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A bold and wide-ranging study across centuries, examining the conflict between “conventional” and “magical” nominalism in philosophy, history, aesthetics, political theory, and photography.

In this magisterial new book, intellectual historian Martin Jay traces the long-standing competition between two versions of nominalism—the “conventional” and the “magical.” Since at least William of Ockham, according to Jay, the conventional form of nominalism has contributed to the disenchantment of the world, by viewing general terms as nothing more than mere names we use to group particular objects together, rejecting the idea that they refer to a further, “higher” reality. Magical nominalism, instead, performs a reenchanting function, by investing proper names, disruptive events, and singular objects with an auratic power of their own. Drawing in part on Jewish theology, it challenges the elevation of the constitutive subject resulting from Ockham’s reliance on divine will in his critique of real universals.
 
Starting with the fourteenth-century revolution of nominalism against Scholastic realism, Jay unpacks various “counterrevolutions” against nominalism itself, including a magical alternative to its conventional form. Focusing on fundamental debates over the relationship between language, thought, and reality, Jay illuminates connections across thinkers, disciplines, and vast realms of human experience. Ranging from theology and philosophy of history to aesthetics and political theory, this book engages with a range of artists and thinkers, including Adorno, Ankersmit, Badiou, Barthes, Bataille, Benjamin, Blumenberg, Derrida, Duchamp, Foucault, Kracauer, Kripke, and Lyotard. Ultimately, Magical Nominalism offers a strikingly original way to understand humanity’s intellectual path to modernity.

Francisco Suárez (1548-1617) was one of the most important philosophers and theologians of Early Modern Scholasticism. Although Suárez spent most of his academic career as a professor of theology, he is better known today for his Metaphysical Disputations (Salamanca, 1597). The present volume contains a facing-page English translation of Metaphysical Disputation I, which is introductory and devoted to the nature of metaphysics itself. In it, Suárez first specifies this science’s object and nature (Sections 1 and 2) and then discusses its unity (Section 3), its end, utility and functions (Section 4), its status as the most perfect natural science and true wisdom (Section 5), and finally the thesis that it is the science most of all desired by means of a natural appetite (Section 6). Those interested in late scholastic conceptions of metaphysics and their influence on the better known metaphysical systems of the seventeenth century – e.g., Descartes’s – will find the volume especially useful. The Latin text contained in this volume introduces a significant number of corrections to the text of the Vivès edition, the one standardly used by scholars of Suárez, and thus more faithfully reproduces the text of the first edition. The volume also contains a lengthy introduction that provides a detailed survey of the disputation’s principal claims and arguments.

Francisco Suárez (1548-1617) was one of the most important philosophers and theologians of early modern Aristotelian scholasticism. Although Suárez spent most of his academic career as a professor of theology, he is better known today for his Metaphysical Disputations (Salamanca, 1597). The present volume contains a facing-page English translation of Metaphysical Disputation II, which is devoted to the nature of real being, the subject of metaphysics. In it, Suárez is especially concerned, first, to argue there is a single nature of being common to all real beings, and second, to show what this nature consists in. The Latin text contained in this volume introduces a significant number of corrections to the text of the Vivès edition, the one standardly used by scholars of Suárez, and thus more faithfully reproduces the text of the first edition. The volume also contains a lengthy introduction that provides a detailed survey of the disputation’s principal claims and arguments.

Francisco Suárez (1548-1617) was one of the most important philosophers and theologians of Early Modern Scholasticism. Although Suárez spent most of his academic career as a professor of theology, he is better known today for his Metaphysical Disputations (Salamanca, 1597). The present volume contains a facing-page English translation of Metaphysical Disputations III & IV. Metaphysical Disputation III offers a general treatment of the properties of being as such, while Metaphysical Disputation IV deals with one of these properties in particular, transcendental unity. The Latin text contained in this volume introduces a significant number of corrections to the text of the Vivès edition, the one standardly used by scholars of Suárez, and thus more faithfully reproduces the text of the first edition. The volume also contains a lengthy introduction that provides a detailed survey of the disputations’ principal claims and arguments.

In this volume, John Wippel has collected a number of his essays dealing with Aquinas's metaphysical thought. The volume begins with a presentation and critical evaluation of certain twentieth-century attempts to describe the philosophical thought of Thomas Aquinas as a "Christian philosophy."

