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Moses Maimonides and John Duns Scotus are key figures as regards the thirteenth-century philosophical tradition that developed out of the Western Christian reception of the Neo-Platonized Aristotelianism of Islamic and Jewish thinkers. Whereas the writings of Maimonides count among the received works that inaugurate and shape this span, the variety of conceptual instruments developed by Scotus arguably signal its end, preparing the way for the emergence of diverse fourteenth-century philosophical worldviews. Maimonides on God and Duns Scotus on Logic and Metaphysics explores the eponymous thinkers'work across a variety of fields. In the domain of natural theology, Maimonides presses for creation de novo, adapting from the Islamic Kalām tradition what has come to be known as the Argument from Particularity, which deduces intelligent design when science seems, in principle, unable to account for states of affairs that conceivably needn't obtain (to take an example from modern physics, the strength of the four fundamental forces). Part one of this volume contrasts Maimonides's and Aquinas's parallel treatments of this and other proof strategies still employed by contemporary philosophers. Part two, on Scotus, includes discussion of the authenticity of the logical writings attributed to him, the evolution of his thought in this field against the backdrop of various thirteenth-century developments, the types of Aristotelian universals theorized by Scotus, his semantics of theological discourse and ontology of possible entities.

Saikat Guha (1974–2008) wrote prolifically on many topics. Trained as a philosopher and physicist, Guha was interested in topics ranging from sexual ethics to Bell's Theorem to Anselm's ontological argument to Augustine's persecution of the Donatists—though he was primarily a metaphysician. Guha studied at the University of Texas at Austin, Boise State University, the University of Washington at Seattle, and Syracuse University. He wrote more than one hundred papers from roughly 1997–2006, five of which are published here. Three of these papers reformulate some of Aquinas's key doctrines on God: his first, second, and third ways, and his account of how necessity of being entails absolute perfection. The fourth paper considers whether Ockham's razor requires the presumption of atheism. The fifth paper presents a logical model of the doctrine of the Trinity in order to prove that the doctrine can be understood without logical contradiction.