Event

A Renaissance Perspective on Divine Causality: Case Studies from the Aristotelian Tradition

Talk by: Francesco Molinarolo (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa) 

Co-Sponsored with the Center for Italian Studies at Penn.

The way of conceiving God and its activity is a long-lasting problem, which has troubled generations of philosophers and theologians. The 16th century saw the development of several possible interpretations,  in many cases connected to the Aristotelian tradition. Aristotle’s texts had already been incorporated into the curricula of European Universities for a long time, and provided many philosophers as well as theologians with concepts and terms that produced new developments. Within this frame, the problem of divine causality is a critical point: the debates on how to make God’s activity fit within Aristotle’s doctrine of causality highlights the increasing difficulty of harmonizing the “philosophical” concept of a metaphysical first principle of the universe with a “religious” perspective. By presenting some case studies, a discussion of such issues will be provided from a historical-philosophical point of view.