medieval philosophy essay

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Medieval Philosophy

An introduction to medieval philosophy, mark daniels introduces a whole millenium of ideas..

Let us start by considering three points. First , medieval philosophy came from a period when philosophy was under attack: the proponents of religious faith felt that the claims of the philosophers concerning the superiority of reason were false and this led to medieval philosophers such as Aquinas and Averroes having to defend the purpose and the existence of philosophy from first principles. Second , many of the texts, especially those of Judaeo-Muslim medieval philosophy, have a richness and complexity that texts of other periods simply lack – philosophy written as poetry, philosophical stories which make major points, etc. There are even major philosophical works – such as Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed – which admit of several wholly opposed interpretations. Third , and lastly, the relevance of various medieval projects to modern problems. The development of computers and the attempt to model events which happen in the world around us led to the development of a logical language capable of handling the various modal qualities describing time and possibility. This replicated the development of a similar language during the middle ages to discuss matters such as the Christian trinity, second coming of Jesus and resurrection of the dead. Knowledge of the medieval success would have greatly facilitated the modem reconstruction.

Now that we have considered the possibility that the subject is one which might deserve our interest, let us move on to put it into context. The parameters of the time span of our subject have been widely debated. The widest stretches from the time of Philo of Alexandria (a Jew who lived c.50 CE) to that of Spinoza (d.1677 CE). Narrower definitions encompass the period from the Carolingian revival in c.800 CE to 1400 CE. Most would, however, include St Augustine of Hippo (c.400 CE).

Many medieval thinkers were highly successful in the areas of their work – which was not philosophy. St Anselm was Archbishop of Canterbury. Peter of Spain rose to become Pope. Grosseteste was Bishop of Lincoln and the first Chancellor of Oxford University. HaLevi was a poet whose works are recited today by the Spanish and Portuguese Jews in synagogue during the Day of Atonement. Maimonides was a doctor in the Egyptian royal court and codified Jewish law in 14 volumes. Gersonides’s navigational tables were used for centuries. Avicenna’s medical works were taught in Europe until the 17th Century and he was deeply involved in Persian politics. Al-Ghazzali was a leading mystic and legal authority. Averroes rose to become Qadi (Supreme Judge) of Cordoba. Two of the best-known thinkers, Abelard and Heloise, had a famous romance which unfortunately led to Abelard being castrated by ruffians hired by Heloise’s uncle. These people were not dull and boring!

There were a number of different projects which were investigated. In all three religious traditions, philosophers speculated on the relationship between faith and reason (including attempts to prove by reason that the fount of faith, the Almighty, must exist). They also argued that the teachings of Plato (and later, of Aristotle) were compatible with the tenets of their respective faiths. Another frequent subject of interest was the problem of evil. Yet another concerned the manner in which it was possible to describe God – leading to considerations on the use and limits of language. In Christian Europe, much energy was spent arguing about the nature of universals such as redness and happiness: whether they had any real existence in themselves or whether they were merely aspects of individual items. Time was also spent on logic, as explained above. In the Muslim and Jewish world, interest centred on the nature of the soul and the possibility of meaningful contact with the Almighty. There were also discussions on the nature of both time and space and considerations of the nature of causation. All three traditions fostered speculation on aesthetics (see Umberto Eco’s book on Aquinas’ aesthetics), the nature of ethics, of political philosophy and the nature of a just society and on the relationship between ‘church’ and ‘state’.

It must be confessed that most medieval writing is not exactly easy to read. The style is unusual – some of the great works such as Aquinas’ Summa Theologica are written in the form of a medieval disputation with Questions followed by Articles, Objections and then Replies. Another popular form of writing is the commentary – such as the Longer, Mid-length and Shorter commentaries of Averroes on the works of Aristotle or the many commentaries on Peter Lombard’s Sententiarum .

Another problem involves that of copying manuscripts. Scribes often made mistakes – leaving out lines or words or misspelling words. Sometimes footnotes or glosses on a manuscript written in by an owner might be included in the body text of the new copy. This affected not only the originals of the works which we read today – but also the works read at the time by our medieval thinkers.

In conclusion, we can hopefully see that there is rather more to medieval philosophy than a set of long involved debates about squeezing angels onto pinheads!

© Mark Daniels 2005

Mark Daniels is minister at Croydon Synagogue in London and was on the Philosophy Now staff in the 1990s, during which time he edited or co-edited several issues of the magazine. He has a special interest in Maimonides (see here ).

