Материал: isaeva_av_sost_professionalnyi_angliiskii_iazyk_dlia_student (1)

ecclesiastical – духовный, церковный;

Peter Abelard – Пьер Абеляр;

Gilbert of Poitiers - Гилберт Порретанский (Гилберт из Пуатье); to prompt – послужить толчком;

to proscribe – объявлять вне закона, запрещать; to suppress – подавлять, сдерживать.

Questions:

1.What was the influence of Christianity on medieval philosophy?

2.What impact on philosophical theology did Augustine have?

3.What did Augustine think about Christianity in accordance with philosophy?

4.How did theology develop in the 12th and 13th century?

Give the written translation of the text.

3.7 Scholarship in Medieval Philosophy.

Contemporary study of medieval philosophy faces special obstacles. First, a large body of medieval philosophical and theological literature has survived in European libraries, but because many of these collections have not yet been fully catalogued, scholars do not yet have a complete picture of what primary source materials exist. Second, the primary sources themselves – in the form of handwritten texts and early printed editions – can typically be deciphered and read only by those with specialized paleographical skills. Only a very small portion of the known extant material has ever been published in modern editions of a sort that any reader of Latin could easily use. Third, an even smaller portion of the extant material has been translated into English (or any other modern language) or subjected to the sort of scholarly commentary and analysis that might open it up to a wider philosophical audience. For these reasons, scholarship in medieval philosophy is still in its early stages and remains a considerable distance from attaining the sort of authoritative and comprehensive view of its field now possessed by philosophical scholars of other historical periods with respect to their fields. For the foreseeable future, its progress will depend not only on the sort of philosophical and historical analysis constitutive of all scholarship in the history of philosophy but also on the sort of textual archeology necessary for recovering medieval philosophy‟s primary texts25.

25 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

obstacles – препятствия;

to decipher – расшифровывать, интерпретировать;

paleographical – палеографический ( – специальная историкофилологическая дисциплина, изучающая историю письма, закономерности развития его графических форм, а также памятники древней письменности в целях их прочтения, определения автора, времени и места создания).

extant – сохранившийся, дошедший до нас; to subject – подвергать;

foreseeable – предвидимый, предполагаемый.

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Unit IV. RENAISSANCE PHILOSOPHY.

4.1 Introduction to Renaissance Philosophy.

The Renaissance, that is, the period that extends roughly from the middle of the 14th century to the beginning of the 17th century, was a time of intense, allencompassing, and, in many ways, distinctive philosophical activity. A fundamental assumption of the Renaissance movement was that the remains of classical antiquity constituted an invaluable source of excellence to which debased and decadent modern times could turn in order to repair the damage brought about since the fall of the Roman Empire. It was often assumed that God had given a single unified truth to humanity and that the works of ancient philosophers had preserved part of this original deposit of divine wisdom. This idea not only laid the foundation for a scholarly culture that was centered on ancient texts and their interpretation, but also fostered an approach to textual interpretation that strove to harmonize and reconcile divergent philosophical accounts. Stimulated by newly available texts, one of the most important hallmarks of Renaissance philosophy is the increased interest in primary sources of Greek and Roman thought, which were previously unknown or little read. The renewed study of Neoplatonism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Scepticism eroded faith in the universal truth of Aristotelian philosophy and widened the philosophical horizon, providing a rich seedbed from which modern science and modern philosophy gradually emerged26.

Read the text and answer the questions after it.

4.2 Aristotelianism.

Improved access to a great deal of previously unknown literature from ancient Greece and Rome was an important aspect of Renaissance philosophy. The renewed study of Aristotle, however, was not so much because of the rediscovery of unknown texts, but because of a renewed interest in texts long translated into Latin but little studied, such as the Poetics, and especially because of novel approaches to well-known texts. From the early 15th century onwards, humanists devoted considerable time and energy to making Aristotelian texts clearer and more precise. In order to rediscover the meaning of Aristotle‟s thought, they updated the Scholastic translations of his works, read them in the original Greek, and analyzed them with philological techniques. The availability of these new interpretative tools had a great impact on the philosophical debate. Moreover, in the four decades after 1490, the Aristotelian interpretations of Alexander of

26 http://www.iep.utm.edu/renaissa/

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Aphrodisias, Themistius, Ammonius, Philoponus, Simplicius, and other Greek commentators were added to the views of Arabic and medieval commentators, stimulating new solutions to Aristotelian problems and leading to a wide variety of interpretations of Aristotle in the Renaissance period.

