In this lecture course, Reiner Schürmann develops the idea that, in between the spiritual Carolingian Renaissance and the secular humanist Renaissance, there was a distinctive medieval Renaissance connected with the rediscovery of Aristotle. Focusing on Thomas Aquinas’s ontology and epistemology, William of Ockham’s conceptualism, and Meister Eckhart’s speculative mysticism, Schürmann shows how thought began to break free from religion and the hierarchies of the feudal, neo-Platonic order and devote its attention to otherness and singularity. A crucial supplement to Schürmann’s magnum opus Broken Hegemonies, Neo-Aristotelianism and the Medieval Renaissance will be essential reading for anyone interested in the rise and fall of Western principles, and thus in how to think and act today.

Never-before-published writing from a key twentieth-century philosopher.
 
In 1962, Reiner Schürmann began studying at the Dominican school of theology Le Saulchoir, outside Paris. That experience radically shaped his life and work, enabling him to begin to develop many of the ideas for which he would later be known: letting be, life without why, ontological anarchy, and the tragic double bind.
 
Ways of Releasement contains never-before-published material from Schürmann’s early period as well as a report Schürmann wrote about his encounter with Heidegger; a précis of his autobiographical novel, Origins; and translations and new editions of later groundbreaking essays. Ways of Releasement concludes with an extensive afterword setting Schürmann’s writings in the context of his thinking and life.