Finding Out More

Good anthologies of medieval philosophy include: • The Age of Belief (ed Anne Fremantle) 1954, short and cheerful (200 pages) • Medieval Philosophy (ed Wippel & Wolter) 1969, better but longer (500pp) • A good academic history of Christian thinking is Medieval Thought by David Luscombe 1997, OUP • An eclectic introduction to Islamic Philosophy (with lots of fun snippets – but guaranteed to give academics the galloping heeby-jeebies) is Studies in Muslim Philosophy by M Saeed Sheikh (3rd ed 1974) printed by Sr Muhammed Ashraf and available in good Islamic bookshops • For a philosophical novel with commentary, take a gander at the remarkable Avicenna and the Visionary Recital by Henry Corbin (Princeton/Bollingen 1960/88) or read the Journey of the Soul by ibn Tufail (Hai bin Yaqzan) translated by Riad Kocache, Octagon Press London 1982.

Eras of Medieval Christian Thought

Medieval Christian philosophy can be split up into four different periods:

• The Dark Ages With the destruction of the Roman Empire by the barbarians (and the final destruction of the remnants of the Great Library of Alexandria by the Muslims), the civilisation of the Classical World was lost. A few lamps of knowledge were kept flickering by such as Isidore of Seville and Cassiodorus who wrote various encyclopedias of knowledge. The works of Boethius and St Augustine provided a link with Classical Thought.

• From the Carolingian Renaissance (c. 800) to the rediscovery of Aristotle (c. 1200). Famously, Dun Scotus Eriugena was brought over from Ireland to France to translate the works of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite from Greek for the Carolingian Court. Other thinkers of this period included Abelard (the logician and lover of Heloise) and St Anselm (of the Ontological Proof of the Existence of God).

• From the Rediscovery of Aristotle (c. 1200) to the Renaissance (1400s). The translation of Aristotle’s works from Arabic into Latin provided new material encouraging a rethink of philosophy. The great minds of this period included St Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham (to whom Ockham’s razor is attributed). The religious difficulties with Aristotle’s approach resulted in a set of Condemnations (1270 – Paris; 1277 - Paris [the famous 219 erroneous propositions of Stephen Tempier, Bishop of Paris] - and another in Oxford; and 1284 - Canterbury).

• From the Renaissance to the end of Scholasticism (c.1600). The rediscovery of Plato and the works of such as the Stoics and the Epicureans led to another re-assessment of philosophy as their Greek works were brought over from Byzantium together with translators such as George of Trebizond. Eventually the new approaches of Descartes and the other early modern philosophers encouraged a rejection of the old ways and philosophy ‘restarted’ with a new project and outlook. Thinkers of this period include Nicholas of Cusa and Francis Suarez.

Plato and Aristotle

Plato and Aristotle were the two leading influences on medieval thought. At the beginning of our period the leading thinkers were St Augustine of Hippo 345-430), Boethius (c.480-c.525), and psuedo-Dionysius the Areopagite (c.500?) who merged the thinking of Plato with Christianity (Boethius drew on Aristotle too) and this moulded Medieval Philosophy until the rediscovery of Aristotle in the 1200s when Aquinas managed a similar synthesis of Aristotelianism with Christianity. We need to be aware that the medieval views of these two thinkers were not identical with our modern understanding of them. Plato, for example, was unread in the Latin-speaking world – the only dialogue available in Latin was part of his Timaeus with a commentary by Chalcidius (c.350). Consequently the medievals lacked our modern understanding of how Plato’s thinking developed in his early, middle and late periods – or of how his ideas had been modified by later schools such as the neo-Platonists. Aristotle on the other hand was mostly known through Boethius’ Latin translations of his Categories and De Interpretatione combined with synopses of his works such as Themistius’ paraphrase of his categories, the Categoriae Decem . In the 1200s there was a rush of translation of almost his entire surviving canon into Latin by such worthies as James of Venice, William of Moerbeke and Michael Scot. These were accompanied by commentaries such as those of Averroes and also by psuedo-Aristotelian works such as the Secretum Secretorum , the Magna Moralia and de Plantis , some of which were neo-Platonic in outlook.

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Medieval Philosophy and Philosophical Medievalism: The Public Understanding of Medieval Philosophy

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Theological Dogma and Philosophical Innovation in Medieval Philosophy

Special editor: susan brower-toland, submission deadline extended: july 1 august 1, 2021, prize: $3,000, call for papers, submission guidelines.

The Medieval Ages Philosophy Essay

The Medieval Ages are characterized by the use of numerous allegories in the priests’ rhetoric. It is possible to note that this was due to the need to convey the idea of the God’s and the Church’s grandness. People had to obey all the rules introduced by the priests and the latter used hidden meanings and allegories to achieve their aims.