The most powerful tradition, at least in Italy, was that which took Averroes’s works as the best key for determining the true mind of Aristotle.

Averroes‟s name was primarily associated with the doctrine of the unity of the intellect. Among the defenders of his theory that there is only one intellect for all human beings, we find Paul of Venice (d. 1429), who is regarded as the founding figure of Renaissance Averroism, and Alessandro Achillini (1463–1512), as well as the Jewish philosopher Elijah del Medigo (1458–1493). Two other Renaissance Aristotelians who expended much of their philosophical energies on explicating the texts of Averroes are Nicoletto Vernia (d. 1499) and Agostino Nifo (c. 1469– 1538). They are noteworthy characters in the Renaissance controversy about the immortality of the soul mainly because of the remarkable shift that can be discerned in their thought. Initially they were defenders of Averroes‟s theory of the unity of the intellect, but from loyal followers of Averroes as a guide to Aristotle, they became careful students of the Greek commentators, and in their late thought both Vernia and Nifo attacked Averroes as a misleading interpreter of Aristotle, believing that personal immortality could be philosophically demonstrated.

Many Renaissance Aristotelians read Aristotle for scientific or secular reasons, with no direct interest in religious or theological questions. Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1525), one of the most important and influential Aristotelian philosophers of the Renaissance, developed his views entirely within the framework of natural philosophy. In De immortalitate animae (Treatise on the Immortality of the Soul, 1516), arguing from the Aristotelian text, Pomponazzi maintained that proof of the intellect‟s ability to survive the death of the body must be found in an activity of the intellect that functions without any dependence on the body. In his view, no such activity can be found because the highest activity of the intellect, the attainment of universals in cognition, is always mediated by sense impression. Therefore, based solely on philosophical premises and Aristotelian principles, the conclusion is that the entire soul dies with the body. Pomponazzi‟s treatise aroused violent opposition and led to a spate of books being written against him. In 1520, he completed De naturalium effectuum causis sive de incantationibus (On the Causes of Natural Effects or On Incantations), whose main target was the popular belief that miracles are produced by angels and demons. He excluded supernatural explanations from the domain of nature by establishing that it is possible to explain those extraordinary events commonly regarded as miracles in terms of a concatenation of natural causes. Another substantial work is De fato, de libero arbitrio et de praedestinatione (Five Books on Fate, Free Will and Predestination), which is regarded as one of the most important works on the problems of freedom and determinism in the Renaissance.

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Pomponazzi considers whether the human will can be free, and he considers the conflicting points of view of philosophical determinism and Christian theology.

There were also forms of Aristotelian philosophy with strong confessional ties, such as the branch of Scholasticism that developed on the Iberian Peninsula during the 16th century. This current of Hispanic Scholastic philosophy began with the Dominican School founded in Salamanca by Francisco de Vitoria (1492–1546) and continued with the philosophy of the newly founded Society of Jesus, among whose defining authorities were Pedro da Fonseca (1528–1599), Francisco de Toledo (1533–1596), and Francisco Suárez (1548–1617). Their most important writings were in the areas of metaphysics and philosophy of law. They played a key role in the elaboration of the law of nations (jus gentium) and the theory of just war, a debate that began with Vitoria‟s Relectio de iure belli (A Re-lecture of the Right of War, 1539) and continued with the writings of Domingo de Soto

(1494–1560), Suárez, and many others. In the field of metaphysics, the most important work is Suárez‟ Disputationes metaphysicae (Metaphysical Disputations, 1597), a systematic presentation of philosophy – against the background of Christian principles – that set the standard for philosophical and theological teaching for almost two centuries27.

Vocabulary

all-encompassing – всеохватывающий, всеобъемлющий; debased – испорченный, униженный;

deposit – вклад, хранилище;

to foster – породить, содействовать;

to strive – стараться, прилагать усилия; hallmark – отличительная черта;

to erode – разрушать; seedbed – почва;

the Poetics – «Поэтика»; availability – доступность;

Alexander of Aphrodisias – Александр Афродисийский; Themistius – Темистиус;

Ammonius – Аммоний; Philoponus – Иоанн Филопон; Simplicius – Симплиций;

Averroes – Аверроэс (Ибн Рушт Мухаммед); Alessandro Achillini – Алессандро Аккилини; Nicoletto Vernia – Николетто Верния;

27 http://www.iep.utm.edu/renaissa/

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