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3.What impact did the Aristotelian texts have on medieval philosophers?

4.What other texts were medieval philosophers acquainted with?

Read the text and give the summary of it.

Part II. Rise of the universities. As abbot of the monastery at Bec in the 1080s, Anselm of Canterbury addressed his philosophical and theological writings to his monks. By contrast, the great philosophical minds of the next generations, thinkers such as Abelard, Gilbert of Poitiers and Thierry of Chartres, would spend significant parts of their careers in the schools at Paris and Chartres and address a good deal of their work to academic audiences. The growth of these schools and others like them at centres such as Oxford, Bologna and Salerno signals a steady and rapid increase in the vitality of intellectual life in Western Europe. By the middle of the 13th century, the universities at Paris and Oxford were the leading centres of European philosophical activity. Virtually all the great philosophers from 1250 to 1350, including Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, studied and taught in the schools at one or both of these centres. It is partly for this reason that early modern philosophers (who were typically not associated with universities) refer to their medieval predecessors in general as “the schoolmen”.

The migration of philosophical activity to the universities meant not only the centralization of this activity but also its transformation into an increasingly formal and technical academic enterprise. Philosophical education was gradually expanded and standardized, philosophers themselves became highly trained academic specialists and philosophical literature came to presuppose in its audience both familiarity with the standard texts and issues of the university curriculum and facility with the technical apparatus (particularly the technical logical tools) of the discipline. These features of later medieval philosophy make it genuinely scholastic, that is, a product of the academic environment of the schools.

The philosophical disciplines narrowly construed – logic, natural philosophy, metaphysics and ethics – occupied the centre of the curriculum leading to the basic university degrees, the degrees of Bachelor and Master of Arts. Most of the great philosophers of this period, however, went beyond the arts curriculum to pursue advanced work in theology. The requirements for the degree of Master of Theology included study of the Bible, the Church Fathers and (beginning perhaps in the 1220s) Peter Lombard‟s Sentences (which was complete by 1158). Designed specifically for pedagogical purposes, the Sentences is rich in quotation and paraphrase from authoritative theological sources, surveying respected opinion on issues central to the Christian understanding of the world. From about 1250, all candidates for the degree of Master of Theology were required to lecture and produce a commentary on Lombard‟s text. This requirement offered a formal occasion for scholars nearing their intellectual maturity to develop and present

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their own positions on a wide variety of philosophical and theological issues guided (often only quite loosely) by the structure of Lombard‟s presentation.

By virtue of its historical circumstances, medieval philosophical method had from its beginnings consisted largely in commentary on a well defined and fairly small body of authoritative texts and reflection on a canonical set of issues raised by them. Philosophers in the era of the universities took for granted a much larger and more varied intellectual inheritance, but their approach to philosophical issues remained conditioned by an established textual tradition, and they continued to articulate their philosophical views in explicit dialogue with it. Formal commentary on standard texts flourished both as a pedagogical tool and as a literary form. However, other philosophical forms, including the disputation – the most distinctive philosophical form of the 13th and 14th centuries – were essentially dialectical. In the university environment, the disputation became a technical tool ideally suited to the pressing task of gathering together, organizing and adjudicating the various claims of a complex tradition of texts and positions.

A disputation identifies a specific philosophical or theological issue for discussion and provides the structure for an informed and reasoned judgment about it. In its basic form, a disputation presents, in order: 1) a succinct statement of the issue to be addressed, typically in the form of a question admitting of a “yes” or “no” answer; 2) two sets of preliminary arguments, one supporting an affirmative and the other a negative answer to the question; 3) a resolution or determination of the question, in which the master sets out and defends his own position, typically by drawing relevant distinctions, explaining subtle or potentially confusing points, or elaborating the underlying theoretical basis for his answer; and 4) a set of replies specifically addressing the preliminary arguments in disagreement with the master‟s stated views. A disputation‟s two sets of preliminary arguments allow for the gathering together of the most important relevant passages and arguments scattered throughout the authoritative literature. With the arguments on both sides of the question in hand, the master is then ideally positioned to deal with both the conceptual issues raised by the question and the hermeneutical problems presented by the historical tradition. Academic philosophers held disputations in their classrooms and at large university convocations, and they used the form for the literary expression of their ideas. Aquinas‟ Summa theologiae, the individual articles of which are pedagogically simplified disputations, is perhaps the most familiar example of its systematic use as a literary device. The prevalence of the disputational form in later medieval philosophy accounts for its being thought of as embodying “the scholastic method”19.