One of the allegories is the life of a person as history. Thus, an individual’s life was not “just a random string of temporal events but was itself a story” (Vitz 112). This allegory was very useful for priests who used it as a potent rhetorical device. Thus, people did not have to (or even could not) think that they were individuals with their own goals. All had to think that they were only a part of the larger story and nothing more.

Importantly, this allegory is closely connected with the central idea that reigned in the Medieval Times. Priests stressed the idea that the entire history is a story written by God. More so, the priests often used allegories revealing the idea that “only God – its author – really knew, in detail, what the story was” (Vitz 112). God was knowledgeable and people could not see the whole picture and, hence, had to follow rules set.

Admittedly, people could not think of the purpose of their life and they could not try to change it as it was against God’s will. Of course, this was beneficial for the clergy who could take complete control over people who had to work and be almost slaves of the priests and nobility.

The fight of angels and demons for people’s souls is also an important allegory used by priests. Thus, dying people are often depicted in the center of the battle. The battle stands for passions that can overcome people and people’s duty to resist temptations. Again, these temptations are not only connected with such simple things as being good to people and living simple lives. One of major virtues was being submissive and following the rules set by priests. Therefore, the battle of demons and angels is a reminder for people to live in a righteous way to get the most important thing in the world, afterlife in paradise.

Another important allegory is the Last Judgment. Apart from the judgment right after death, all souls are bound to be judged when the Doomsday comes. This is another trial all people have to remember of. The priests used this allegory quite often as they used it as a tool to make people obedient.

A very widespread allegory was also the idea of witchcraft. The priests started the war on witchcraft which was, in reality, in the vast majority of cases, a struggle against disobedience or attempts to think differently. A person could be condemned as a witch for trying to question the order established by the priests and/or nobility.

Thus, scientists who tried to reveal secrets of nature or women who could treat people with herbs were all seen as witches as they tried to do what only priests could do. Saving people or explaining secrets of nature were complete responsibilities of the priests who stressed that they were instruments of god. Clearly, this was a strong allegory as the priests created horrific pictures in people’s minds and they could keep all people in obedience.

Works Cited

Vitz, Evelyn Birge. Medieval Narratives and Modern Narratology: Subjects and Objects of Desire. New York, NY: NYU Press, 1992. Print.

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Medieval Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction

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Medieval philosophy is one of the most exciting and diversified periods in the history of thought. Introducing the coexisting strands of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish philosophy, Medieval Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction shows how these traditions all go back to the Platonic schools of late antiquity and explains the complex ways in which they are interlinked. Providing an overview of some of the main thinkers, such as Boethius, Abelard, al-Fārābī, Avicenna, Maimonides, and Gersonides, and the topics, institutions, and literary forms of medieval philosophy, it discusses in detail some of the key issues in medieval thought: universals; mind, body, and mortality; foreknowledge and freedom; and society and the best life.

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University of Notre Dame

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Emotion and Cognitive Life in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy

Lisa Shapiro and Martin Pickavé (eds.), Emotion and Cognitive Life in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy , Oxford University Press, 2012, 296pp., $85.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199579914.

Reviewed by Matthew J. Kisner, University of South Carolina

Contemporary philosophers of emotions sometimes complain that the emotions are unfairly maligned or overlooked because of their alleged opposition to reason. According to a familiar story, knowledge and understanding arise from rational mental processes, to which the emotions either do not contribute or, worse, contribute negatively by generating confusion and leading us to mistaken, specious conclusions. Defenders of the emotions often respond to this criticism by showing that the emotions make positive contributions to reasoning and knowledge.  Emotion and Cognitive Life in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy  explains the historical background to this question by bringing together essays concerning the various ways that historical figures conceived of the emotions' contribution to cognition. This anthology shows that today's defenders of the emotions find themselves in good historical company, as many of these figures regarded the emotions -- passions or affections, to use less anachronistic terms -- as indispensible to cognition. In doing so, the volume not only provides an important contribution to historical scholarship on the emotions, but also maps out some central strategies for understanding the emotions' role in cognition, which is important to philosophy of the emotions today.

The essays can be roughly divided into two categories, those concerned with medieval and those concerned with early modern theories of the emotions, though there is some overlap. Some of the essays, particularly Paul Hoffman's "Reasons, Causes, and Inclinations," compare medieval and early modern theories, while Sabrina Ebbersmeyer's "The Philosopher as a Lover: Renaissance Debates on Platonic  Eros ," and Simo Knuuttila's "Sixteenth-Century Discussions of the Passions of the Will," examine later figures, such as Giordano Bruno and Francisco Suárez, who lie at the cusp of the early modern period. Consequently, the anthology helps the reader to trace how early modern theories of the emotions emerge from and respond to medieval theories, which is one of the anthology's most valuable contributions to the literature. The medieval essays, such as Knuuttila's, are particularly good at providing broad, systematic overviews, which is helpful to those who are more familiar with early modern accounts of the emotions and want a better sense of their historical context.

