Материал: isaeva_av_sost_professionalnyi_angliiskii_iazyk_dlia_student (1)

triumphed over it. In seeking to understand such spiritual movements of late antiquity as Hermetism, Gnosticism, Neo-Pythagoreanism, Cynicism and even Neoplatonism itself, and their concern with such values as asceticism, selfpurification and self-divinization, it is inappropriate to insist on a sharp division between philosophy and religion.

“Ancient philosophy” is traditionally understood as pagan and is distinguished from the Christian Patristic philosophy of late antiquity. But it was possible to put pagan philosophy at the service of Judaism or Christianity, and it was indeed largely in this latter capacity that the major systems of ancient philosophy eventually became incorporated into Medieval philosophy and Renaissance philosophy, which they proceeded to dominate.

This extensive overlap between philosophy and religion also reflects to some extent the pervasive influence of philosophy on the entire culture of the ancient world. Rarely regarded as a detached academic discipline, philosophy frequently carried high political prestige, and its modes of discourse came to infect disciplines as diverse as medicine, rhetoric, astrology, history, grammar and law. The work of two of the greatest scientists of the ancient world, the doctor Galen and the astronomer Ptolemy was deeply indebted to their respective philosophical backgrounds13.

Vocabulary

to constitute – составлять;

to allege – утверждать, заявлять; watchword – лозунг, девиз; purification – очищение; standing – положение;

public grove – открытая (городская) роща;

agora – рыночная площадь и место открытых собраний; premises – помещение;

crucial – решающий, ключевой; to flock – стекаться, собираться;

public visibility – общественный резонанс, присутствие в публичной сфере; recruitment – набор, пополнение;

gaze – внимательный взгляд; commitments – обязательства; allegiance – верность, преданность;

13 SEDLEY, DAVID (1998). Ancient philosophy. In E. Craig (Ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge. Retrieved February 05, 2014, from http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/A130

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to dissent – расходиться во мнениях, взглядах; discernible – видимый, различимый; supplementation – дополнение;

reverence – глубокое уважение, почитание; asceticism – аскетизм;

self-divinization – самообожествление;

Patristic – принадлежащий отцам церкви; overlap – взаимное наложение;

pervasive – повсеместный;

to indebt – обязывать, обязать.

Questions:

1.What philosophical group can be called a “school”? Who was its founder?

2.What was their watchword?

3.What were their beliefs bound up in?

4.Why were the Academy and the Lyceum so named? Give another example of such a name.

5.What was the philosophical school alike?

6.What is the usual characteristic of “ancient philosophy”?

7.What were the relations between philosophy and religion then?

Give the written translation of the text.

2.8 Survival of the Ancient Philosophy.

A very substantial body of works by ancient philosophical writers has survived in manuscript. These are somewhat weighted towards those philosophers

– above all Plato, Aristotle and the Neoplatonists – who were of most immediate interest to the Christian culture which preserved them throughout the Middle Ages, mainly in the monasteries, where manuscripts were assiduously copied and stored. Some further ancient philosophical writings have been recovered through translations into Arabic and other languages, or on excavated scraps of papyrus. The task of reconstituting the original texts of these works has been a major preoccupation of modern scholarship.

For the vast majority of ancient philosophers, however, our knowledge of them depends on secondary reports of their words and ideas in other writers, of whom some are genuinely interested in recording the history of philosophy, but others bent on discrediting the views they attribute to them. In such cases of secondary attestation, strictly a “fragment” is a verbatim quotation, while indirect reports are called “testimonia”. However, this distinction is not always rigidly maintained and indeed the sources on which we rely rarely operate with any explicit distinction between quotation and paraphrase.

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It is a tribute to the philosophical genius of the ancient world that, despite the suppression and distortion which its contributions have suffered over two

millennia, they remain central to any modern conspectus of what philosophy is and can be14.

Vocabulary

substantial – существенный, значительный; to weight – придавать вес;

assiduously – старательно, тщательно; to recover – восстанавливать; excavated – выкопанный, вырытый; to bend on – склоняться к;

to discredit – подвергать сомнению;

verbatim quotation – дословное цитирование, цитата; testimonia – свидетельство;

rigidly – строго, твердо;

to maintain – сохранять, утверждать; tribute – дань, должное;

suppression – запрещение, подавление; conspectus – обзор, общий взгляд.