This volume contains eleven articles and book chapters written by John Wippel since the publication of his Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas in 1984.

Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas III is Msgr. John Wippel’s third volume dedicated to the metaphysical thought of Thomas Aquinas. After an introduction, this volume of collected essays begins with Wippel’s interpretation of the discovery of the subject of metaphysics by a special kind of judgment (“separation”). In subsequent chapters, Wippel turns to the relationship between faith and reason, exploring what are known as the preambles of faith. This is followed by two chapters on the important contributions by Cornelio Fabro on Aquinas’s distinction between essence and esse and on participation. The volume continues with articles on Aquinas’s view of creation as a preamble of faith, Aquinas’s much-disputed defense of unicity of substantial form in creatures, his account of the separated soul’s natural knowledge, and Aquinas’s understanding of evil in his De Malo 1. The volume concludes with an article comparing Bonaventure, Aquinas, and Godfrey of Fontaines on the metaphysical composition of angelic beings. Most of these issues were disputed during Aquinas’s time by some of his contemporaries, and the proper understanding of each continues to be debated by various students of his thought today. Wippel’s purpose, therefore, is to help clarify our understanding of Aquinas’s thought on each of these topics, a task that requires the careful analysis of primary sources and of secondary literature and attention to the relative chronology of his writing.

Comprehensive introductory survey of the key concepts and problems in traditional and contemporary metaphysics.

A comprehensive introductory study of the key concepts and problems in traditional and contemporary metaphysics. Aune presents and defends a point of view that is naturalistic, nominalistic and pragmatic-an approach that has the overall advantage of providing a coherent, structured view of the topics he discusses.

Metaphysics is not often spoken of as a venue for dialogue about anything, let alone culture or religion, which are more readily associated with phenomenology or hermeneutics in contemporary thinking. This collection of essays, however, by the late Boston College philosopher Oliva Blanchette, maintains the absolute necessity of metaphysics as a prerequisite for examining any particular ‘realm of being,’ in all areas of human inquiry, from the particular sciences to historical cultures and religions. Blanchette proposes metaphysics as a fundamental and necessary level of intelligence presupposed in any exercise of judgment, discourse, or dialogue, among rational beings. At the same time, he defends the idea that dialogue is the first and most fundamental form in which such reasoning takes place in human experience, on a radically intersubjective level through language. Metaphysics is not an abstraction removed from human experience. Rather, it is a science in its own right defining itself in relation to ‘being as being’, its subject matter, as it depends on all the particular sciences and bodies of knowledge. Firmly standing on the ground of human experience, and on the human person as primary analogate of being, it opens up an entire realm of questioning that the particular sciences and bodies of knowledge, operating in functional separation, cannot pose on their own, especially when they take, in a reductionist fashion, their own object to be the prime analogate. Metaphysics, in fact, insinuates itself into each and every particular science in exploring its own subject matter of ‘being as being’ in the analogical sense, advancing to more and more complex stages of analogy through dialogue among different spirits and cultures, and reaching its terminus in the transcendent aspect of spirit and religion. In this sense, metaphysics has much to say to theologians: without metaphysics, theology reduces to mere superstition.

Leading Girardian theologian Scott Cowdell seeks to resolve a long-standing challenge to mimetic theory: that it entails a fundamental brutishness—an ontological violence. Girard’s account of scapegoating violence, seen as providing the initial stability for our species to emerge and consolidate, hardly seems compatible with Christian belief in God’s good creation, with violence only appearing after a subsequent Fall. The brilliant but controversial theologian John Milbank has long raised this concern about Girard, grounded in a remarkably sophisticated (though seldom fathomed) philosophical theology. Unpacking Milbank’s program, along with Girard’s recasting of Continental philosophy in light of mimetic theory, Cowdell finds a way between two apparently irreconcilable positions. With irenic spirit but analytic tenacity, he probes for ways through Milbank’s arguments while pressing on growth points in Girard’s. Cowdell’s proposals involve reframing divine creation in light of salvation history, reimagining divine participation by thinking Christ and evolution together, and developing a semiotic approach to mimetic theory that delivers ontological peace hermeneutically. Cowdell shows how Girard’s vision of human transformation through faith in Christ reveals a different world beyond ontological violence while preserving the divine participation that Milbank champions.