The Metaphysics of Creation

Norman Kretzmann, Sage Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Cornell Univerisity, New York, completed this book at the beginning of 1998, and died in the summer of that year. He taught philosophy at Cornell for more than thirty years, and also held appointments at Bryn Mawr College, Ohio State University, and the University of Illinois, and visiting positions at Wayne State University and the Universities of Minnesota, Arizona, and Oxford.This is the follow-up to Professor Kretzmann's 1997 Clarendon Press volume The Metaphysics of Theism: Aquinas's Natural Theology in Summa contra gentiles I. He also published scholarly editions of various medieval texts (by William of Sherwood, William of Ockham, Paul of Venice, and Richard Kilvington), many learned articles and essays, and a number of edited collections. He was the principal editor of The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (1982), and co-editor with Eleonore Stump of The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas (1993).

Kretzmann's lucid analysis of the arguments, and his patient teasing out of their difficult steps, is a service to the learned world, both theological and philosophical.

• 1. Nature from the Top Down ; 2. From God to Everything Else ; 3. Creation as Doubly Universal Production ; 4. Creation's Modalities ; 5. Could the Created World Have Existed For Ever? ; 6. The Origin of Species ; 7. Intellects ; 8. Metaphysical Hybrids ; 9. The Soul's Anatomy; ; 10. Souls before Birth and at Death ; Appendices; References; Indexes.