Medieval Philosophy

A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps #4

by Peter S. Adamson

Peter Adamson presents a lively introduction to six hundred years of European philosophy, from the beginning of the ninth century to the end of the fourteenth century. The medieval period is one of the richest in the history of philosophy, yet one of the least widely known. Adamson introduces us to some of the greatest thinkers of the Western intellectual tradition, including Peter Abelard, Anselm of Canterbury, Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, and Roger Bacon. And the medieval period was notable for the emergence of great women thinkers, including Hildegard of Bingen, Marguerite Porete, and Julian of Norwich. Original ideas and arguments were developed in every branch of philosophy during this period - not just philosophy of religion and theology, but metaphysics, philosophy of logic and language, moral and political theory, psychology, and the foundations of mathematics and natural science.

Genres: Philosophy, History, Nonfiction, Religion, Medieval, Reference, Christianity

672 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2019

About the author

Peter Scott Adamson is an American academic who is professor of philosophy in late antiquity and in the Islamic world at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich as well as professor of ancient and medieval philosophy at Kings College London.

Reviews

[Adam Glantz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Six hundred years in 600 pages! Peter Adamson does it again, making the most abstruse philosophical arguments comprehensible for the layman, in as far as that's possible. There are two takeaways here. First, medieval philosophy isn't all about God and how many angels can dance on the head of a pin and Church censorship of radical ideas...though, yes, it is partly that. There was heavy engagement with the pagan philosophical classics on their own terms, particularly after a wave of translations from Arabic, and several thinkers were content to treat theology as a completely separate discipline from rational philosophy. And second, as we've learned from previous installments in this series, new philosophical ideas didn't occur in a vacuum, but arose from the critical appraisal by scholars of their predecessors' work. In fact, there isn't a hard and fast dividing line between philosophical eras, with late antique thinkers like Augustine and Boethius heavily influencing the medievals, and the medievals John Wyclif, Ramon Llull, Petrarch, and perhaps even Dante prefiguring the Renaissance and Reformation.

Adamson helpfully balances chapters devoted to individual thinkers with those on particular philosophical trends, schools, and topics, which manages to bind everything together into a smooth narrative. Be prepared for lots of debates on individuals vs. universals, determinism vs. voluntarism, reason vs. will, how the soul relates to the body...and yes, on how God can be simultaneously a simple unity and a Trinity, and how the Eucharist can really be the body of Christ despite continuing to look and taste like bread. I've often thought of grammar as dull and technical, but Adamson shows how advances there shaped the terms (literally) of philosophical discourse. (Spoiler alert: he pulls off the same feat in the following book on Indian philosophy.)

(Just one quibble for Prof Adamson: It would be great if you wrote a conclusion to each of your volumes. Otherwise, they are all magnificent.)

[Tamar · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great introduction to Medieval Philosophy, and a good overview for future reference. Adamson disputes many common misconceptions about the medieval period, and does so with wit and the occasional pun.

[Frank · Rating 2 out of 5]

The fourth in the series. As with the others, I listened to these as podcasts. The medieval period has an unsurprising focus on religion. When it engages with unknowable questions, it becomes a barometer for cultural traits, anticipating the later division of church according to national affiliation). This is a rather tiresome set back for philosophy. But, I suspect, it needs attending to as background for what is to follow.

[Massimo Pigliucci · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yet another superb entry in Peter Adamson's ongoing series, A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, based on his podcast by the same title. Precisely because I personally don't have much interest in medieval philosophy this book was so fascinating. I've learned a lot, and Peter has challenged a number of prejudicial notions I had about philosophy from that time and place (mostly Europe). And of course is understated sense of humor is priceless.

[Marvin Brauer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thorough, clever, deep, thought provoking, that is if you have any appetite for philosophy. Who knew that I would. On the other hand definitely not a beach read.

[Moderated · Rating 5 out of 5]

"In the popular imagination, intellectual history recovered only in the Renaissance. Here 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 eighth and early ninth centuries. Scholars attached to his court, particularly Alcuin, 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 right down to the present day. So, from the point of view of the historian of philosophy, you could even consider the ninth century as the true renaissance.1 As we’ll be seeing, the twelfth century has also been honored with the title of “renaissance.” This is not to deny, of course, that a renaissance also happened after the medieval age. As we’ll see in the closing chapters of this book, the thought of that period 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 ofnew sources, especially Plato, into Latin, and more generally the self-conscious return to classical texts staged by the humanists. Still, any line dividing late medieval philosophy from Renaissance philosophy is going to be a 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."

