William of Ockham was an English Franciscan friar, scholastic philosopher, and theologian, who is believed to have been born in Ockham, a small village in Surrey. He is considered to be one of the major figures of medieval thought and was at the centre of the major intellectual and political controversies of the 14th century. He is commonly known for Occam's razor, the methodological principle that bears his name, and also produced significant works on logic, physics, and theology. William is remembered in the Church of England with a commemoration on 10 April.
Scholasticism was a medieval school of philosophy that employed a critical method of philosophical analysis predicated upon a Latin Catholic theistic curriculum which dominated teaching in the medieval universities in Europe from about 1100 to 1700. It originated within the Christian monastic schools that were the basis of the earliest European universities. The rise of scholasticism was closely associated with these schools that flourished in Italy, France, Spain and England.
Alvin Carl Plantinga is an American analytic philosopher who works primarily in the fields of philosophy of religion, epistemology, and logic.
Divine command theory is a meta-ethical theory which proposes that an action's status as morally good is equivalent to whether it is commanded by God. The theory asserts that what is moral is determined by God's commands and that for a person to be moral he is to follow God's commands. Followers of both monotheistic and polytheistic religions in ancient and modern times have often accepted the importance of God's commands in establishing morality.
Henry of Ghent was a scholastic philosopher, known as Doctor Solemnis, and also as Henricus de Gandavo and Henricus Gandavensis.
Godfrey of Fontaines, in Latin Godefridus de Fontibus, was a scholastic philosopher and theologian, designated by the title Doctor Venerandus. He made contributions to a diverse range of subjects ranging from moral philosophy to epistemology. However, he is best known today for his work on metaphysics.
Scotism is the philosophical and theological system or school named after 13th century Scottish philosopher-theologian John Duns Scotus. The word comes from the name of its originator, whose Opus Oxoniense was one of the most important documents in medieval philosophy and Roman Catholic theology, defining what would later be declared the Dogma of the Immaculate conception by Pope Pius IX in his constitution Ineffabilis Deus on 8 December 1854.
John Edmund Hare is a British classicist, philosopher, ethicist, and currently Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale University.
Marilyn McCord Adams (1943–2017) was an American philosopher and Episcopal priest. She specialized in the philosophy of religion, philosophical theology, and medieval philosophy. She was Horace Tracy Pitkin Professor of Historical Theology at Yale Divinity School from 1998 to 2003 and Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford from 2004 to 2009.
Radical orthodoxy is a Christian theological and philosophical school of thought which makes use of postmodern philosophy to reject the paradigm of modernity. The movement was founded by John Milbank and others and takes its name from the title of a collection of essays published by Routledge in 1999: Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, edited by Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward. Although the principal founders of the movement are Anglicans, radical orthodoxy includes theologians from a number of ecclesial traditions.
Henry (of) Harclay was an English medieval philosopher and university chancellor.
John Behr is a British Eastern Orthodox priest and theologian. Since 2020, he has served as the Regius Professor of Humanity at the University of Aberdeen. He is the former Dean of St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, where he was the Director of the Master of Theology Program and the Father Georges Florovsky Distinguished Professor of Patristics. He was ordained to the diaconate on 8 September 2001 and the priesthood on 14 September 2001. He is the editor of the Patristic Series released by St. Vladimir's Press. He was elected dean of the seminary on 18 November 2006 and served from 2007 until 2017 when he was named Father Georges Florovsky Distinguished Professor of Patristics.
Robert Cowton was a Franciscan theologian active at the University of Oxford early in the fourteenth century. He was a follower of Henry of Ghent, and in the Augustinian tradition. He was familiar with the doctrines of Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas, and attempted a synthesis of them.
In scholastic metaphysics, a formal distinction is a distinction intermediate between what is merely conceptual, and what is fully real or mind-independent. It was made by some realist philosophers of the Scholastic period in the thirteenth century, and particularly by Duns Scotus.
George Arthur Lindbeck (1923–2018) was an American Lutheran theologian. He was best known as an ecumenicist and as one of the fathers of postliberal theology.
Daniel Patrick Horan is an American Franciscan friar, Roman Catholic priest, theologian, and author. He is currently the Duns Scotus Chair of Spirituality at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. He is a columnist for National Catholic Reporter.
Medieval philosophy is the philosophy that existed through the Middle Ages, the period roughly extending from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century to the Renaissance in the 15th century. Medieval philosophy, understood as a project of independent philosophical inquiry, began in Baghdad, in the middle of the 8th century, and in France, in the itinerant court of Charlemagne, in the last quarter of the 8th century. It is defined partly by the process of rediscovering the ancient culture developed in Greece and Rome during the Classical period, and partly by the need to address theological problems and to integrate sacred doctrine with secular learning.
James Francis Ross was an American philosopher. James Ross, a creative thinker in philosophy of religion, law, metaphysics and philosophy of mind, was a member of the Philosophy Department at the University of Pennsylvania from 1962 until his death. He published widely.
Michael Cannon Rea is an American analytic philosopher and, since 2017, John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He delivered the 2017 Gifford Lecture on divine hiddenness.
John Duns, commonly called Duns Scotus, was a Scottish Catholic priest and Franciscan friar, university professor, philosopher, and theologian. He is one of the three most important philosopher-theologians of Western Europe in the High Middle Ages, together with Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham. Scotus has had considerable influence on both Catholic and secular thought. The doctrines for which he is best known are the "univocity of being", that existence is the most abstract concept we have, applicable to everything that exists; the formal distinction, a way of distinguishing between different aspects of the same thing; and the idea of haecceity, the property supposed to be in each individual thing that makes it an individual. Scotus also developed a complex argument for the existence of God, and argued for the Immaculate Conception of Mary.
