By Anthony Kenny
Introduction
Most histories of philosophy, in
this age of specialization, are the work of many hands, by specialists working
in different Welds and periods. In inviting me to write, single-handed, a
history of philosophy from the earliest times to the present day, Oxford
University Press gave expression to the belief that there is still something to
be gained by presenting the development of philosophy from a single viewpoint,
linking ancient, medieval, early modern, and contemporary philosophy into a
single narrative concerned with connected themes. This is the second of four volumes.
The first volume covered the early centuries of philosophy in classical Greece
and Rome. This volume takes up the narrative from the conversion of St
Augustine and continues the story up to the humanist Renaissance.
There are two quite different
reasons why readers may wish to study the history of philosophy. They may be
mainly interested in philosophy, or they may be mainly interested in history.
We may study the great dead philosophers in order to seek illumination upon
themes of present-day philosophical inquiry. Or we may wish to understand the
people and societies of the past, and read their philosophy to grasp the
conceptual climate in which they thought and acted. We may read the
philosophers of other ages to help to resolve philosophical problems of abiding
concern, or to enter more fully into the intellectual world of a bygone era.
I am by profession a philosopher,
not a historian, but I believe that the history of philosophy is of great
importance to the study of philosophy itself. It is an illusion to believe that
the current state of philosophy represents the highest point of philosophical endeavor
yet reached. These volumes are written with the purpose of showing that in many
respects the philosophy of the great dead philosophers has not dated, and that
one may gain philosophical illumination today by a careful reading of the great
works that we have been privileged to inherit. I attempt in these volumes to be
both a philosophical historian and a historical philosopher. Multi-authored histories
are sometimes structured chronologically and sometimes structured thematically.
I try to combine both approaches, offering in each volume Wrst a chronological
survey, and then a thematic treatment of particular philosophical topics of
abiding importance. The reader whose primary interest is historical will focus
on the chronological survey, referring where necessary to the thematic sections
for amplification. The reader who is more concerned with the philosophical
issues will concentrate rather on the thematic sections of the volumes,
referring back to the chronological surveys to place particular issues in
context.
The audience at which these
volumes are primarily aimed is at the level of second- or third-year
undergraduate study. However, many of those interested in the history of
philosophy are enrolled in courses that are not primarily philosophical.
Accordingly I endeavour not to assume a familiarity with contemporary
philosophical techniques or terminology. I am also to write in a manner clear and
light-hearted enough for the history to be enjoyed by those who read it not for
curricular purposes but for their own enlightenment and entertainment.
Not so long ago, in many
universities, courses in the history of philosophy went straight from Aristotle
to Descartes, leaping over late antiquity and the Middle Ages. There was a
widespread belief in academic circles that medieval philosophy was not worth
studying. This belief was not usually based on any close acquaintance with the
relevant texts: it was more likely to be an unexamined inheritance of religious
or humanist prejudice.
There were, however, many genuine
obstacles that made medieval philosophy less accessible than the philosophy of
any other age. We may identify four significant barriers that have to be
surmounted if one is to come to grips with the thought of the philosophers of
the Middle Ages: the linguistic, the professional, the confessional, and the
parochial.
Most of the philosophy of the
high Middle Ages is written in Latin which even those well trained in classical
Latin find very difficult to comprehend. Even Thomas Aquinas presents initial
difficulties to a reader brought up on Livy and Cicero, and Aquinas is a model
of simple lucidity by comparison with most of his colleagues and successors. It
is only in recent years that translations into English of medieval writers have
become widely available, and the task of translation is not a trivial one.
Scholastic Latin is full of technical neologisms which are hard to render into
other languages without cumbrous paraphrase. It is true that many of these
neologisms, transliterated, survive into modern languages, and often into
everyday use (e.g. ‘intelligence’, ‘evidence’, ‘voluntary’, ‘supposition’). But
the modern use is never an exact equivalent of the scholastic use, and often
diVers from it widely. ‘Subjective’ and ‘objective’, for instance, are two
terms that have virtually reversed their meanings since medieval times.