"In light of this observation, we can now see that there are four stages involved in any action, whether sinful, virtuous, or morally neutral. First, we have a desire or “will” that motivates us to perform the action. We do not necessarily have any control over whether or not we have a certain desire; we may simply find that we have it. What we can control is whether or not we “consent” to a desire, as opposed to resisting it. Giving consent, then, is a second stage, which consists in forming an intention to act on the desire in question. Then, the action itself is a further, third stage. Just as the desire does not guarantee consent, so consent to the desire does not guarantee acting on it. Something might prevent the action from occurring, as when Harpo’s poverty stops him from performing an act of charity. Fourth and finally, if one does succeed in performing the action, there will come the results of acting, which could include taking pleasure in sin. Abelard’s theory, then, amounts to the claim that morality has to do only with the second stage of consent. Good and bad lie with the intentions we form, not the desires we have, the actions we perform, or the pleasure we take in them."

"Religion put the history into the history of philosophy. The pagans of antiquity by and large saw history as irrelevant to a philosophical understanding of the world. Whether you were a Platonist who saw physical things as mere images of eternal Forms, an Aristotelian who believed that the celestial bodies are moved everlastingly by a divine intellect, or an Epicurean who thought that all things result from random atomic interactions, you were offering an account of the universe’s permanent state. No particular historical event figured importantly in any of these worldviews. But for Jews, Christians, and Muslims, history was central."

"Is humanity one and the same thing in both of them? Or is it that we have Groucho’s humanity, which is one thing, and Harpo’s humanity, which is something else, but these two humanities are similar to one another? If we take the first alternative, we are committed to something that really exists out in the world and is universal. If we take the second alternative, then true universality occurs only in the mind of someone who abstracts and isolates humanity as a general concept."

"The difficulty of accounting for the shared features of things is called the problem
of universals. Perhaps the most famous attempt to answer the problem is also the earliest attempt: Plato’s theory of Forms. This theory was apparently intended to explain common characteristics like humanity or largeness by postulating a single, overarching Form or paradigm, humanity-itself or largeness-itself. And readers have traditionally understood Plato’s Forms as universals. This may not be quite right, though. Aristotle points out that although a Platonic Form does play the role of a universal by accounting for shared membership in a kind of thing, it also seems to be just another kind of particular, albeit a perfect, unchanging, and paradigmatic particular. In fact it was Aristotle himself who really started talk of “universals” in philosophy. Unfortunately, he left it rather unclear what sort of metaphysical status we should assign to a universal like humanity or animality."
"We would need first to decide whether they are real or not; if they are real, whether they are bodily or incorporeal; and if they are incorporeal, whether they exist in bodies or separately."
"If you answer the first question by saying that universals aren’t real, you don’t need to go on to ask whether they are bodily or incorporeal; and ifyou answer this second question by saying they are bodily, you don’t need to ask whether they are separate from bodies or in them."
"Is humanity one and the same thing in both of them? Or is it that we have Groucho’s humanity, which is one thing, and Harpo’s humanity, which is something else, but these two humanities are similar to one another? If we take the first alternative, we are committed to something that really exists out in the world and is universal. If we take the second alternative, then true universality occurs only in the mind of someone who abstracts and isolates humanity as a general concept."
"In the twelfth century, philosophers working in France split over the correct understanding of universals, and more or less along the lines I’ve just indicated. Some thinkers, whom we can call “realists,” believed that humanity is something real that exists in the world. It is present, or instantiated, every time that a human exists. Others found this impossible to accept, and insisted that everything that really exists is something particular. Historians refer to this camp as the “nominalists.” The usual story you’ll hear is that nominalism was pioneered by the great Peter Abelard, following ideas first put forward by his teacher Roscelin, and that the antirealist position is called “nominalist” because Abelard and his allies held that a universal is nothing but a word or a name, in Latin nomen. In fact, though, things are considerably more complicated."
"The problem, as Abelard sees it, is that William and the other realists are desperately holding on to the notion that humanity is a thing (res). In fact, though, humans are alike not in virtue of some real object in the world, their humanity. Rather, they are simply alike in all being humans. And “being a human” is not a thing. It is, rather, what Abelard calls a “status” , again coining a new technical term in order to clarify the situation as he sees it. A thing’s status is simply some way that it is, and ways of being are not themselves things. The realists might complain that a status must indeed be a thing. My being a human is something about which we can have knowledge, and something that explains features of the world. For instance my being a human explains my being rational and alive. So how could it be nothing at all? Abelard responds with an example. Suppose a slave of ancient Rome is beaten because he refuses to go to the forum. His refusing to go is a status, and it explains something, namely why he was beaten. But we are surely not tempted to say that his refusing to go to the forum is actually a thing in its own right. Rather, the man who refuses, and is beaten for it, is a thing. His refusing to go is just a status, one that he lives to regret.
This leaves the way clear for Abelard to give his own, positive account of the universal, which is that it is nothing more, or less, than a word. Universality is like the tense of a verb, an unavoidable aspect of our language that does not correspond to anything out in the world. Rather, we produce universality through a mental process ofextracting some shared feature ofthings."

