Throughout the centuries of intellectual endeavor touched upon in these essays, the growth of the metaphysical and historical consciousness across subjects, ranging from theology and physics at one extreme to music and social history at the other, took closely parallel forms. Just how closely parallel they are emerges from the papers offered here. The other concern these articles address has to do with the recurrent patterns of theory manifested in all the disciplines examined here. Whenever thinkers with quite different subject matters, such as philosophy, theology, music, or history, have faced common forms of problems, they seem to resort to similar strategies. To this extent, thinkers today have more to learn than they yet recognize from the theoretical quandaries facing their predecessors in philosophy, political theory, and even in theology.

This volume, like others in the series, is intended to serve as a "perspective" into the scholarship celebrated at the Dowling Mediterranean Conferences XX and XXI, held in Spain in 1998 and in Italy in 1999. In this volume we have attempted to characterize several lines of intellectual development by which some of the fundamental features of ancient, medieval, and modern pictures of God, Nature, Beauty, the State, and the Self came to be accepted as common knowledge in the Mediterranean world today.