 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyofphilosophy.com. Today's episode, Arts of Darkness – Introduction to Medieval Philosophy Most periods in the history of philosophy have appealing names. Putting Plato, Aristotle, and Friends under the heading of classical philosophy already highlights the unique role of ancient thought as the model and source for all that comes after. Authors like Erasmus and Machiavelli can bask in the positive connotations of the term Renaissance. As for Descartes, Hume, and Kant, their importance and fame is so well established that they hardly need any help from a historical label, but they get an alluring one nonetheless, modern philosophy, with its suggestion that these are the thinkers who remain relevant for us today. The poor relative is medieval philosophy. This word medieval is useful, since it picks out the epoch in European history that we're going to be covering in the coming episodes, but there's no denying that it sounds vaguely like an insult. Neither classical nor modern, the word medieval conjures up a time of social collapse, superstition, oppressive and dogmatic religious authority. Medieval philosophy is, in short, the philosophy of the Dark Ages. The next year and more of podcasts will be devoted to the task of shedding light on this supposedly dark period of human thought. Hopefully, by the end of this series of episodes, you'll not only still be listening, but will have been convinced that the medieval period richly merits such lavish attention. I'll start trying to persuade you in this episode by highlighting some of the main figures and themes that lie ahead of us. First, a brief word about what I mean by medieval philosophy. As you know, I've already covered philosophy in the Islamic world in previous episodes, and in so doing provided extensive coverage of Jewish thought in the medieval period. We even made a few forays into Christian Europe when we looked at figures like Gersonides. So none of that material is on our to-do list, though as we'll be seeing, characters like Avicenna, Averroes, and Maimonides will turn up again as influences on the philosophers we will be covering. Something else that is on our to-do list, but not yet, is the Byzantine tradition. In the surviving eastern part of the Roman Empire, the medieval period saw the continued production of philosophical works in Greek, and we'll get to that in due course. As of now, though, when I say medieval philosophy, what I mean is the philosophy of Latin Christendom in the medieval period. That gives us clear cultural and geographical boundaries for our topic. More difficult is setting chronological boundaries. As far as starting point goes, the die is cast. The last thinker I covered from Latin Christendom was Boethius, so we need to pick up the story after him. In those long ago episodes, I said that Augustine and Boethius must be seen as late antique figures, not as early medieval philosophers, even if they are often taught in courses on medieval philosophy. Now, Boethius died in 525 AD, so you would think I'd be kicking off these episodes with figures from the later 6th or perhaps 7th centuries, but here we do have a period that could legitimately be called a Dark Age, at least as far as philosophy goes. After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, philosophy collapsed too, though not for nearly as long as you might think. In the popular imagination, intellectual history recovered only in the Renaissance, and popular imagination is almost right. It's just that the recovery happened in the Carolingian Renaissance, that is during the reign of Charlemagne in the late 8th and early 9th centuries. Scholars attached to his court, particularly Alquin, renewed the study of philosophy, along with the other disciplines they called the liberal arts. Following this rebirth, we have continuous philosophical activity in Europe until, well, I guess until 2014, with fairly good prospects of its continuing for the foreseeable future. So from the point of view of the historian of philosophy, you could even consider the 9th century as the true Renaissance. This is not to deny, of course, that a Renaissance also happened after the medieval age. The thought of that period, as we'll be seeing after we've looked at the Byzantines, was far more continuous with medieval intellectual history than is often supposed. But there were genuinely new developments in the Renaissance too, notably the reception of new sources, especially Plato, into Latin, the composition of philosophy in vernacular languages instead of Latin, and this self-conscious return to classical texts staged by the humanists. Still, the line dividing late medieval philosophy from Renaissance philosophy is at best a very blurry one. Mostly for convenience, I am going to draw it at the year 1400. I will, however, be emphasizing that medieval thought anticipated Renaissance and early modern thought in some ways, and in other ways, survived past 1400. So that's the terrain to be covered, philosophy in Latin Christendom starting after Boethius, which pretty much means beginning with the Carolingian period around the year 800 AD, and ending in 1400. It's more than half a millennium of philosophy, featuring debates within all areas of philosophy and many dozens, in fact hundreds, of significant figures. In keeping with the no-gaps approach of this whole series, we'll be looking at quite a number of them, far too many even to name in this introductory episode. But just so you have an idea of what to expect, let me mention a few. The most obvious is Thomas Aquinas. I suppose he is the only medieval thinker who you'd be almost certain to encounter in an undergraduate course on philosophy unless you count Anselm, because of the couple of pages in which he presented his famous ontological argument for the existence of God. There are several reasons why Aquinas is so prominent. He was among the first who grappled systematically with the works of Aristotle that were reintroduced into Latin Christendom in the 12th and 13th centuries. Showing a rare gift for synthesis, he wove Aristotle with ideas from previous medieval thought, especially themes from Augustine and Neoplatonism. His writings are also very readable, at least by medieval standards, composed in straightforward Latin and full of concise arguments that were designed for use in teaching contexts. In fact, as I can testify from my own experiences teaching Aquinas to students, those arguments still work quite nicely in the same context today. To this, we can add the fact that he is recognized by today's Catholic Church as a leading theological authority, even promoted