"At the root of all these difficulties is a fundamental confusion. The accidentalist account is plausible because we do in fact use accidents to tell things apart. We tell Groucho apart from Harpo by noticing that he is, for example, the one with the cigar, not the one with the blond wig. But that doesn’t mean that accidents really account for the distinctness between things. How could they, if accidents depend on those very things? This would be like saying that the Marx Brothers movies are funny because people laugh at them. It’s true that these two things go together: funny movies do provoke laughter, and we can tell that a movie is funny from the fact that people laugh at it. But it’s because the movies are funny that people laugh, not the other way around. In the same way, it may be true that we only find particular accidents, and unique collections of accidents, in individual substances. This is why we can use accidents to tell substances apart. But that is a matter of epistemology, not metaphysics. Or to put it another way, accidents show us that things are individual, but they don’t explain why things are individual."
"In each of the Marx brothers, in each of the Adamson brothers, in every human, there is a humanity which belongs only to that individual human, while also being “similar” or “conforming” to other instances of humanity. It is the fact that humanity can be exemplified over and over like this that leads Gilbert to deny that one single instance of humanity can be called an “individual.” An individual is, as we would expect, something non-repeatable. Nonetheless, the humanity in Groucho is “singular,” as Gilbert puts it, because it is his humanity and no one else’s."
"Also, unlike his predecessors and contemporaries, Gilbert does not confuse the question of what makes something individual with the question of how we know something is individual. He sees clearly that accidents merely show us that one individual is distinct from another, without making it be distinct."

"The problem of number arises again in discussions of infinity, another topic discussed in Aristotle’s Physics. The standard Aristotelian view here is that nothing can be actually infinite, but there can be potential infinities. For instance, you cannot have an infinitely big body, but you could have a body that is increasing indefinitely in size while always remaining finitely large. Of course, the ban on actual infinities will have to be abandoned if we are to get to developments in modern science, and especially mathematics. So it’s noteworthy that our medieval commentators begin to argue for the possibility of actual infinities in physics. They still don’t want to say there could be an infinitely large body, but they do recognize a kind of infinity even in a body of limited size. As Aristotle himself said, any body can at least in principle be divided, and subdivided, without limit. The ancient atomists were wrong to think that you would ever reach a smallest body that can no longer be cut."

"Nowadays, we take it for granted that our leaders are subject to the law, even if we can’t take it for granted that they will always follow the law. In the medieval period, this was not so obvious. Kings naturally promoted an ideal of absolute sovereignty and saw themselves as the source of the law rather than as being subject to it."

"Prejudice against it derives above all from the assumption that thinkers of this period were constrained by the iron shackles oftheology. Any green shoots of genuine innovation or free thought would have been trampled by the Church before they could blossom, leaving us with a dreary succession ofunoriginal scholastics. Of course, we know by now that this would at best be a crude exaggeration, since there were plenty of heated debates amongst the scholastics themselves, to say nothing of philosophy outside the university setting. Still, there were clearly restrictions on the freedom of thought in medieval Christendom."

"The core idea of modism is that our ways of talking express our ways of thinking and that our ways of thinking in turn express the ways things are. Thus, we have a distinction between three types of “modes”: the modes of signification, which belong to language, the modes of understanding (modi intelligendi), which are the ways we grasp reality, and finally the modes of being (modi essendi). It’s vital to the modists that each thing out in the world really does have multiple modes of being, since otherwise there would be no basis in reality for the various ways we can think and talk about a given thing."

"Of course, not all the noises we make signify. We sometimes sneeze, grunt, or just speak nonsense. The terminist logician William of Sherwood gives an example that would be at home in a Harry Potter novel: buba blicatrix. For the medievals, sounds made by non-human animals would fall mostly or entirely into this category of (literally) insignificant noise.7 How then does a mere sound (vox) come to acquire meaning? Only through an act of the mind, which imposes a certain meaning on a certain sound.8 This is what the grammarians call the ratio significandi or “signifying relation.” Once this is added, we have something more than a sound: we have a meaningful verbal expression (dictio)."

