Week 3 - Medieval Philosophy Flashcards
The history of Western philosophy is divided into 3 broad periods:
Ancient philosophy
Medieval philosophy
Modern philosophy
Ancient philosophy is dominated by the writings of two people: Plato and Aristotle.
Medieval philosophy = the philosophy of 1,000 years or more, from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance.
Throughout the Middle Ages virtually all important philosophers were religious scholars, nearly all of them Christian ecclesiastics.
There were important Jewish and Arabic philosophers such as Maimonides and Avicenna too.
There are 2 figures who stand out:
1/ St Augustine (354 - 430)
- Born in North Africa in AD 354.
- 2 of his books are universally acknowledged among the world’s greatest literature: The Confessions and The City of God
- Very solitary thinker; a lonely scholar (like Descartes/Spinoza)
- Confessions draws on his own meditation, his own reading of the Bible, his own interior life
2/ Thomas Aquinas
- Born in Italy in 1225
- More of a technical philosopher than Augustine
- 2 famous works are textbooks written for students
- Lived his life within communities of friars
- A university teacher (like Kant/Hegel)
The death of St Augustine and the fall of the Roman Empire were followed by the period we dub the Dark Ages.
Manichaeism was a major religious movement that was founded by the Iranian prophet Mani.
Manichaeism taught an elaborate dualistic cosmology describing the struggle between a good, spiritual world of light, and an evil, material world of darkness.
In his younger days Augustine was a Manichaean. They believed that God wasn’t supremely powerful. Instead there was a never-ending struggle between equal forces of good and evil (God and Satan).
This explained why such terrible things happened.
In later life, he came to reject this approach but he still wrestled with the problem of Evil.
Theodicy, in its most common form, is an attempt to answer the question of why a good God permits the manifestation of evil.
Augustine used the Free Will Defence. God is powerful enough to prevent all evil. However, moral evil is a result of our choices.
Augustine believed that it was also partly as a result of Adam and Eve’s choices.
He believed that Original Sin gets passed on to each new generation by the act of sexual reproduction. Even a child from its earliest moments bears the traces of this sin.
One of the most important contributions of the Middle Ages to philosophy: the invention of the university.
2 things characteristic of medieval philosophers - the voluminous output and the rigorous method of presentation. A third medieval innovation is the University syllabus.
One preoccupation that ran throughout the whole of the Middle Ages was the desire to reconcile the great classic philosophers of Ancient Greece with the Christian religion.
Reconciling Aristotle with Christianity was a particular concern of Aquinas and those who succeeded him.
Augustine was much more interested in Plato, and as a source of knowledge he was very much more interested in the Bible than he was in any philosopher at all.
Augustine’s presence broods over the Middle Ages. The later medieval philosophers regarded him as almost a codification of the religious knowledge to be found in the Christian tradition through the Bible.
It would be quite wrong to think of people like Aquinas as having an eye only on religion. He thought that God had things to tell us about the world, not only through the Sacred books, like the Bible, but also through the story of the Creation.
Much of medieval philosophy is not connected with religion. There is a great deal of linguistic and conceptual analysis.
In medieval philosophy we find the germ of many of the sciences which set up as disciplines on their own after the Renaissance.
Most modern ideas of logic (Frege/Russell) were things that were well known in the Middle Ages.
After the Middle Ages people lost interest in logic, and to a great extent lost interest in the philosophical study of language.
From Descartes onwards philosophers placed epistemology in the centre of their discipline.
Epistemology is based on the question: how do we know what we know?
Aquinas is very careful to make a distinction between his beliefs as a theologian and his beliefs as a philosopher.
He sees his job as a theologian as being to articulate, make explicit and defend the revelation of the history of the world, contained in the Sacred books of Christianity and in the teaching of the Church. As a philosopher, his job is to get as far as he can in discovering what kind of place the world is, and what truths we can know which are necessary truths about the world and about thought.
The ontological argument is the most famous argument in the history of philosophy. It was thrashed over in the Middle Ages; it crops up again in Descartes, in Spinoza, in Leibniz, and in Kant.
Its classic formulation was by Anselm in the eleventh century.
St. Anselm, Archbishop of Cantebury (1033-1109), is the originator of the ontological argument, and be summarised as follows:
It is a conceptual truth (or, so to speak, true by definition) that God is a being than which none greater can be imagined (that is, the greatest possible being that can be imagined).
God exists as an idea in the mind.
A being that exists as an idea in the mind and in reality is, other things being equal, greater than a being that exists only as an idea in the mind.
Thus, if God exists only as an idea in the mind, then we can imagine something that is greater than God (that is, a greatest possible being that does exist).
But we cannot imagine something that is greater than God (for it is a contradiction to suppose that we can imagine a being greater than the greatest possible being that can be imagined.)
Therefore, God exists.
Christian doctrine of Divine Grace
The philosophical problem was the problem of reconciling divine foreknowledge and human freedom.
This is a problem for anybody who believes in an omniscient God at all, whether or not they believe in anything the Bible says about God.
This was a special problem for Christians because St Augustine lays enormous emphasis on the doctrine that nobody achieves salvation and goes to glory in heaven unless they are predestined to do so by God.
The actual logical moves which somebody in the 20th century will use to reconcile physical determinism with our experience of freedom will be, as often as not, the same steps gone through by people in the 14th century trying to reconcile predestination with human freedom.