The essays on medieval philosophy tend to focus on the question of how philosophers situated the emotions within broader theories of mind, which has important implications for how they contribute to cognition. Taken as a whole, the essays on medieval philosophy present something like the following picture. The highly influential Thomistic view -- a touchstone throughout the essays -- locates the passions within the sensitive, appetitive powers of the soul. According to this view, the passions are non-cognitive movements of the appetite, which possess intentionality because they are caused by or associated with cognitions. According to this picture, the passions are located in the part of the soul that we share with animals, which may be taken to suggest that the passions are divorced from cognitive processes. However, Dominik Perler's essay, "Medieval Debates on Animal Passions," shows that Aquinas followed Avicenna in conceiving of animals as capable of much cognition. Furthermore, Perler shows that, according to Aquinas, the intellectual and sensitive powers of the soul cooperate in human beings so that the cognitive mechanisms in the sensitive soul that underlie the passions are informed by reasoning and intellectual activity.

The essays examine two main ways that this Thomistic view was contested in medieval philosophy. First, some philosophers, particularly John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, held that there are passions of the will. Since the will was understood as a power of the intellect, this view locates passions in the intellectual, rather than the sensitive powers of the soul. Peter King's essay helps to explain the significance of this commitment. Examining the Stoics, Augustine and ultimately Aquinas, King argues that there was a tradition of admitting a fuzzy category of mental states that resemble passions, but cannot be strictly classified as passions because they do not possess properties essential to them. King calls these "Dispassionate Passions," the paradoxical title of the essay. Augustine and Aquinas admit this category partly because they want to allow for passionate states, such as the joy that souls experience in the afterlife, that do not involve the body, as passions do. By opening up the conceptual space for passions of the will, then, Scotus and Ockham make it possible to regard these states as proper passions. The essay by Ian Drummond examines Scotus's view, explaining how, for Scotus, there can be passions of the will, when they lack the material, bodily element that usually explains how the passions are passive. Claude Panaccio's essay considers Ockham's view on passions of the will, though its main focus is Ockham's distinction between intellectual and volitional acts. Knuuttila's essay complements this discussion by explaining how Scotus's and Ockham's views were received in the sixteenth-century, particularly by John Mair and Francisco Suárez.

Second, in much the same way that Scotus and Ockham challenged whether the passions belong exclusively to the sensitive powers of the soul, other philosophers challenged Aquinas's notion that the passions belong exclusively to the appetitive, rather than the intellectual powers. Martin Pickavé's essay examines this "minority" view, defended by Adam Wodenham. Wodenham understood emotions as cognitions and, thus, belonging to the apprehensive powers of the mind, though he also regarded emotions as acts of appetite. Pickavé argues, against those who tend to read medieval philosophers as cognitivists about the emotions, that this is one of the few places where medieval philosophers took up the question of whether the emotions are cognitive, a common question in contemporary philosophy of the emotions.

While the essays on early modern philosophy tend to be more narrowly focused on issues pertaining to particular philosophers, they provide some indication of how early modern theories of the passions in general are situated with respect to the medieval theories. In particular, Lisa Shapiro, in "How We Experience the World: Passionate Perception in Descartes and Spinoza," shows that Descartes and Spinoza break with the "familiar" view that the passions are motivational, non-intentional states that are brought about by sensations, which provide the passions with intentional objects. In contrast, Shapiro argues that Descartes and Spinoza conceived the passions as themselves containing information and intentional perceptions, rather than as acquiring these from sensations. According to this view, the passions are both perceptual -- in the same way as sensations -- and motivating. Indeed, she claims that these philosophers understood our experiences of the world as possessing a fundamental affective dimension. This reading shows an important way that Descartes and Spinoza break with the dominant medieval view, discussed above, that the passions are purely appetitive and acquire intentionality from their association with other perceptions and cognitions. Furthermore, this reading shows that Descartes and Spinoza are more continuous with contemporary theories of emotions, which tend to regard the emotions as complex states that have both motivational and perceptual elements, as Pickavé argues (p. 96).

Shapiro's claim that Spinoza understands the passions as perceptual sets the stage for Lilli Alanen's, "Spinoza on Passions and Self-Knowledge: the Case of Pride." Alanen examines a problem in Spinoza's philosophy that arises because he conceives of the passions as kinds of perceptions, more specifically, inadequate ideas. Alanen argues that, for Spinoza, the passions of pride and self-esteem are the only basis for perceiving ourselves as individuals. Since these ideas are necessarily inadequate, it is not clear how we can genuinely know ourselves. For us to acquire true knowledge, that is, adequate ideas of ourselves, it seems that we would need to transcend our passions and, in doing so, our only source of knowledge about ourselves as individuals.