"When all goes well, the mode of signification reveals a mode of understanding that actually fits the way the world is, in other words, grasps a real thing under one of its modes of being. My toe really hurts; the thing out there really is a giraffe, and it really is seeing something, or being seen, or standing on my foot.
But sometimes all does not go well. There’s a difference between saying something meaningful and saying something true. The grammarians recognize this too, and in fact their theory makes it easy to explain. Suppose you say to me, “Giraffes are ugly.” I understand you just fine but I also know that you’re saying something false. The good news is that you have successfully used language to convey to me what you are thinking. The bad news is that you are thinking about giraffes in a way that doesn’t correspond to the way they really are. More puzzling for the modists were cases where language doesn’t look as if it even could correspond to the worldunder any mode of being. To what does the word “nothing” refer, or the word “matter,” assuming, as the medievals did, that matter is pure potentiality? Again, the role ofmental concepts could come to the rescue here. By negating concepts that do refer to reality, the mind is capable of forming notions of potentiality, nothingness, or privation, even though no such absences really exist outside the mind.9 This solution could also be used to handle “empty” words like “centaur” or “chimera.” These signify concepts that are only figments of the mind with no correlate outside in real being."

"A signature doctrine found in his writings has to do with the core notions of metaphysics: the so-called “transcendentals,” those features that belong to absolutely everything, like unity, truth, and, of course, being. Avicenna thought that the idea of being, or of a “thing” is so basic that we cannot be extracting it from our experiences of the world. Rather, it is known primarily or immediately."

"Medieval philosophy is notoriously intertwined with Christian theology, and some Christian doctrines may seem to involve embracing the impossible. In modern times, philosophers have sometimes taken this to be a great virtue. The nineteenth-century Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard put the notion ofthe “absurd” at the center of Christianity, arguing that we should not and indeed cannot rationally accept the idea of God’s incarnation as a human. It can be believed only by faith."

"He contrasted the essence of a thing with that thing’s existence. The idea is a pretty plausible one. On the one hand, you have the question ofwhat something is by its very nature, on the other hand, the question of whether it exists. Actually these two questions are already distinguished by Aristotle (Posterior Analytics). What Avicenna added was the point that essences are almost always neutral with respect to existence. He gave the example of a triangle. You can study the nature or essence of a triangle and learn all sorts of things about it, for instance that its internal angles are equal to two right angles. But nothing about the nature of triangle tells you whether or not it exists. So if a triangle does exist, this must be because some other thing, like a child doing geometry homework, has come along and made it exist. This same point will apply to the child too, of course. She is a human, and if you think about what it means to be a human, you’ll see that humanity involves many things, such as being alive, being rational, or being an animal, but not just plain being. So the child too must be brought to exist by some outside cause. Avicenna added that there is, however, one essence that is not like this, the essence of that which necessarily exists. This necessary existent is, of course, God. He exists through Himself, by His very nature, so that He cannot fail to exist and exists without needing a cause."

"While Godfrey accepts that we can think about things either in terms oftheir essences or as existing things, he denies that this is a real distinction in the things themselves. Instead, it is a distinction of the sort we saw when looking at speculative grammar. If I think or speak of a duck’s essence or a duck as existing, I am just using two different modes of signifying the same thing. This no more implies a real difference in ducks than it would if I used the adjective “beautiful” when saying “Ducks are beautiful” and then the noun “beauty” in saying “Ducks have a beauty rare even among waterfowl.” Besides, the real version of the distinction runs afoul of obvious difficulties. If, as Giles of Rome claimed, essence is something distinct that receives existence the way that matter receives form, then essence would already have to exist before it receives existence the way that matter may already exists before taking on form. This is clearly absurd. But what about Avicenna’s triangle argument, that we can understand what something is without knowing whether it exists? To this Godfrey replies that we can only know things when they do in fact exist. We never grasp such mysterious, ontologically neutral essences; our knowledge is directed towards real things."

The medieval world was a world of hierarchies. Landholding and military service were organized through feudalism, with every man but the king having to fulfill
obligations to his lord. The Church too was hierarchically arranged, with the Pope at its apex. Philosophy and theology were no exception. As they moved through the stratified educational system of the university, scholastics would speculate about angels arranged in descending ranks, about the subordination of all human sciences within a single system, and about the created universe itself, seen as a hierarchically ordered cosmos ruled by God. Yet, as we’ve been seeing, it was also a time of dissension and schism. There was rivalry between hierarchies, with the popes and emperors contending to be the truly supreme representatives of God on earth. And there was tension within hierarchies, too, as when nobles resisted the demands of their kings or clerics protested at the conduct or decrees of wicked popes.