in recent papal encyclicals. It would, however, be a serious mistake to think of the coming journey as a dutiful trek through dimly-lit lowlands as we make our way to the solitary peak of Aquinas, followed by a swift descent back into obscurity until we reach the Renaissance. This was certainly not the way the medieval themselves saw things. Though Aquinas always had his adherents, he had his detractors too. It was only much later that he came to be seen as the indispensable medieval thinker. Centering our story on Aquinas would not only be historically anachronistic, it would also run the risk of obscuring other thinkers from this period who should have an equal claim to our attention. Take, for instance, Aquinas' contemporary, John Duns Scotus, who innovated in several areas of philosophy and whose radical new understanding of necessity and contingency set the stage for later thinkers like Leibniz. Or take Peter Abelard, among the most original logicians and metaphysicians who has ever lived, and no mean contributor to the history of ethics. Abelard is frequently seen as the first major scholastic thinker, but he was not the first major medieval philosopher. That title should probably go to Eriugena, an author of the Carolingian period who was unusual in being able to work with and translate Greek patristic literature. This led him to propose a stunning, and for his contemporaries, shocking vision of God and the created world, rethinking the Christian Neoplatonism of late antiquity. Another pioneering figure was Anselm of Canterbury, best known for his aforementioned ontological argument for the existence of God, though as we'll see, he was more than a one-trick pony. Along with these two early thinkers, let me mention two later ones from the 14th century, William of Ockham and John Buridan. Ockham is primarily known for his contributions to the longest-running philosophical debate of the whole medieval period, the Problem of Universals. But his work ranged more widely than that, for instance into political philosophy. As for Buridan, he is probably the medieval thinker whose star has risen fastest in recent scholarship. Like Abelard, he was a brilliant logician and able to see the far-reaching connections between logical issues and other philosophical problems. As so often, thus far, the entries on this list of landmark thinkers have something in common—they are all men. But one exciting aspect of medieval intellectual history is the emergence of great women thinkers. Foremost among them is Hildegard of Bingen, but we'll be looking at a number of women in the coming series. We do have to be careful not to exaggerate here. As in antiquity and the Islamic world, women were rarely, if ever, allowed to enter into the cut and thrust of technical philosophical debate—that's something that seems to have occurred only in early modern Europe, and about time too. But taking the broad-minded approach that is by now customary in this podcast, we can very easily make a case for the inclusion of medieval women into our history. They were major contributors to philosophical mysticism and played a significant role in the marriage of philosophy and medieval literature. That's only a small sampling of the wonderful philosophers who await our attention in the coming months. The next question is, what sorts of philosophical issues can we expect to see them discussing? A short answer would be all sorts. Every branch of philosophy was explored in the medieval period, as I'll be explaining in the rest of this episode. But let's start with the most obvious—medieval thinkers had a lot to say about God, and religious beliefs more generally. I have been known to make the mischievous remark that working on contemporary philosophy of religion is basically just like studying medieval philosophy, except not as interesting and you don't have to learn Latin. That's a bit unfair to my colleagues who do philosophy of religion, but there's some truth in it. Most of the proofs for and against God's existence still being debated today were already discussed with great sophistication in the medieval period, along with such issues as divine omnipotence, the nature of miracles, the metaphysics of the afterlife, and so on. Furthermore, the medieval discussions did not simply presuppose the truth of Christian belief. Philosophers frequently offered arguments that were explicitly designed to be convincing even for a hypothetical atheist or non-Christian reader. So this aspect of medieval philosophy should interest you if you are religious, or are interested in religion, or are keenly anti-religious and want to understand the opposing side. If you couldn't care less about religion, medieval philosophy still has a lot to offer you. Perhaps the most common and pernicious prejudice about medieval philosophy is that it was really all theology, that these thinkers talked of nothing but God and other recondite questions of faith, such as the proverbial puzzle about the angels dancing on the head of a pen. There are at least three reasons why this is wrong. First, the fact that a philosophical argument, distinction, or concept was developed in a theological context doesn't preclude the development from having application outside such a context. Ideas developed to explain such things as the Trinity, the Incarnation, or transubstantiation can be deployed outside the debates where they were first proposed. Second, this actually happened historically. A nice example would be one I mentioned briefly already, Scotus's conception of necessity and contingency. This may have been introduced to explain God's omnipotence, but it constituted a giant step in the direction of our modern-day understanding of these notions. When atheist philosophers do modal logic today, they are working with a conception of modality that owes a great deal to Scotus. Third, medieval philosophers didn't spend all their time arguing about God and theology. Especially once the medieval universities arose with a distinction made between theological and non-theological faculties, it was standard to designate certain areas of intellectual activity as drawing solely on natural reason. As early as the Carolingian period, we find examples of philosophical debate being conducted for its own sake without any explicit comment on what the debate might all mean for our understanding of God or the state of our souls. And, like souls, according to most medieval philosophers, such debates could have a life of their own. Perhaps the best example is an issue I've also already mentioned in passing, the problem of universals. I've pondered long and hard about the best example to use to illustrate this