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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 ������Ƶ.

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.
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