19 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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Vocabulary

abbot – аббат, настоятель монастыря;

Gilbert of Poitiers – Гилберт Порретанский (Гилберт из Пуатье); Thierry of Chartres – Тьерри из Шартра;

Bologna – г. Болонья;

Albert the Great – Альберт Великий;

John Duns Scotus – Иоанн (Джон) Дунс Скот; William of Ockham – Уильям Оккам (Оккамский);

academic enterprise – академическое предприятие, занятие; to presuppose – предполагать, допускать;

narrowly construed – в узком смысле; to pursue – заниматься, следовать;

Peter Lombard – Пьер Ломбар; to survey – обследовать, изучать;

loosely – в общих чертах, в широком смысле; by virtue of – посредством, вследствие; conditioned – обусловленный;

explicit – откровенный, открытый; disputation – спор, дискуссия, диспут; pressing – ключевой;

to adjudicate – выносить решение, заключать; succinct – сжатый, краткий;

preliminary – вступительный, подготовлительный;

to elaborate – вырабатывать, тщательно разрабатывать; to scatter – разбрасывать, рассеивать;

convocation – собрание; to embody – воплощать.

Read the text and answer the questions after it.

3.5 Doctrinal Characteristics of Medieval Philosophy.

At the most basic level, medieval philosophers share a common view of the world that underlies and supports the various specific developments that constitute medieval philosophy‟s rich detail.

Part I. Metaphysics. The common metaphysical ground of medieval philosophy holds that at the most general level reality can be divided into substances and accidents. Substances – Socrates and Browny the donkey are the stock examples – are independent existents and therefore ontologically fundamental. Corporeal substances (and perhaps also certain incorporeal substances) are constituted from matter and form. Matter, which in itself is utterly devoid of structure, is the substrate for form. Form provides a substance‟s

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structure or organization, thereby making a substance the kind of thing it is.

Socrates‟ soul, for example, is the form that gives structure to Socrates‟ matter, constituting it as the living flesh and blood of a human body and making Socrates a particular human being. Accidents – Socrates‟ height, for example, or Browny‟s colour – are also a kind of form, but they take as their substrate not matter as such but a substance: Socrates or Browny. Accidents depend for their existence on substances and account for substances‟ ontologically derivative characteristics.

Medieval philosophers recognized matter and form, the fundamental constituents of corporeal substances, as fundamental explanatory principles. A thing‟s matter (or material cause) and its form (or formal cause) provide basic explanations of the thing‟s nature and behaviour. To these two principles they added two others, the agent (or efficient) cause and the end (or final cause). The agent cause is whatever initiates motion or change; the final cause is the goal or good toward which a particular activity, process, or change is directed.

Medieval philosophers disagreed about extensions and qualifications of this fundamental metaphysical view of the world. They debated, for example, whether incorporeal substances are like corporeal substances in being composed ultimately of matter and form, or whether they are subsistent immaterial forms. They also debated whether substances such as Socrates have just one substantial form

(Socrates‟ rational soul) or many (one form constituting Socrates‟ body, another making him a living body with certain capacities for motion and cognition (an animal), and another making him a rational animal (a human being)). However, they never doubted the basic correctness of the metaphysical framework of substance and accidents, form and matter, nor are they in any doubt about whether the analytical tools that framework provides are applicable to philosophical problems generally20.

Vocabulary

substance – субстанция, материя, вещество;

accident – акциденция; качество, особенность предмета; stock example – избитый пример;

corporeal – физический, материальный, телесный; matter – материя, вещество;

devoid of – свободный от, лишенный чего-либо; substrate – основа;

derivative – вторичный;

agent cause – действующая причина;

20 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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subsistent – существующий.

Questions:

1.What is the common metaphysical ground of medieval philosophy?

2.What does the term “substance” mean?

3.What are corporeal substances constituted from?

4.What does the term “matter” mean?

5.What does a form provide for a substance?

6.Give the examples of a form and a matter?

7.What do accidents depend on?

8.What were fundamental explanatory principles for medieval philosophy?

9.What two principles did the medieval philosophers add? What did they mean?

Give the written translation of the text.

Part II. Psychology and epistemology. Medieval philosophers understood the nature of human beings in terms of the metaphysics of form and matter, identifying the human rational soul, the seat of the capacities specific to human beings, with form. All medieval philosophers, therefore, held broadly dualist positions according to which the soul and body are fundamentally distinct. But only some were also substance dualists (or dualists in the Cartesian sense), holding in addition that the soul and body are themselves substances.

Medieval philosophers devote very little attention to what modern philosophers would recognize as the central questions of epistemology. Until very late in the period, they show little concern for sceptical worries and are not primarily interested in stating the necessary and sufficient conditions for the truth of the claim that some person knows a given proposition. For the most part they assume that we have knowledge of various sorts and focus instead on developing an account of the cognitive mechanisms by which we acquire it. They are especially interested in how we are able to acquire knowledge of universals and necessary truths – objects or truths that are immaterial, eternal and unchanging – given that the world around us is populated with particular material objects subject to change. The answers medieval philosophers give to this question vary considerably, ranging from Platonistic accounts that appeal to our direct intellectual vision (with the aid of divine illumination) of independently existing immutable entities (such as ideas in the divine mind) to naturalistic accounts that appeal to cognitive capacities wholly contained in the human intellect itself that abstract universals from the data provided by sense perception21.

21 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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