Like Shapiro, Paul Hoffman also helps to connect early modern and medieval theories of emotions. While Hoffman's essay focuses on a question raised by Mark Wrathall's work on reasons and motives, Hoffman's consideration of this question leads him to consider Aquinas's, Descartes's and Leibniz's views about how something can incline the will, as passions are often supposed to do. Whereas Shapiro draws our attention to an important break between common medieval theories and early modern philosophers, Hoffman draws attention to a point of continuity. He argues that Descartes and Leibniz agree with Aquinas that the passions incline the will because of their association with representations of good and evil and, thus, by offering reasons, rather than by mechanically causing the will to incline in some direction.

Amy M. Schmitter's, "Family Trees: Sympathy, Comparison, and the Proliferation of the Passions in Hume and his Predecessors," rounds out the volume by explaining what is distinctive about Hume's account of the passions. While Schmitter does not look as far back as medieval philosophy, she does show the ways in which Hume's theory of the passions is novel and innovative given the immediate context of theorizing about the passions in the eighteenth century. Consequently, Schmitter helps to extend the anthology's narrative beyond the seventeenth century, which receives the lion's share of attention in the essays on early modern philosophy.

If I have anything like a criticism, it concerns one way Shapiro and Pickavé explain how the anthology contributes to the literature, a way that features prominently in promotional literature for the anthology. They claim, "historians of philosophy have typically focused on the discussions of the moral relevance of the emotions," without devoting much attention "to the place of emotions in cognition" (p. 2). Without more qualification or explanation, I am inclined to resist this characterization, first, because it does not strike me as entirely true, at least, not of the literature on early modern philosophy. While work on the moral sentimentalists -- Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume and Smith -- as well as their interlocutors has focused on examining the emotions in a moral context, this seems less true of work on seventeenth-century philosophy. Susan James'  Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy , perhaps the most systematic philosophical treatment of emotions during this period, generally steers clear of moral philosophy. Most of the work on Descartes's theory of the passions has focused on its implications for understanding the relationship between the mind and body, while work on Spinoza's theory of emotions has tended to focus on how the passions are situated within his metaphysics. [1]  While this work usually has peripheral interest in moral philosophy, it focuses more on how the emotions fit into the philosophers' broader theories of the mind, which is closely connected to understanding how the emotions are related to cognition. It seems that there are many different, localized literatures in the history of emotions, each with its own emphases and lacunae, which makes it difficult to generalize.

There is a second reason to resist Shapiro and Pickavé's claim, one that helps to illustrate something valuable about the anthology. Focusing on the passions' importance to morality, rather than cognition, is potentially problematic not only because it neglects the importance of the passions to cognition, but also because it might imply a false dichotomy, which supposes that research on the emotions must contribute to work on the passions' importance to either morality or cognition. I am reticent to conceive of the anthology as contributing to our understanding of cognition rather than morality because such a conception might perpetuate this dichotomy. My concern arises on the first page of the introduction, where Shapiro and Pickavé assert that historians of philosophy have focused on aspects of the passions relevant to morality because they tend to emphasize the passions' role in motivation, which "discounts the many ways in which emotions figure in our cognitive lives" (p. 1). It is not clear, however, why focusing on the motivational aspects of the passions would lead one to discount their importance to cognition. On the contrary, the essays are particularly interesting because they show that the motivational aspect of the passions, their most morally salient feature, is also critical to understanding their contribution to cognition.

This point is particularly evident in Deborah Brown's "Agency and Attention in Malebranche's Theory of Cognition," which argues that Malebranche conceives the passion of wonder as critical to correcting cognitive errors. Wonder plays this role, Brown argues, because it directs our attention in a way that is impartial, which helps us to achieve a more objective understanding. In this way, the passion of wonder contributes to cognition largely because of its ability to motivate cognitive acts: the voluntary direction of attention and judgments. This is the converse of Hoffman's claim that the passions, for Aquinas, Leibniz and Descartes, influence and direct the will by providing reasons that derive from associated perceptions: whereas Hoffman argues that the passions, for early modern philosophers like Descartes, motivate in virtue of their association with cognitions, Brown argues that, for Malebranche, Descartes and Augustine, the passions contribute to cognition because of their ability to motivate. Brown and Hoffman agree here that the passions' importance to cognition, for many early modern philosophers, cannot be separated from their importance to motivation, a sentiment shared by Shapiro's essay. In this way, the essays suggest that we should avoid thinking of the emotions, for early modern philosophers, as possessing one set of traits that is important to morality and another set that is important to cognition. Consequently, we should also be careful about thinking of the literature on early modern theories of emotions as falling into one category or the other. This point is underscored by the fact that many of the essays take up explicitly moral issues, particularly those of Panaccio, Schmitter, and Dennis Des Chene ("Using the Passions").