problem, and decided that a good choice would be giraffes. So then, giraffes, we might wonder what it is that is shared by all members of this class that makes each of them qualify as a giraffe. This would be a universal, in other words it would exist in or apply to all the particular members of the class of giraffes. But do such universal natures really exist? If so, what sort of existence could they possibly possess? While this question does, as we'll see, connect to theological problems in various ways, it was treated throughout the medieval period as an issue to be solved in its own right. In general, philosophical logic and philosophy of language were the first areas to capture the attention of medieval thinkers. This happened already in the Carolingian period, and problems of logic and language remained urgent in the minds of 14th century figures like Occam and Buridun. This is a striking feature of medieval philosophy, and one that should make this period of thought especially interesting for contemporary philosophers. Like 20th century analytic philosophy, medieval philosophy was deeply and centrally concerned with philosophical problems related to language. These philosophers' fascination with words was not restricted to the Word of God. Nor were theology, logic, and language the only games in town. Free will, for instance, had been put squarely at the center of the Latin Christian philosophical tradition thanks to patristic authors, especially Augustine. It stayed there in the medieval period, as the nature of freedom, both human and divine, continued to be an abiding concern. Another Augustinian theme of perennial importance was the nature of knowledge. When we looked at Augustine, we saw him proposing in a short work called On the Teacher that humans achieve knowledge thanks to assistance from God. For Augustine, our ability to attain truth relies on the presence within our souls of the truth, that is Christ. This so-called illuminationist model of knowledge continued to be popular among medievals, but it received competition when Aristotle's more empiricist approach became known. The stage was set for an epistemological showdown which unfolded in the 13th century. Meanwhile, there were questions about the scope and possibility of human knowledge. We tend to assume that radical skeptical hypotheses are a distinctive feature of modern philosophy, emerging for the first time with people like Descartes and Hume. But we find such skeptical hypotheses already in medieval texts, albeit never developed with quite the systematic ambition of the modern philosophers. Like Muslims and Jews in the medieval period, the Latin Christians also saw the development of a mystical tradition, which not only stressed the limitations of natural human knowledge, but also offered a path to go beyond those limitations. We saw with Sufism and Kabbalah how mystics both drew on and influenced mainstream philosophy, and the same is going to be true here. The female medieval thinkers usually come into the story about here, allowed to contribute to spiritual literature just like the desert mothers of late antiquity and the female Sufis of the Islamic world. But of course this was a game men could play too, with an especially impressive development of philosophical mysticism late in our period in Germany, the most famous name here being Meister Eckhart. And by the way, another lesson we've learned from late antiquity and the Islamic world applies here too. There is no sharp boundary between mystical and non-mystical authors. We'll find figures like Eckhart offering arguments, and specialists in argument, like Aquinas, occasionally sounding like mystics, or the figure like Aquinas' contemporary Bonaventure pursuing both approaches with equal intensity. The mystics remind us that philosophy does not appear only in texts that consist of relentless argumentation. To tell the story of medieval philosophy without any gaps, we need to cast our net wide enough to take in literary works like Dante's Divine Comedy and the visionary treatises and poems of Hildegard. The scholar of medieval thought must look beyond the obvious formats of the free-standing philosophical treatise or commentary on Aristotle, and take seriously text-like glosses written in the margins of manuscripts, or pastoral literature, a potential source of insight into medieval ideas about ethics. And speaking of ethics, we should not underestimate the medieval contributions in practical philosophy. The need to define sin and to explain what is happening in humans when they perform sinful actions led to a blossoming of reflection on ethical issues in Latin Christendom. Throughout the medieval centuries, debates also raged over questions in political philosophy. The most burning issue here concerned the rival claims to authority made by the Church on the one side and by worldly rulers on the other. Should the kings and emperors of Europe submit to the commands of the popes? And if so, then on which issues? We also find fascinating medieval discussions of more specific issues in ethics and politics, for instance voluntary poverty and the circumstances in which it is just to wage war. A final area I'd like to mention, before wrapping up this introduction, is natural science. Throughout this series of podcasts, we've occasionally cast an eye on the intricate connections between philosophy and the sciences, considering such areas as medicine, optics, and astronomy. Again, there's an unhelpful prejudice that lurks here, to the effect that the Renaissance and early modern periods in Europe saw advancements in the natural sciences, which had been stalled ever since late antiquity. But as we'll see, the medievals too engaged in science. Early scientific discussions centered on the one dialogue of Plato that was partially known to the Latin Christians, his Timaeus. A more empiricist approach to science came along later, but well within the medieval period. One of the great contributors to scientific method, Roger Bacon, lived in the 13th century and was thus a near-contemporary of Aquinas. So, there's plenty for us to look forward to. Next time, however, we're going to start by looking back. I'll be reminding you of the late ancient legacy for the medievals, and mentioning the few texts of significance for the history of philosophy produced in Latin in the couple of centuries following Boethius. Mostly, though, we'll be looking at the Carolingians and the Renaissance they staged a good 500 years before the Renaissance. Starting next week, whether you're old or young, you'll have an opportunity to feel middle-aged here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.