Metaphysics and Hermeneutics in the Medieval Platonic Tradition
consists of twelve essays originally published between 2006 and 2015,
dealing with main trends and specific figures within the medieval
Platonic tradition.
Three essays provide general surveys of the transmission of late ancient
thought to the Middle Ages with emphasis on the ancient authors, the
themes, and their medieval readers, respectively. The remaining essays
deal especially with certain major figures in the Platonic tradition,
including pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Iohannes Scottus Eriugena,
and Nicholas of Cusa. The principal conceptual aim of the collection is
to establish the primacy of hermeneutics within the philosophical
program developed by these authors: in other words, to argue that their
philosophical activity, substantially albeit not exclusively, consists
of the reading and evaluation of authoritative texts. The essays also
argue that the role of hermeneutics varies in the course of the
tradition between being a means towards the development of metaphysical
theory and being an integral component of metaphysics itself. In
addition, such changes in the status and application of hermeneutics to
metaphysics are shown to be accompanied by a shift from emphasizing the
connection between logic and philosophy to emphasizing that between
rhetoric and philosophy. The collection of essays fills in a lacuna in
the history of philosophy in general between the fifth and the fifteenth
centuries. It also initiates a dialogue between the metaphysical
hermeneutics of medieval Platonism and certain modern theories of
hermeneutics, structuralism, and deconstruction.
The book will be of special interest to students of the classical
tradition in western thought, and more generally to students of medieval
philosophy, theology, history, and literature. (CS1094).
