Thinking Through Revelation

by Robert J. Dobie
Catholic University of America Press, 2019
eISBN: 978-0-8132-3146-4, Paper: 978-0-8132-3133-4

ABOUT THIS BOOK
Navigating the seemingly competing claims of human reason and divine revelation to truth is without a doubt one of the central problems of medieval philosophy. Medieval thinkers argued a whole gamut of positions on the proper relation of religious faith to human reason. Thinking Through Revelation attempts to ask deeper questions: what possibilities for philosophical thought did divine revelation open up for medieval thinkers? How did the contents of the sacred scriptures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam put into question established philosophical assumptions? But most fundamentally, how did not merely the content of the sacred books but the very mode in which revelation itself is understood to come to us – as a book “sent down” from on high, as a covenant between God and his people, or as incarnate person - create or foreclose possibilities for the resolution of the philosophical problems that the Abrahamic revelations themselves raised?
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction. Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages
Chapter 1. What Is “Decisive” about Averroes’s Decisive Treatise?
Chapter 2. Is Revelation Really Necessary? Revelation and the Intellect in Averroes and al-Ghazali
Chapter 3. Law, Covenant, and Intellect in Moses Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed
Chapter 4. Natura as Creatura: Aquinas on Nature as Implicit Revelation
Chapter 5. Why Does the Unity of the Intellect Become Such a Burning Issue in Medieval Thought? Aquinas on Human Knowing as Incarnate Knowing
Chapter 6. Aquinas on Revelation as Incarnate Divine Intellect
Conclusion. The Rationality of Revelation in Three Traditions
Bibliography
Index

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