Philosophy of the Middle Ages.

The Middle Ages cover a long stretch of the history of Europe from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance –more than a whole millennium.In the early Middle Ages, Christian dogmas evolved along with the formation of the European states after the collapse of the Roman Empire (5th century A.D.), while the later Middle Ages (beginning with the llth century) are associated with the spreading of feudalism, which used Christianity as its ideological basis, clarifying and deepening the details of this worldview in accordance with its own demands.

The idealist orientation of most mediaeval philosophical systems was prompted by the dogmas of Christianity, of which the most important were the dogma of the personal form of the one God the Creator, which rejected out of hand the atomistic doctrines of antiquityand the dogma of the creation of the world by God out of nothing;

philosophy was declared to be the maidservant of theology (St. PietroDamiani’s formula) expected to use the power of the rational apparatus to confirm the dogmas of Christianity. This philosophy came to be known as scholasticism. All truth was believed to have been given in the biblical texts.

There are 4 main ideas of Cristianian worldview which expose the very essence of the consepts of God, of man and the world in Mediaeval philosophers’ speculations:

1. The Idea of the Trinity or believing God as the Creator, Savior and Holy Spirit. God is Havency Father who created subsequently the world and man. The latter was the sort of perfection as God created him similar to himself, but man fell away from God because of his primodial transgression.

God is the Savior Christ who is in the same time both the son of God and the Human son, who takes off the burden of the primodial sin from Human. He manifests in himself both devine and human character. God Father and God Son are linked by the Holy Spirit. He also links them both with Human.

2. The Idea of Free Choice between Good and Evil. According to Cristian dogmas the world is divided into 3 realms: the Devine- Heavens, the earthly one and the Devil’s – the hell. On the Earth man makes his choice and comes at last either to God or to Devil. (They accepted this though Cristianity suggested absoluteness of Good and relativeness of Evil).

3. The idea of afterdeath recompense and Devine Mercy. In Cristianity we have additionaly the idea of devine grace and absolution. The most attractive expression of such absolution is the act of crusifixion of The Christ, who liberated mankind from the primodial sin. In Cristianity an important role got the idea and practice of penance (repentence) when man opens his feelings and consciousness to God and then gets salvation.

4. The idea of repentence is a sort of the bridge between God and man. The one who forgives is approaching The Christ. From this follows the deepest Christian principle of non-resistance to evil.

5. The idea of Apocalipses (from Greek revelation) of human history, it shows the history of mankind not as a cycle, but as a line, which got its beginning and end, that in its turn is the transmission into some other being.

The main peculiarities of the Mediaeval Philosophy:

1. Theocentricism, meaning that any problem in philosophy including the problem of man is solved via God.

2. Theodicy solves the contradiction between the idea of God as Absolute Good and the existence of Evil in the world.

3. Providentialism (from Geek “foresigh”) means that everything is developing according to God’s purport and is supposed to achieve it at last.

4 Personalism, meaning that God is the Absolute Personality and derivative from him is the personality of man, who is able to cognise God only through deep and mystic communication of persolalities, by means of prayer, confession and penance.

The history of the Mediaeval philosophy can be divided into 3 periods: Patristics with Apologetics, Early Scholasticism and the Late Scholasticism.

These periods are closely connected with the ways of philosophisizing of religious philosophers. During the whole period it was the interpretation and commentaries of Holy Scripture. As the whole truth is contained in the Byble, everybody should learn this devine knowledge. But this knowledge was symbolic, mysterions and figurative, so the aim of philosophers was to interprete, explicate, clear out the Holy Writ. This process had three stages:

1. When ethymological analysis was attemted;

2. When conceptual analysis was attempted;

3. When the text of Holy Writ became the base for the further development of philosophical ideas by religious philosophers themselves.

ThemainproblemsinvestigatedintheMediaevalperiodwereconcerned:

1) The nature of the universals. During the whole Mediaeval period there was a hot discussion between realism and nominalism attemping to solve this problem.

2) Correlation of will and coscionsness.

3) The problem of free will, the choice between good and evil.

4) Correlation of soul and body (Origen: man is spirit, which is given by God and directed to good and truth;soul is of dual nature: high and low (passions);body manifests nature. So evil comes from abuse(breach) of freedom. The Mediaeval asceticism was not to restrain the nature(body) but to bring up flesh to bendl it to the spiritual grounds.

5) Correlation of nature and blessings.

6) Correlation of faith, consciousness and will.

Scholasticism is a Medieval school of philosophy (or, perhaps more accurately, a method of learning) taught by the academics of medieval universities and cathedrals in the period from the 12th to 16th Century. It combined Logic, Metaphysicsand semantics into one discipline, and is generally recognised to have developed our understanding of Logic significantly.

There are perhaps six main characteristics of Scholasticism:

• An acceptance of the prevailing Catholic orthodoxy.
• Within this orthodoxy, an acceptance of Aristotle as a greater thinker than Plato.
• The recognition that Aristotle and Plato disagreed about the notion of universals, and that this was a vital question to resolve.
• Giving prominence to dialectical thinking and syllogistic reasoning.
• An acceptance of the distinction between "natural" and "revealed" theology.
• A tendency to dispute everything at great length and in minute detail, often involving word-play.

