BY CHANCE OR PROVIDENCE collects BECKY CLOONAN's award-winning trilogy: WOLVES, THE MIRE, and DEMETER, with lush colors by LEE LOUGHRIDGE and a sketchbook/illustration section. These stories cast a spell of hypnotic melancholy, weaving their way through medieval landscapes of ancient curses and terrible truths that will haunt you long after you've set them down.
Figures of Chance I: Chance in Literature and the Arts (16th–21st Centuries) proposes a transhistorical analysis that will serve as a reference work on the evolution of literary and artistic representations of chance and contingency. Alongside its multidisciplinary companion volume (Figures of Chance II), it considers how the projective and predictive capacity of societies is shaped by representations and cultural models of a reality that is understood, to varying degrees, to be contingent, unpredictable, or chaotic. Giving special emphasis to the French context while also developing broad cross-cultural comparisons, this volume examines the dialogue between evolving conceptions and changing representations of chance, from Renaissance figures of Fortune to the data-driven world of the present. Written by recognized specialists of each of the periods studied, it identifies and historicizes the main fictional and factual modes of portraying, narrating, and comprehending chance in the West.
Analyzing works by George Eliot, Joseph Conrad and James Joyce, the author offers a new approach to narrative theory by showing how successive generations of novelists have used ever more powerful concepts of chance even though, he argues, chance is precisely what narrative cannot represent, since when it tries to do so it slips into the fated. He also relates the novelistic treatment of chance to important historical currents in the philosophical and scientific understanding of chance, and provides a theoretical framework for analyzing the representation of chance in any narrative. The author asks three central questions: Why did British novelists become intensely interested in chance in the late nineteenth century? Why and how did they thematize it in their fiction? How did the novelistic treatment of chance contribute to innovations in narrative form?
This landmark book is the first to provide a comprehensive account of Aristotle's concept of chance. Chance is invoked by many to explain order in the universe, the origins of life, even human freedom and happiness. An understanding of Aristotle's concept of chance is indispensable for an appreciation of his views on nature and ethics, views which have had a tremendous influence on the development of Western philosophy. Author John Dudley analyzes Aristotle's account of chance in the Physics, the Metaphysics, in his biological and ethical treatises, and in a number of his other works as well. Important complementary considerations such as Aristotle's criticism of Presocratic philosophers, particularly Empedocles and Democritus, Plato's concept of chance, the chronology of Aristotle's works, and the relevance of Aristotle's work to evolution and quantum theory are also covered in depth. This is an essential book for scholars and students of Western philosophy.
In the Renaissance and early modern periods, there were lively controversies over why things happen. Central to these debates was the troubling idea that things could simply happen by chance. In France, a major terrain of this intellectual debate, the chance hypothesis engaged writers coming from many different horizons: the ancient philosophies of Epicurus, the Stoa, and Aristotle, the renewed reading of the Bible in the wake of the Reformation, a fresh emphasis on direct, empirical observation of nature and society, the revival of dramatic tragedy with its paradoxical theme of the misfortunes that befall relatively good people, and growing introspective awareness of the somewhat arbitrary quality of consciousness itself. This volume is the first in English to offer a broad cultural and literary view of the field of chance in this period. The essays, by a distinguished team of scholars from the U.S., Britain, and France, cluster around four problems: Providence in Question, Aesthetics and Poetics of Chance, Law and Ethics, and Chance and its Remedies. Convincing and authoritative, this collection articulates a new and rich perspective on the culture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France.
Towards the end of his life, St. Thomas Aquinas produced a brief, non-technical work summarizing some of the main points of his massive Summa Theologiae. This 'compendium' was intended as an introductory handbook for students and scholars who might not have access to the larger work. It remains the best concise introduction to Aquinas's thought. Furthermore, it is extremely interesting to scholars because it represents Aquinas's last word on these topics. Aquinas does not break new ground or re-think earlier positions but often states them more directly and with greater precision than can be found elsewhere. There is only one available English translation of the Compendium (published as 'Aquinas's Shorter Summa: Saint Thomas's Own Concise Version of his Summa Theologiae,' by Sophia Institute Press). It is published by a very small Catholic publishing house, is marketed to the devotional readership, contains no scholarly apparatus. Richard Regan is a highly respected Aquinas translator, who here relies on the definitive Leonine edition of the Latin text. His work will be received as the premier English version of this important text.
Towards the end of his life, St. Thomas Aquinas produced a brief, non-technical work summarizing some of the main points of his massive Summa Theologiae. This 'compendium' was intended as an introductory handbook for students and scholars who might not have access to the larger work. It remains the best concise introduction to Aquinas's thought. Furthermore, it is extremely interesting to scholars because it represents Aquinas's last word on these topics. Aquinas does not break new ground or re-think earlier positions but often states them more directly and with greater precision than can be found elsewhere. There is only one available English translation of the Compendium (published as 'Aquinas's Shorter Summa: Saint Thomas's Own Concise Version of his Summa Theologiae,' by Sophia Institute Press). It is published by a very small Catholic publishing house, is marketed to the devotional readership, contains no scholarly apparatus. Richard Regan is a highly respected Aquinas translator, who here relies on the definitive Leonine edition of the Latin text. His work will be received as the premier English version of this important text.
