The De Sacramento Altaris Of William Of Ockham

A paperback edition of Miri Rubin's highly successful study of the meaning of the eucharist, c. 1150-1500.

You are holding, to date the only critical study of the works by William of Ockham regarding his perception and teaching of the Corpus Christi. Within these pages are the main corpus of works which have been carefully screened from all extant works. The era is the early 1300's and the Christian Church is under siege of by the gradual infiltration of the writings of Aristotle into the West was not without profound repercussions on the speculative thought of the day. This was true not only in the field of natural philosophy but in an even more marked degree in the field of logic. Philosophy gained for itself more of an autonomous position without, however, becoming completely divorced from theology, the queen of the sciences. The great speculative minds of the day began to inquire more earnestly as to just which truths the human mind could demonstrate with certainty. The field of positive theology became more and more distinct from that of speculative theology.

Students of medieval thought have long been stimulated by the work of Ernest A. Moody. That intellectual debt should be increased by this volume, which brings together the significant shorter studies and essays he wrote in the period 1933 - 1969. The collection should be particularly useful to the medievalist who finds it difficult to see where the detailed monographic research of the past half-century is leading. An initial lengthy study, on William of Auvergne and his treatise De anima, has not hitherto appeared in print. Five of the essays deal with late medieval physics and its relation to the mechanics of Galileo; others bear on medieval logic and philosophy of language, with reference to contemporary treatments of those subjects; and several studies are concerned with the historical and philosophical significance of Ockham, Buridan, and the via moderna of the fourteenth century. In his Introduction Moody discusses the development of his interests in medieval thoughts and offers some critical reflections on the essays. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1975.

The English Franciscan, William of Ockham (c. 1285-1349), was one of the most important thinkers of the later middle agesThis book provides a coherent account of Ockham's aims and the principles operating in all his political works.

"William of Ockham is a towering figure in the history of philosophy and he is commonly seen as the most important nominalist thinker of the Middle Ages. His nominalism basically consists in three theses: there are no universals in the external world, no relations either, and no quantities considered as distinct entities. This book provides an introduction to Ockham's defence of these positions and to what they amount to in metaphysics, semantics, and epistemology. It thus displays the outlines of a rich and carefully crafted nominalist system that is still of great philosophical interest today. All along in so doing, it situates Ockham's thought with respect to several salient contemporary debates in philosophy"--