In conclusion, this excellent volume provides a valuable overview of medieval debates about how to situate the passions within the mind and the role of the passions in cognition. It also provides some interesting and insightful essays on various subjects pertaining to early modern views on the passions and cognition, which help to show how early modern theories of the passions emerge from this medieval background. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the burgeoning field of work on the history of the passions and for contemporary philosophers interested in the connection between emotions and cognition.

[1]  With respect to Descartes, I am thinking of Deborah Brown's  Descartes and the Passionate Mind  and Lilli Alanen's  Descartes's Concept of Mind , each of which contains a chapter on ethics, but otherwise devotes more energy to understanding how the passions inform Descartes's philosophy of mind. With respect to Spinoza, I am thinking of overviews of Spinoza's view of the passions, such as Michael LeBuffe's "The Anatomy of the Passions," in  The   Cambridge Companion to Spinoza's  Ethics and Michael Della Rocca's "Spinoza's Metaphysical Psychology," in  The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza .

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Notes to Medieval Philosophy

1. Although Jewish philosophers writing in Arabic fit within the Islamicate cultural tradition (see, e.g., Maimonides in ( §2.6 ), there is a strong continuity between Jewish philosophy in Arabic and in Hebrew, which is lost if medieval Jewish philosophy is not regarded as a single branch of the tradition. In §2 , however, for the sake of space, pre-1200 Jewish philosophy is treated alongside other philosophy in Arabic in §2.4 and §2.6 . Besides the four main branches there were others, such as philosophy in Syriac from the fourth to the thirteenth century, in Georgian and Armenian, and in Persian (attached to the Arabic tradition).

2. The term “medieval”, meaning “belonging to the middle ( medium ) age ( aevum )”, was coined by Renaissance scholars to designate (in a derogatory way) the period between the end of antiquity and their own time. But there is no need to stick to this original sense, in which it would apply only to the Latin tradition (and perhaps the Jewish tradition, which had by then rooted itself in the Latin world); and, indeed, it is argued below ( §5.2 ) that the Renaissance does not mark the end of the Latin tradition of medieval philosophy.

3. Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy ( §1.3 ) was frequently commented on, from the ninth to fifteenth century, and his short theological treatises and logical textbooks especially before 1150. There were early medieval (800–1200) Latin gloss and commentary traditions also on Martianus Capella’s Marriage of Mercury and Philology, a late ancient encyclopaedic work with philosophical content and on Macrobius’s commentary on Cicero’s Dream of Scipio.

4. The Timaeus was translated into Latin (incompletely) in the fourth century by Calcidius, who also wrote a commentary. The Timaeus was commented on by William of Conches in the twelfth Century, and in the same period Averroes commented on an epitome of the Republic , whilst in the fifteenth century Marsilio Ficino commented on works by Plato and Platonists. There was a Latin tradition of commentary on pseudo-Dionysius and on a modified version of Proclus’s Elements of Theology , originally made in Arabic, called the Liber de causis (see Calma 2016). In 1340–61 Berthold of Moosburg wrote a vast commentary on the Elements of Theology itself.

5. There was also a tradition of commentary on writings by al-Suhrawardī ( §2.10 ), and on kalām ( §2.4 ) textbooks.

6. The Dartmouth Dante project, https://dante.dartmouth.edu/ , gives access to 32 commentaries on the Commedia written before 1600.

7. Pasnau 2014 allows most of these movements to be traced, using Appendix B, “Medieval Translations” (793–832), which list

• Greek Aristotelian works translated into Latin;
• (Other) Greek philosophical works translated into Latin;
• Greek philosophical works translated into Arabic;
• Arabic philosophical works translated into Latin;
• Latin philosophical works translated into Greek;
• Ancient philosophical works and commentaries translated into Hebrew.

8. Tatakis 2003 is a translation of a book published in French in 1949; balanced discussions are given in Kaldellis and Siniossoglou 2017, sections IV and V, and Bruns, Kapriev and Mudroch 2019, Part I; the entry on Byzantine philosophy concentrates on the Aristotelian commentary tradition, and Kapriev 2005 on the Christian Platonic tradition.

9. See Börje Bydén and Katerina Ierodiakonou (2012: 29–30). For discussion about what “Byzantine Philosophy” means, see Trizio 2007 and Gutas & Siniossoglou 2017.

