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225A Confucian Slippery Slope ArgumentConfucian Academy: Chinese Thought and Culture Review 4 (1): 89-101. 2017.The Song and Ming dynasty Confucians make frequent use of what would today be identified as a slippery slope argument. The Book of Changes and its early commentaries provide both the language and the rationale for this argument, inasmuch as the Confucians regard these texts as a method for identifying tiny problems that will one day threaten the state. While today the slippery slope argument is often criticized for promoting an unreasoned resistance to change, a close look at its use by Confucia…Read more
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40Recent Attempts to Define a Dionysian Political TheoryAmerican Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 82 (4): 639-660. 2008.The Dionysian corpus makes virtually no statement about the authority of kings or the structure of nations, but it has nevertheless repeatedly been the subjectof political analysis. Several scholars have recently sketched out a Dionysian politics by drawing analogies between the Dionysian church and the city, and between the Dionysian bishop and the emperor. These analogies are of limited usefulness. They show that Dionysius does employ Platonic political language to describe the ecclesiastical …Read more
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38Clement of alexandria (review)Journal of the History of Philosophy 45 (2): 326-327. 2007.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Clement of AlexandriaL. Michael HarringtonEric Osborn. Clement of Alexandria. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xviii + 324. Cloth, $85.00.With Clement of Alexandria, Eric Osborn returns to the subject of his 1957 book, The Philosophy of Clement of Alexandria, but its style and themes more closely resemble his more recent studies of second-century Christian thinkers: Tertullian, First Theologian of…Read more
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32The Argument for Universal Immortality in Eriugena’s “Zoology”American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 79 (4): 611-633. 2005.Apparently alone among medieval Christians, Eriugena argues that all life is immortal. He relies on Plato’s Timaeus as his primary source for this claim, but he modifies the argument of the Timaeus considerably. He turns Plato’s cosmic soul into the genus of life, thereby taking a treatise that originally dealt with cosmology and using it to explore the ontological significance of definition. All species that fall under the genus of life must be immortal, because a mortal species would contradic…Read more
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31Sacred place in early medieval NeoplatonismPalgrave-Macmillan. 2004.The twentieth century discovered the concept of sacred place largely through the work of Martin Heidegger and Mircea Eliade. Their writings on sacred place respond to the modern manipulation of nature and secularization of space, and so may seem distinctively postmodern, but their work has an important and unacknowledged precedent in the Neoplatonism of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Sacred Place in Early Medieval Neoplatonism traces the appearance and development of sacred place in t…Read more
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24Apophasis and Pseudonymity in Dionysius the Areopagite: ‘No Longer I.’ (review)Speculum 88 (1): 341-342. 2013.
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22Two Anonymous Sets of Scholia on Dionysius the Areopagite's “Heavenly Hierarchy.” (review)Speculum 87 (2): 578-580. 2012.
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21Logic, Theology, and Poetry in Boethius, Abelard, and Alan of Lille (review)Review of Metaphysics 60 (4): 886-887. 2007.
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17The Yi River Commentary on the Book of ChangesYale University Press. 2019.This book is a translation of a key commentary on the Book of Changes, or Yijing, perhaps the most broadly influential text of classical China. The Yijing first appeared as a divination text in Zhou-dynasty China and later became a work of cosmology, philosophy, and political theory as commentators supplied it with new meanings. While many English translations of the Yijing itself exist, none are paired with a historical commentary as thorough and methodical as that written by the Confucian scho…Read more
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17The luminaries of late thirteenth-century Europe took great interest in the mysterious fifth-century author known as Dionysius the Areopagite. They typically read Dionysius not in the original Greek, but in a Latin edition prepared sometime in the middle of the thirteenth century. This edition, which appeared first in Paris and later circulated all over Western Europe, was no mere translation. In addition to the famous translation made by Eriugena in the ninth century, it contained translations …Read more
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16François Jullien’s Unexceptional Thought: A Critical Introduction by Arne De BoeverPhilosophy East and West 72 (2): 1-3. 2022.François Jullien is a master of repetition. Over his more than thirty books, he introduces a carefully defined set of concepts--such as “blandness” and “efficacy”--and then pairs them, opposes them, and sets them in different contexts, returning to them repeatedly without ever saying quite the same thing. One can imagine an introduction to Jullien’s work that traces each of his concepts through its development from book to book, noting explicit and implicit connections to the traditional Chinese…Read more
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1351. Taking Sides: The Education of a Militant MindIn Bernard Williams (ed.), Essays and Reviews: 1959-2002, Princeton University Press. pp. 252-256. 2014.
