The Rediscovery of Wisdom : From Here to Antiquity in Quest of Sophia

By reconstructing it and tracing its vicissitudes, David Conway rehabilitates a time-honoured conception of philosophy, originating in Plato and Aristotle, which makes theoretical wisdom its aim. Wisdom is equated with possessing a demonstrably correct understanding of why the world exists and has the broad character it does. Adherents of this conception maintained the world to be the demonstrable creation of a divine intelligence in whose contemplation supreme human happiness resides. Their claims are defended against various latter-day scepticisms. Introduction 1 Philosophy without Wisdom 1.1 The present-day philosophical landscape 1.2 The forgetting of wisdom 1.3 Three case-studies 1.4 The betrayal of sophia 2 The Classical Conception of Philosophy 2.1 Philosophy as quest for sophia 2.2 Plato on the form of the good 2.3 Aristotle's Unmoved Mover 2.4 The Unmoved Mover and the Judaeo-Christian God 2.5 Aristotle on the purpose of creation 3 The Decline and Fall of the Classical Conception 3.1 Philosophy in the age of wisdom 3.2 The Copernican Revolution 3.3 God's unwilling executioners 3.4 The assault on the Cosmological Argument 3.5 The assault on the Argument from Design 3.6 God's jubilant obituarist 4 The Wisdom of the Book Revisited 4.1 The hieroglyph of wisdom 4.2 Revelation in Christian orthodoxy 4.3 Revelation in Jewish orthodoxy 4.4 Revelation without grace or favour 5 Conclusion Notes Bibliography Name Index Subject Index My aim, in sum, is to defend the legitimacy of the view that the explanation of the world and its broad form is that it is the creation of a supreme omnipotent and omniscient intelligence, more commonly referred to as God, who created it in order to bring into existence and sustain rational beings such as ourselves who, by exercising their intellects, can become aware of the existence of God and thereby join their Creator in the activity of contemplating God in which activity God is perpetually and blissfully engaged.--from introduction