This first, linguistic, problem
is closely connected with the second problem of professionalism. The study of
philosophy was more professionalized during the Middle Ages than at any other
time before the present— hence the term ‘scholastic’. Philosophy was largely
the province of tight university communities sharing a common curriculum, a
common patrimony of texts, and a common arsenal of technical terms. Most of the
works that have come down to us are, in one way or another, the product of
university lectures, exercises, or debates, and those who produced them could
expect in their hearers or readers a familiarity with a complicated jargon and
an ability to pick up erudite allusion. There was hardly any philosophy written
for the general reader. Those who wrote or read it were overwhelmingly male,
clerical, and celibate. An appendix to The Cambridge History of Later Medieval
Philosophy gives brief biographies of the sixty-six most significant figures in
medieval thought. None of them are women, and only two are laymen.
The third problem, again, is
related to the second. Because the bestknown medieval philosophers were members
of the Catholic Church, their philosophy has often been regarded as a branch of
theology or apologetics. This is unfair: they were all aware of the distinction
between philosophical argument and dogmatic evangelism. But it is true that,
since most of them concluded their academic career in the faculty of divinity,
much of their best philosophical work is actually contained in their
theological works, and it takes some experience to locate it.
Moreover, many of the most significant
thinkers were members of religious orders, who have often been possessive of
their heritage. There have been long periods when it seemed that all and only
Dominicans studied St Thomas, and all and only Franciscans studied Bonaventure
and Scotus. (Some scholastics were hardly studied because they belonged to no
order. John Wyclif, for instance, had as his spiritual heirs only the rather
small class consisting of secular clergy who had got into trouble with the
Church.) After Pope Leo XIII gave Aquinas special status as a Catholic
theologian, his works were studied by many who had no connection with the
Dominican order. But this elevation only reinforced the view of secular
philosophers that he was essentially an ecclesiastical spokesman. Moreover,
within the realm of Catholic scholarship it fostered the view that only Aquinas
was worth taking seriously as a philosopher. The gradual abandonment of some of
his teaching in the later Middle Ages was seen as a key factor in the decline
of the Church that led to the Reformation. A philosophical debate between
Scotus and Ockham, from this perspective, was like a wrestling match between
two men standing on the edge of a cliV from which they were both about to fall
to their doom.
One effect of the professionalism
and confessionalism of scholastic philosophy is that, by comparison with
earlier and later writers, medieval philosophers appear as rather anonymous figures.
It is not just that in some cases we have very little external information
about their lives: it is that their own writings betray comparatively little of
their own personalities. They produce few original monographs; most of their
effort goes into commenting on, and continuing, the work of their predecessors
in their order or in the Church. The whole edifice of scholasticism is like a
medieval cathedral: the creation of many different craftsmen who, however
individually gifted, took little pains to identify which parts of the overall
structure were their own unaided work. Often it is only in the spontaneous
disputations called ‘quodlibets’ that we feel we can come close to a living
individual in action.
This generalization, of course,
applies only to the high Middle Ages under the dominance of scholasticism. In
the pre-scholastic period we meet philosophers who are highly colourful
personalities, not constructed out of any template. Augustine, Abelard, and
even Anselm are closer to the romantic paradigm of the philosopher as a
solitary genius than they are to any ideal of a humble operative adding his
stone to the communal cairn.
A history of Western philosophy
in the Middle Ages must include a treatment of philosophers who are not
‘Western’ in any modern sense, because the intellectual frontiers of medieval
Latin Europe were, fortunately, porous to influences from the Muslim world and
the minorities living within it. Latin versions of the philosophical writings
of Avicenna and Averroes had no less influence on the great scholastics than
the works of their Christian predecessors. Accordingly, this volume contains
some account of Muslim and Jewish philosophy, but only to the extent that these
philosophies entered into the mainstream of Western thinking, not in proportion
to their own intrinsic philosophical value.
My own training in philosophy
began at the Gregorian University in Rome, which, in the 1950s, still aimed to
teach philosophy ad mentem Sancti Thomae
in accordance with the instructions of recent popes. I was grateful to two of
my professors there, Fr. Bernard Lonergan and Fr. Frederick Copleston, for
teaching me that St Thomas’ own writings were much more worth reading than
popular Thomists’ textbooks, and that St Thomas was not the only medieval
thinker who deserved attentive study.