10. See Marenbon 1983 (outdated, but unfortunately not yet replaced).

11. Adamson and Taylor 2005 is a good introductory survey, mainly on this period; Rudolph 2021 is much more detailed, and goes up to the end of the twelfth century. This period is covered in the course of a wider treatment of Arabic philosophy in Taylor & Lopéz-Farjeat 2016 and El-Rouayheb & Schmidtke 2017; see also entries on Arabic and Islamic metaphysics , Arabic and Islamic natural philosophy and natural science , Arabic and Islamic psychology and philosophy of mind , causation in Arabic and Islamic Thought .

12. Kalām , especially before al-Ghazālī, is often excluded from surveys of Arabic philosophy. Frank 1978 is the classic study of early kalām metaphysics and Van Ess 1991–95 (now being translated—part already available) is fundamental.

13. But this picture should be nuanced: see Vasalou 2008.

14. For general histories of medieval Jewish philosophy, see note 23 .

15. See Dronke 1988; Cesalli, Imbach, de Libera, & Ricklin 2021 (very thorough); and Giraud 2020.

16. The first study to look at the philosophical culture of Islamic Spain as a whole is Stroumsa 2019. See also entries on Arabic and Islamic metaphysics , al-Farabi’s psychology and epistemology , causation in Arabic and Islamic .

17. For general histories of medieval Jewish philosophy, see note 23 .

18. Cross 2014 ( The Medieval Christian Philosophers ) gives a philosophically sophisticated introduction to the main figures; Cross and Paasch 2021 ( Routledge Companion to Medieval Philosophy ) is a multi-author survey, arranged by topic and also philosophically acute. Kenny 2005 ( Medieval Philosophy ) is beautifully written and lucid. Although, as indicated, the titles suggest a wider survey, these books concentrate especially on University Philosophy. For the thirteenth century, Brungs, Mudroch, & Schulthess 2017 provides unrivalled detail; it also considers to a limited extent non-university philosophy in the period. Flasch 1986 [2000] is unusual because, though staying with the Latin tradition, it sees university philosophy only as a limited part of its field.

19. This, of course, vastly oversimplifies the complicated story of the use of Arabic sources in Latin University Philosophy: see entry on influence of Arabic and Islamic philosophy on the Latin West .

20. This area has not been much explored: Imbach & König-Pralong 2013 assembles some of the important articles or chapters written by these two pioneers; Casagrande & Fioravanti 2016 also considers University Philosophy (in Italy), but is mainly oriented to philosophy outside universities, or at least outside the Arts and Theology Faculties there. In the Jewish and Islamic traditions there was also philosophy directed towards a wider public, although it has been little studied by historians of philosophy: Abram, Harvey and Muehlethaler 2022 contains essays on the whole area (Latin, Jewish, and Islamicate worlds), and see Adamson 2016: 344–350 (on Rūmī).

21. These figures are customarily called “Renaissance Philosophers”: see below, ( §5.2 ).

22. On how female mystics might be thought about in connection with philosophy, see Christina Van Dyke 2018, and cf. the chapters in Adamson 2019 on Hildegard (2019: 128–34), Hadewijch and Mechthild of Magdeburg (2019: 222–27), Marguerite Porete (2019: 368–73), English Mysticism (2019: 489–94), and Catherine of Siena (2019: 509–15).

23. Sirat 1985 provides a thorough guide to the whole range of medieval Jewish philosophy, as does Frank & Leaman (2003: 258–445 are on philosophy in Hebrew) and Nadler & Rudavsky 2009 (arranged by topic). The SEP entry on influence of Arabic and Islamic philosophy on Judaic thought covers the Jewish Arabic and Hebrew tradition: it provides important qualifications to the simplified picture presented here and in §2.6 about the sources used by Jewish philosophers.

24. The best general information will be found in the relevant chapters of El-Rouayheb & Schmidtke 2017 and Adamson 2016: 295–420. There is a lively historiographical debate about what elements in later Arabic thought and culture should be considered to be philosophy. Adamson takes a broad view, Gutas 2018– who, however, was one of the first to suggest the interest of “post-classical Arabic philosophy”—a narrow one, whilst there is a nuanced discussion in Griffel 2021: see especially 565–71. Cf also: entries on Arabic and Islamic metaphysics , mysticism in Arabic and Islamic philosophy .

25. At much the same time, al-Aḥsa’ī (d. after 1501) brought together “ kalām , Peripatetic and Illuminationist philosophy, and philosophical mysticism” (Schmidtke 2017: 398).