It includes the following major philosophers:

Avicenna (Ibn Sina) (980 - 1037) Persian Anselm, St. (1033 - 1109) Italian Abelard, Peter (1079 - 1142) French Averroes (Ibn Rushd) (1126 - 1198) Spanish-Arabic Maimonides (1135 - 1204) Spanish-Jewish

Albertus Magnus (c. 1206 - 1280) German Bacon, Roger (c. 1214 - 1294) English Aquinas, St. Thomas (1225 - 1274) Italian Scotus, John Duns (c. 1266 - 1308) Scottish Ockham (Occam), William of (c. 1285 - 1348) English

William of Ockham (1285-1349), born in Surrey not far from London, was perhaps the most radical and original of the medieval philosophers and theologians. He studied at Oxford, but before receiving his licence as a professor, he was summoned to the Papal court at Avignon to face charges of heresy and the like. Later he migrated to Bavaria, where he received the protection of King Ludwig. He died in Munich of the Black Death (it is surmised). The latter scourge carried away many leading European intellectuals of the time.

The radicalism of his views came from his sweeping challenge to realism and the whole Aristotelian scheme of essences. The whole apparatus of thinking of a term like “falcon” as standing somehow for a form which inheres in particular birds was challenged by him. Scientific generalizations about the world are to be confirmed on the basis of empirical observations, that is by intuitive cognitions of individual instances. They are at best hypothetical, since they depend on the prior assumption of the uniformity of nature.

From his empiricist perspective it follows that theology is not a science. Science should be based on what is evidently known: this would be something which is a necessary truth or which is known by immediate experience. Neither of these requirements can be met in regard to matters of faith. He made the highly important observation that the articles of faith are by no means evident to infidels and pagans, who are no less intelligent than Christians.

Ockham’s influence spread in Oxford and Paris, since his critical views offered an exciting alternative to traditional metaphysical approaches. His empiricism offered avenues for the critique of Aristotle and helped prepare the way for later scientific developments.

Probably the most important contribution of the Ockhamist stream of thought to the ongoing development of thought, including science, was its skepticism towards Aristotle. The grip of his physics upon the medieval imagination was slackened somewhat, and so the way was prepared for the scientific revolutions of the Renaissance and beyond.

Argumentation on the Universals. Nominalists and realists.

The conflict between matter and spirit was manifested most acutely in the mediaeval controversy between the realists (fr. L. realis “material”) and nominalists (fr. L. nomen “name”). The debate was concerned with the nature of universals, or general concepts. The realists (Johannes Scotus Erigena, and mostly Thomas Aquinas), relying on Aristotle’s proposition that the general exists as indivisibly linked with the individual, being its form, developed the theory of the three kinds of the existence of universals: “before things” —in divine reason; “in the things themselves”, of which universals are the essences or forms; and “after things” —in the human mind, as results of abstraction. This position is known in the history of philosophy as a”moderate realism”, distinct from an”extreme realism” insisting that the general exists only outside things. The extreme realism of the Platonian variety, despite all its apparent suita­bility to idealist scholasticism, could not be accepted by the Orthodox Church since matter was partially justified in Christianity as one of the two natures of Jesus Christ.

The nominalists, like Roscelin, were much more materialistically minded than even the moderate realists; they carried the idea of negation of the objective existence of the general to the logical end, believing that universals only exist in the human mind, in thought; in other words, they rejected not only the presence of the general in a concrete individual thing but also its existence “before the thing”, and that was tantamount to the materialist view of the primacy of matter. Universals, Roscelin said, are nothing but the names of things, and their existence is reducible to the vibrations of the vocal chords. Only the individual exists, and only the individual can be the object of knowledge.

It was only to be expected that the church accepted the moderate realism of Thomas Aquinas, while Roscelin’s nominalism was condemned already at the Council of Soissons in 1092.

Thus, despite the idealist character of the entire mediaeval philosophy, the confrontation of the lines of Plato and Democritus continued in it, although it was mostly expressed in logical terms. The mediaeval controversy on the nature of universals had a considerable impact on many philosophical doctrines, especially those of such major thinkers of the Modern Times as Hobbes and Locke. Elements of nominalism also occur in Spinoza, while the technique of the nominalist critique of the ontologism of universals was used by Berkeley and Hume in the shaping of the doctrine of subjective idealism. The realist proposition concerning the presence of general concepts in human consciousness later formed the basis of idealist rationalism of Leibniz and Descartes, while the idea of the ontological independence of universals was absorbed by classical German idealism.

Mediaeval philosophy made a significant contribution to further development of epistemology by working out and clarifying all the logically possible versions of the relations between the rational, the empirical, and the “a priori”—the relations which later became not just the theme of scholastic arguments but the basis for natural-scientific and philosophical knowledge.

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