After studying at the Gregorian I
did graduate work in philosophy at Oxford in the heyday of ordinary language
philosophy. I found this much more congenial than Roman scholasticism, but I
was fortunate to meet Professor Peter Geach and Fr. Herbert McCabe OP, who
showed me that many of the problems exercising philosophers in the analytic
tradition at that time were very similar to those studied, often with no less
sophistication, by medieval philosophers and logicians.
In many ways, indeed, the keen
interest in the logical analysis of ordinary language which was characteristic
of Oxford in the latter part of the twentieth century brought it closer to
medieval methods and concerns than any other era of post-Renaissance
philosophy. But this was still not widely appreciated. William Kneale, for
instance, an Oxford professor of logic who wrote a well-informed and
sympathetic survey of medieval logic, had this to say about the development of
medieval philosophy between 1200 and 1400:
We shall not try to decide here
whether the result justified the great intellectual effort that produced it.
Perhaps the systems of St Thomas Aquinas and John Duns the Scot deserve only
the reluctant admiration we give to the pyramids of Egypt and the palace of
Versailles. And it may be that the thousands of young men who wrestled with subtle
abstractions at the medieval universities would have been better employed in
the literary studies which were then thought fit only for grammar schools.
It was, in fact, in the area of
logic that it was first appreciated that the study of medieval texts had much
to offer. Medieval logicians had addressed questions that had fallen into
oblivion after the Renaissance, and many of their insights had to be
rediscovered during the twentieth-century rebirth of logic. The Cambridge
History of Later Medieval Philosophy brought this to the attention of a wide
public, and inaugurated a new phase in the reception of medieval philosophy in
the general, secular, academic world. The vigour of the revival can be measured
by the number of excellent articles on medieval philosophy to be found in the
recent Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
In the last decades of the
twentieth century the person most responsible for the growth of interest in
medieval philosophy in the English-speaking world was the principal editor of
the Cambridge History, Norman Kretzmann. In conjunction with his fellow editor,
Jan Pinborg, he brought together the work that was being done in several
countries of continental Europe and introduced it to a wider audience in the
United States and the United Kingdom. His own teaching in the Sage School at
Cornell University bred up a brilliant group of younger scholars who in recent
years have published widely and well on many topics of medieval philosophy.
Paradoxically, one effect of the new medieval interest was a downgrading of
Thomas Aquinas. In the Cambridge History, for example, his index entry is not
as long as the entry for sophismata. Kretzmann came to realize and remedy this
defect, and spent the last years of his life writing two magisterial books on
St Thomas’ Summa contra Gentiles.
Aquinas, in my view, retains the
right to be classed as the greatest philosopher of the high Middle Ages. But he
is an outstanding peak in a mountain range that has several other resplendent
summits. Medieval philosophy is above all a continuum, and when one reads an
individual philosopher, whether Abelard, Aquinas, or Ockham, one is taking a
sounding of an ongoing process. And one soon learns that between every two
major peaks there are minor ones that are not negligible: between Aquinas and
Scotus, for instance, stands Henry of Ghent, and between Scotus and Ockham
stands Henry of Harclay.
A historian of the ancient world
can read, without too great exhaustion, the entire surviving corpus of
philosophical writing. A comparable feat would be well beyond the powers of
even the most conscientious historian of medieval philosophy. Augustine,
Abelard, and the great scholastics were such copious writers that it takes
decades to master the entire output of even a single one of them. Consequently,
anyone who undertakes a volume such as the present must be heavily dependent on
secondary sources, even if only for drawing attention to the best way to take
soundings of the primary sources. I here acknowledge my own debt to the writers
listed in my bibliography, from my teacher Fr. Copleston (whose history of
philosophy still bears comparison with many works written since) to the most
recent monographs written by colleagues and pupils of Norman Kretzmann. My debt
to others is particularly heavy in the area of Islamic philosophy, since I do
not know Arabic. In the course of writing this I had cause to regret deeply
that it is only in Latin that I can read the work of Avicenna, whose genius,
and whose influence, I have come to realize ever more. I am particularly
indebted to Dr John Marenbon and Professor Robert Pasnau, who made many helpful
suggestions for the improvement of an earlier draft of this volume, and who
saved me from many errors.
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