[David Kerslake · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the things I love most about History is trying to understand how people in the past used to think and consequently act. Added to that, the Medieval period seems sufficiently different from the present to allow us to think of it as really being a 'different country'. So how could I resist the challenge of reading this book? Well, I couldn't and so I did.
Firstly, I admit I didn't understand all of it. Each chapter began tamely enough with a mix of personal anecdotes, the odd dreadful joke and frequent allusions to the Marx Brothers and giraffes. Yes, really. Whether or not I understood what followed generally depended upon the nature of the particular philosophical conundrum.
Almost everything was covered and most of it was fascinating. Such as the search for a language of the imagination to parallel the existing languages of speech and writing.
Some of the ideas made me smile. For example, the thinker who wanted to establish whether or not a re-married widow should abandon her new husband if her dead husband were to be resurrected.
Smiling is fine but laughing is not. Think of all the amusement our 21st ideas will cause those 1,000 years from now. There is no God .. ha ha ha.
672 pages but do read, its worth the effort, honestly.

[Anthony O'Connor · Rating 4 out of 5]

another good survey

Medieval Europe around 900 to 1400 CE. Or we might as well say it. AD.
A period which was God/theology soaked. Aristotle soaked with an underlying swirl of Plato. With massive ongoing power struggles between Church and State.
Characteristically the book mentions many more philosophers than other introductory surveys and covers the material well, despite an unfortunate tendency towards lame giraffe jokes which I thought the author would have got over by volume four.
Forms, essences, the Eucharist, the Trinity. Angels. God. The soul. One might be excused for thinking of it all as so much legalistic hairsplitting. Language self obsessing and run amok. But there were some surprisingly modern ideas starting to appear in all the muck. And even the most trivial details were desperately important to the protagonists of the time. End up on the wrong side of an argument and you could easily find yourself branded as a heretic and handed over to the secular authorities to be burnt. A high stakes game. Pun intended. And the game itself? As fascinating as it was also so appallingly misdirected and stupid. But part of our intellectual history so worth knowing at least a bit about.

[Daniel Gill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Slow going but enjoyable

I read this as part of my effort to read Peter Adamson's entire series on the history of philosophy. While I enjoyed it less than the previous volumes, I think that's primarily due to my having just less interest in the subject matter. It was very interesting to explore the philosophy of the Islamic and late-ancient-Roman worlds, but the thinkers covered in this Volume definitely seem to circle around the same themes over and over. My favorite parts were probably the beginning covering a lot of the "dark ages" and Carolingian era as well as the ending of the book when some auxiliary topics cropped up like economic theory and the introduction of mathematics into physics and science. Adamson provides a lot of lists of chapters in the introduction if you're interested in covering particular topics or themes, and I'd recommended using them unless you're especially invested in reading "THE ENTIRE" history of philosophy like me.

[LuisJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another very readable and educational instalment in the series.
However, I noted a fair few unforced errors (presentation, not content) and so it definitely needed an additional set of eyes for the proof-reading.
Also, note that the paper used previously has changed hugely from smooth bleached-white to very coarse yellow. I found the yellow pages to be harder on the eyes.
The pages are also substantially lighter in weight which means it feels like it lacks perceived-value compared with previous instalments and didn't give me confidence that it would survive adding comments and repeated re-reading/referencing. I also have the next instalment on Indian Philosophy and it has the same issues.

[Alan Eyre · Rating 3 out of 5]

A hard slog, but lots of interesting bits. A time and a world filled with people and ways of thinking quite unfamiliar to me. Fierce debates and condemnations about issues that now seem quite silly, but at the time were doubtless vital. And Interesting how long Aristotle had a chokehold on how we saw the world. It makes me wonder how silly our worldviews might seem in retrospect in the future.

[Courtney Riggan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book really shattered some preconceived notions I had about philosophy in medieval times.
What I enjoy so much about this series is that it explains some of the wider cultural context surrounding the philosopher and their ideas rather than just tackling their works in a vacuum. It makes for engaging reading.

[Roy Kenagy]

Recommended by Massimo. Available online?

[Nick Coughlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would highly recommend this for anyone interested in the subject matter. While it is very long, Adamson avoids tediousness. I read this off and on while I was in lulls with other reading and it was perfect to pick up and put down from time to time.