Within the long tradition of halakhic stares decisis, or Jewish responsa literature, one can find no more intricate a weave of law and philosophy than that crafted by the twelfth century Jewish jurist and philosopher, Moses Maimonides, in response to an existential query by Ovadyah, a Muslim convert to Judaism. Ovadyah's conversion raised particular concerns within the realm of institutionalized prayer and the rabbinically standardized texts that were its mainstay. The liturgy that had evolved was replete with ethnocentric expressions that rendered it highly resistant to the entry of outsiders anxious to become full-fledged members of the club. How can the convert utter the phrase “God of our fathers” when his biological ancestry belies its pronouncement? What right does he have to lay claim to a divine election, “who chose us,” which was motivated by a preference for one “nation” over others? Can he appeal to a God who is particularized as a national liberator, “who took us out of Egypt,” when enslavement and exodus were confined to a specific locale and time within a national historical consciousness? And finally, God's intrusion into history on Israel's behalf “who performed miracles for our fathers,” is a shared collective memory about which the convert cannot reminisce. This was no mere halakhic question as to whether he could legitimately adopt these communal liturgical expressions. Ovadyah was also posing a deep existential suspicion that he would never be able to consider himself an authentic insider of the religious community he had joined, in all likelihood, at great personal risk.

In Plato's Republic, the moral education necessary to live the just life requires a transformation of the learner, a transformation that is both moral and intellectual. The result of the transformation, ideally, is a new understanding of power—one that subverts conventional ideas about power and one that requires nearly a lifetime of moral education to cultivate. When the eye of the soul has been turned toward the Good, Socrates teaches, we see that political power alone is powerless to satisfy our deepest longings; our ambitions for political power are destined for frustration unless they are redirected by philosophical wisdom. Moreover, wisdom teaches that worldly power is just the appearance of power; real power lies in knowledge of truth.

Charting a course between modalism (the belief that there is just one divine person) and tritheism (the belief that there are three divine substances or Gods) has long been the major problem for Trinitarian theology. In what follows, I shall discuss part of the contribution made by Duns Scotus to this problem. I will argue that, with a few small modifications, Scotus presents a coherent account of the doctrine of three persons in one substance, and thus that this doctrine can be coherently defended against both modalism and tritheism. I do not intend to give a complete presentation of Scotus's Trinitarian thought.

The canonical text relating experience to knowledge for the philosophers of the High Middle Ages was Aristotle's Metaphysics A.1. The very first remarks in First Philosophy describe how humans, after repeated exposure to the world, come to have art and then science through experience: hominibus autem scientia et ars per experientiam evenit (981a2–3: apobainei d'epistêmê kai technê dia tês empeirias tois anthropois). Aristotle explains this process in terms of cognitive capacities and their objects: sense, memory, and imagination give rise to experience, which is directed to particulars; reason gives rise to art and science, each directed to universals, the former being the exercise of practical reason and the latter of speculative reason. So much is familiar. Mediaeval philosophers who read Aristotle's text generally followed his lead, to the point where Robert Kilwardby, around the middle of the thirteenth century, begins his explanation of the origin of the sciences by simply giving a close paraphrase of Metaphysics A.1 (De ortu scientiarum 1.8–11). The philosophers of the High Middle Ages offered analyses of cognition whose details, meant to flesh out Aristotle's account, were elaborated in their debates over the role of the agent intellect, the need for species in perception and in thought, the reliability of the cognitive apparatus for induction, the nature and function of memory, and so on.

John Wyclif's metaphysical realism is well documented, as is the role it plays in his biblical exegesis. Indeed, notable scholars have observed how Wyclif's Christian Neoplatonism goes hand in hand with his view of Scripture. What has not received due attention is the way in which Wyclif's understanding of universals corresponds to his specifically Christological view of Scripture. In fact, Wyclif's threefold system of universals bears a striking similarity to that outlined by the sixth-century Neoplatonist Simplicius, and, in turn, corresponds markedly to Wyclif's division of Scripture into five and three levels. As we shall see, because Wyclif equates Scripture with Christ the Word, in whom all the divine ideas dwell, such an equation results in a very dynamic view of Scripture. For rather than subsisting as a static eternal book, Scripture, in its different levels, functions as a vital extrapolation of Christ the Word. In this article, I have three basic objectives. The first is to show the similarity between Wyclif's theory of universals and the Neoplatonic model presented by Simplicius. Secondly, I plan to examine the place of Christ the Word within that system. Having done these things, the stage is set for demonstrating the connection between Wyclif's system of universals and his understanding of Scripture's own nature and composition.

Cajetan's treatment of analogy in De Nominum Analogia is well known as the most influential and sophisticated theory of a central issue in Thomistic philosophy. The late twentieth century saw that theory subject to a family of criticisms. If the critics are correct, Cajetan's analogy theory is also significant historically for exposing weaknesses latent in medieval semantic assumptions. According to the critics, the Aristotelian assumptions that words signify by means of discrete “concepts,” and that the meaning of propositions depends on the significations of its component terms, cannot do justice to the complexity, variety, and flexibility of actual human discourse; in De Nominum Analogia they see the elegant structure of classical semantics collapsing under the pressure of analogical language. In this article, I examine these criticisms of Cajetan's analogy theory, and argue that, in light of both Cajetan's semantic principles and his hermeneutic practice, they fall short. The conclusion not only implies a defense of Cajetan's project, but clarifies the general philosophical alternatives available within the traditional Aristotelian semantic framework.