The Unknown God

The Unknown God

Author: Deirdre Carabine

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2015-01-26

Total Pages: 383

ISBN-13: 1620328623

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""This book contains a careful, thorough, and where necessary skeptical as regards doubtful evidence (especially in the case of Plato and the Old Academy) of the beginnings in European thought of the negative or apophatic way of thinking and its relations to more positive or kataphatic ways of thinking about God. One of its greatest strengths, perhaps the greatest, is that the author makes clear that none of the persons concerned, Hellenic, Jewish or Christian, was engaged in the pursuit of a philosophical abstraction, or the heaping of rhetorical superlatives on God. They were rather concerned to present the origin of the universe as an intimately present living reality which infinitely transcends our thought and speech. This, combined with careful attention to the varieties of negative theology and its relations with positive, and the particular difficulties experienced by the members of the various traditions involved, makes the book the best introduction to the negative theology available."" -A. H. Armstrong, Emeritus Professor of Greek, University of Liverpool, England. Emeritus Professor of Classics, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Senior Fellow of the British Academy. Irish academic Deirdre Carabine has lived and taught in Uganda for more than twenty years. She has recently been founder Vice-Chancellor at the Virtual University of Uganda (VUU), the first fully online university in Sub-Saharan Africa. Prior to that she set up International Health Sciences University in Kampala. She has taught at Queen's Belfast, University College Dublin, and Uganda Martyrs University. Currently, she is Director of Programmes at VUU. She attended the Queen's University of Belfast where she graduated with a PhD in philosophy, and University College Dublin where, as one of the first Newman Scholars, she gained a second PhD in Classics. She is also author of John Scottus Eriugena in the Great Medieval Thinkers Series (2000).


The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena

The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena

Author: Dermot Moran

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2004-08-19

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 9780521892827

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This work is a substantial contribution to the history of philosophy. Its subject, the ninth-century philosopher John Scottus Eriugena, developed a form of idealism that owed as much to the Greek Neoplatonic tradition as to the Latin fathers and anticipated the priority of the subject in its modern, most radical statement: German idealism. Moran has written the most comprehensive study yet of Eriugena's philosophy, tracing the sources of his thinking and analyzing his most important text, the Periphyseon. This volume will be of special interest to historians of mediaeval philosophy, history, and theology.


Reading Plotinus

Reading Plotinus

Author: Kevin Corrigan

Publisher: Purdue University Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 9781557532343

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Plotinus was one of the most influential philosophers of the early Christian world, whose life was dedicated to the care of others and whose extensive treatises were recorded and preserved by his pupil and colleague Porphyry. This book provides a guide to reading and understanding Plotinus and covers many of the topics that he contemplated.


De Aeternitate Mundi

De Aeternitate Mundi

Author: Proclus

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 0520225546

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The first Argument, which survives in Arabic, is also included and makes this the only complete edition of On the Eternity of the World since antiquity.".


Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible

Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible

Author: Karel van der Toorn

Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 1006

ISBN-13: 9780802824912

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The Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible (DDD) is the single major reference work on the gods, angels, demons, spirits, and semidivine heroes whose names occur in the biblical books. Book jacket.


The Metamorphosis of Magic from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period

The Metamorphosis of Magic from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period

Author: Jan N. Bremmer

Publisher: Peeters Publishers

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13: 9789042912274

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Deities, demons, and angels became important protagonists in the magic of the Late Antique world, and were also the main reasons for the condemnation of magic in the Christian era. Supplicatory incantations, rituals of coercion, enticing suffumigations, magical prayers and mystical songs drew spiritual powers to the humain domain. Next to the magician's desire to regulate fate and fortune, it was the communion with the spirit world that gave magic the potential to purify and even deify its practitioners. The sense of elation and the awareness of a metaphysical order caused magic to merge with philosophy (notably Neoplatonism). The heritage of Late Antique theurgy would be passed on to the Arab world, and together with classical science and learning would take root again in the Latin West in the High Middle Ages. The metamorphosis of magic laid out in this book is the transformation of ritual into occult philosophy against the background of cultural changes in Judaism, Graeco-Roman religion and Christianity. This volume, the first in the new series Groningen Studies in Cultural Change, offers the papers presented at the workshop The Metamorphosis of Magic from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period held from 22 to 24 June 2000, and organised by Jan N. Bremmer and Jan R. Veenstra. The papers have been written by scholars from such varying disciplines as classics, theology, philosophy, cultural history, and law. Their contributions shed new light upon several old obscurities; they show magic to be a significant area of culture, and they advance the case for viewing transformations in the lore and practice of magic as a barometer with which to measure cultural change.