14 SEDLEY, DAVID (1998). Ancient philosophy. In E. Craig (Ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge. Retrieved February 05, 2014, from http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/A130

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Unit III. MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY.

Read the text and give the summary of it.

3.1 General Characteristics.

Medieval philosophy is the philosophy of Western Europe from about AD 400–1400, roughly the period between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance. Medieval philosophers are the historical successors of the philosophers of antiquity, but they are in fact only tenuously connected with them. Until about 1125, medieval thinkers had access to only a few texts of ancient

Greek philosophy (most importantly a portion of Aristotle‟s logic). This limitation accounts for the special attention medieval philosophers give to logic and philosophy of language. They gained some acquaintance with other Greek philosophical forms (particularly those of later Platonism) indirectly through the writings of Latin authors such as Augustine and Boethius. These Christian thinkers left an enduring legacy of Platonistic metaphysical and theological speculation. Beginning about 1125, the influx into Western Europe of the first Latin translations of the remaining works of Aristotle transformed medieval thought dramatically. The philosophical discussions and disputes of the 13th and 14th centuries record later medieval thinkers‟ sustained efforts to understand the new

Aristotelian material and assimilate it into a unified philosophical system.

The most significant extra-philosophical influence on medieval philosophy throughout its thousand-year history is Christianity. Christian institutions sustain medieval intellectual life, and Christianity‟s texts and ideas provide rich subject matter for philosophical reflection. Although most of the greatest thinkers of the period were highly trained theologians, their work addresses perennial philosophical issues and takes a genuinely philosophical approach to understanding the world. Even their discussion of specifically theological issues is typically philosophical, permeated with philosophical ideas, rigorous argument and sophisticated logical and conceptual analysis. The enterprise of philosophical theology is one of medieval philosophy‟s greatest achievements.

The way in which medieval philosophy develops in dialogue with the texts of ancient philosophy and the early Christian tradition (including patristic philosophy) is displayed in its two distinctive pedagogical and literary forms, the textual commentary and the disputation. In explicit commentaries on texts such as the works of Aristotle, Boethius‟ theological treatises and Peter Lombard‟s classic theological textbook, the Sentences, medieval thinkers wrestled anew with the traditions that had come down to them. By contrast, the disputation – the form of discourse characteristic of the university environment of the later Middle Ages – focuses not on particular texts but on specific philosophical or theological issues. It thereby allows medieval philosophers to gather together relevant passages and arguments scattered throughout the authoritative literature and to adjudicate

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their competing claims in a systematic way. These dialectical forms of thought and interchange encourage the development of powerful tools of interpretation, analysis and argument ideally suited to philosophical inquiry. It is the highly technical nature of these academic (or scholastic) modes of thought, however, that provoked the hostilities of the Renaissance humanists whose attacks brought the period of medieval philosophy to an end15.

Vocabulary

tenuously – слабо; Boethius – Боэций;

enduring legacy – непреходящее наследие; influx – приток;

dramatically – наглядно, значительно;

to sustain – поддерживать, подтверждать; perennial – непрерывный, долговечный; permeated – пропитанный;

enterprise – предметная область; explicit – подробный;

Peter Lombard – Пьер Ломбар; to wrestle – бороться;

anew – снова, заново;

to scatter throughout – разбросать повсюду;

to adjudicate – выносить решение, установить; hostilities – враждебные действия.

Give the written translation of the text.

3.2 Historical and Geographical Boundaries of Medieval Philosophy.

The terms “medieval” and “Middle Ages” derive from the Latin expression medium aevum (the middle age), coined by Renaissance humanists to refer to the period separating the golden age of classical Greece and Rome from what they saw as the rebirth of classical ideals in their own day. The humanists were writing from the perspective of the intellectual culture of Western Europe, and insofar as their conception of a middle age corresponds to an identifiable historical period, it corresponds to a period in the history of the Latin West. The historical boundaries of medieval intellectual culture in Western Europe are

15 MacDONALD, SCOTT and NORMAN KRETZMANN (1998). Medieval philosophy. In E. Craig (Ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge. Retrieved February 05, 2014, from http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/B078

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