26. For a brief discussion, mainly of Arabic authors, see Kukkonen 2014: 237–43. Fuller treatments include Sorabji 1983 and Davidson 1987 (Islamic and Jewish writers) and Dales 1990 and Rudavsky 2000 (Jewish authors).

27. A good survey is given in the entry on medieval theories of future contingents and, with use of formal notation, Bornholdt 2017. Both of these are restricted to the Latin tradition. For a wider view, see Rudavsky 1985.

28. Aquinas’s most important discussions of the problem are at On Truth , q. 2, a.12; Summa contra Gentiles , I, 67; Summa Theologiae I, q. 14, a. 13.

29. Avicenna puts his idea in The Cure at Metaphysics VIII.6 (Avicenna [2005: 287–290]). Averroes rejects Avicenna’s view, but his own is not really very different ( Metaphysics  Book Lam, 197–98).

30. Crescas sets out his argument for compatibilism mainly in Book II, Parts (“Cornerstones”) 1 and 5, which are conveniently translated in Manekin 2012: 192–235: see especially Part 5, chapter 3 at 222–223; in the full translation, Crescas [2018: 120–142, 188–205].

31. Averroes changed his interpretation of Aristotle’s On the Soul during his career. Apart from some fragments, his Great Commentary survives only in the Latin translation by Michael Scotus, and it probably, but not certainly, represents his latest view on the question. See Averroes Long Commentary [2009: esp. 304–329].

32. Although this comment is justified, and Aquinas was right to say that, on Averroes’s view, one cannot say “This human thinks”, it misses the point. Averroes did not think that humans could be the agents in the immaterial process of intellectual thinking, in the way that they are in sensible perception. Rather, he provided a way for humans, although not themselves immaterial, to take part in immaterial thinking. For Aquinas’s text, see Thomas Aquinas On There Being Only One Intellect [1993].

33. Aquinas sets out his ideas succinctly in Qq. 75–76 of his Summa Theologiae, Part 1.

34. Dutilh Novaes and Read 2016 provides a detailed account, by the best experts, of both the Latin and Arabic traditions of logic.

35. The tradition of Arabic logic from the twelfth century onwards has been brought out of obscurity, first by the work of Tony Street (see Stanford Encyclopedia entry cited at the end of the section), and most recently, reaching right up to the nineteenth century, in El-Rouayheb 2019. See also El-Rouayheb 2016.

36. Gabbay & Woods 2008 provides the fullest survey of the Latin tradition of medieval logic, but its coverage of the material is patchy. Besides the relevant parts of Dutilh Novaes & Read 2016, Cross & Paasch 2021 Part I (Bulthuis 2021, Bäck 2021, Uckelman 2021, Johnston 2021, Paasch 2021) gives an excellent, brief but philosophically pertinent account of some of the main areas. See also entry on Medieval theories of the syllogism .

37. The influence of Arabic logic on the Latin tradition was far more limited than that of Arabic metaphysics, philosophy of mind and natural philosophy, and the distinctive features of Avicennian logic were never known: see Lagerlund 2008.

38. A number of the fourteenth-century logicians who worked especially on the logica  modernorum have special entries devoted to them here: as well as Buridan and Ockham (already given), Albert of Saxony , Burley , Heytesbury , Kilvington , Richard the Sophister , William of Sherwood .

39. The best introduction to Byzantine logic is Erismann 2017; for Jewish logic, see Manekin 2009.

40. For c. 500, see, e.g., De Rijk 1985 and Lagerlund 2020, as cited above; the second century was favoured by Étienne Gilson and Paul Spade; c. 800 is followed by Robert Pasnau and, according him (Pasnau 2014: 1) is the object of “some consensus”. In early work, John Marenbon accepted (c).

41. “Renaissance Philosophy” has its own general histories, which of course overlap in chronology and often in the figures and works covered with general histories of medieval philosophy. Schmitt & Skinner 1988; Copenhaver & Schmitt 1992; and Hankins 2007 are all very valuable, as is a book that deliberately avoids the label “Renaissance” and concentrates on philosophy in the sixteenth century: Lagerlund & Hill 2017. See also entries on Aristotelianism in the Renaissance , natural philosophy in the Renaissance .

42. This is the title of Jacob Schmutz’s illuminating 2012 essay.

43. This has been suggested in various places (e.g., Marenbon 2012b: 7). In their Introduction to a collection of articles on “baroque scholasticism”, Dvořák & Schmutz (2019: 187) write that

the paradigm of a “long scholastic” age, stretching from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century, is now imposing itself as an alternative to the classical narrative of the early-modern scientific and philosophical “revolution”,

and so maybe the suggestion is no longer too radical.

Copyright © 2022 by John Marenbon < jm258 @ cam . ac . uk >

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Medieval Philosophy of Nature

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