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10Principle and Place: Complementary Concepts in Confucian Yijing CommentaryPhilosophy East and West 66 (3): 861-882. 2016.The classical Western concept of place points in two directions: toward isolating things from one another and toward articulating their connections. Aristotle’s famous definition of a thing’s place as the limit of its surrounding body, which serves to isolate the thing from all but its immediate surroundings, sits side-by-side in the Physics with his theory of natural places, according to which things have places only in relation to each other.1 A thing’s natural place may be at the center—as th…Read more
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7On the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy: The Thirteenth-Century Textbook EditionPeeters Press. 2011.The medieval fascination with the mysterious language of Dionysius the Areopagite is nowhere more evident than in the thirteenth-century textbook edition of his treatise on liturgical rites. Dionysius employed unfamiliar Greek to describe people, actions, and texts that would have been perfectly familiar to his readers. The Latin translation used in the thirteenth-century textbook strives to preserve this unfamiliarity, but commentaries are introduced between its lines and paragraphs, disrupting…Read more
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2"'Unusquisque en suo sensu abundet': Human perspective in Eriugena's" PeriphyseonDionysius 16 123-140. 1998.
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2The Drunken Epibole of Plotinus and its Reappearance in the Work of Dionysius the AreopagiteDionysius 23 117-138. 2005.
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1Pseudo-DionysiusIn Nick Trakakis & Graham Oppy (eds.), Medieval Philosophy of Religion: The History of Western Philosophy of Religion, Volume 2. pp. 277-290. 2009.
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1What Are the 'Hypothetical Logoi' of Dionysian Mystical Theology?Studia Patristica 48 177-182. 2010.
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1Body and the Discursive in the Anthropology of Dionysius the Areopagite and His First ScholiastStudia Patristica 42 147-161. 2006.
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Eriugena and the Neoplatonic traditionIn Adrian Guiu (ed.), A companion to John Scottus Eriugena, Brill. 2019.
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Dionysius the AreopagiteIn James R. Lewis & Olav Hammer (eds.), The Invention of Sacred Tradition, Cambridge University Press. pp. 241-257. 2007.
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Why Be Moral? Learning From the Neo-Confucian Cheng Brothers (review)Frontiers of Philosophy in China 11 158-162. 2016.
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Roots of Scientific Objectivity in the Quaestiones ad ThalassiumIn Sotiris Mitralexis, Georgios Steiris, Marcin Podbielski & Sebastian Lalla (eds.), Maximus the Confessor as a European Philosopher. pp. 131-139. 2017.
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Anastasius the Librarian's Reading of the Greek Scholia on the Dionysian CorpusStudia Patristica 36 119-125. 2001.
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The Emperor Julian's Use of Neoplatonic Philosophy and ReligionIn Kevin Corrigan, John D. Turner & Peter Wakefield (eds.), Religion and Philosophy in the Platonic and Neoplatonic Traditions, . pp. 65-79. 2012.
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The Postulate of Clarification in Cheng Yi's Commentary on the Book of ChangesSigns and Images 1 (1): 92-107. 2020.Erwin Panofsky developed the postulate of clarification to explain the mental habit common to Gothic architecture and Western medieval scholasticism, but the postulate is equally applicable to the commentary tradition of Song-dynasty China. The commentary on the Book of Changes authored by Cheng Yi (1033–1107) provides a good example of how the Confucians of the Song dynasty took their concern for clarity to a recognizably medieval extreme. By looking at how Cheng Yi understands and foregrounds …Read more
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