Medieval Philosophy

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Medieval Philosophy

• A Brief Introduction

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Medieval philosophy is enjoying a sort of
renaissance. Historians have challenged the
entire notion of the middle ages. For
philosophers, this is no longer a period of book
reports Postmodern sensibilities, both among
secular and religious philosophers, have given us
a new appreciation for the ideas, arguments, and
problems presented in a period that was once more
or less skipped in history of philosophy
classes.
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Faith and Reason. In one sense this is conceived
in terms of a relationship between knowledge
revealed (especially within the monotheistic
traditions) and knowledge attained via human
reasoning (e.g., in Aristotle). But within the
medieval philosophical tradition this often takes
the form of trying to understand the relationship
between faith and reason (and the limits of
each). Thus conceived, theology deals with what
is reasonable to believe is beyond reason(?).
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What is medieval philosophy? From (?) Augustine
(354-430) To (?) Descartes (1596-1650) The
Patristic Period Dark Ages to Carolingian
Renaissance The Early Medieval Period (e.g.,
Anselm, Abelard) High Scholasticism (e.g.,
Aquinas, Avicenna, Averroes) Late Scholasticism
(e.g., Ockham)
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The thirteenth century was a particularly
prolific and productive period. Two developments
in the latter half of the twelfth century led to
this. First, was the rise of the
university. Second, was contact with Muslim
scholars (via the Crusades, et al) that led to
encounters with previously unavailable texts
(especially those of Aristotle) and with a
community of scholars who are already working on
the problems (and solutions) presented by
Aristotle.
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Aristotle
384-322 BCE
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Background Controversy

• The Eleatic school held that the world was
  essentially unknowable by humans. This led to the
  Sophists movement, that Socrates, Plato, and
  Aristotle all opposed.
• Eleatics followed Parmenides idea that the world
  is composed of one unchanging thing.
  (monism)Also influenced by Zenos
  paradoxes. Tortoise and Achilles. An arrow in
  flight is really at rest.

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Platos response seems to have been to posit a
world of Ideal (unchanging) forms. Aristotles
Metaphysics concerns itself with what exists
(ontology) and the extent to which we can have
knowledge (episteme) of what exists.
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Aristotles approach tends towards Empiricism

• If we think of the cosmos as a box filled with
  substances.
• Once we describe all the substances when we
  explain everything in the box, were done,
  because there is no box.
• So he rejects both the idea that we cant know
  anything about the world and that there are
  actually two realms, one more real than the other
  (Platos dualism).

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Definition vs. Description

• A description sort of marks things off by
  pointing to their characteristics.
• The mug is white, smooth, hard, etc.
• But a definition would say say something about
  the essence of the thing what is its real
  nature?
• A mug is a vessel used for drinking warm
  beverages.
• But if you did this with me (i.e., a person), how
  would you proceed?
• Felder is a . . . Person, living thing, body,
  teacher, man????
• The idea is to get to the essential quality.

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To be or not to be What is is.

• Two sentences
• The mug is white.
• Venus is the morning star.
• In the first sentence we learn that mug has a
  particular property. We can think of it as an
  intersection of two sets mugs and white things.
• The second tells us that morning star and
  Venus are different names for the same thing.
• Aristotle thought thinking about the verb to be
  with greater clarity might help us understand
  existence.

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Genera and differentia
If we would define things in this way, we could,
by considering the genera, get at what things are.
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For Aristotle., the vesselness in the mug, or
the foodness in the pizza, are actually in
those objects and not just a way we talk about
them.
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• But when we think about the world, we have to
  acknowledge that the only things that are real
  are individual substances this mug, this desk,
  this tree, this Steve Felder, etc. Aristotle
  considered this thisness.
• Thisness resides in particulars (also
  substance, those things we can access through
  direct personal experience.)
• But knowledge (episteme) comes to us through our
  knowledge of universals (things that are in a
  number of different substances e.g., whiteness,
  hardness, heaviness, etc.). (Otherwise, we
  wouldnt have knowledge, but only sense
  perceptions.)
• For Aristotle these universals inhere in the
  object and are not merely relative to the
  observer (contra the Eleatics).
• If we say Socrates is honorable, we are saying
  the honor is in him.
• In normal language we construct sentences with a
  subject and predicate.
• The mug is white tell us something about the
  mug Venus is the morning star does not.

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The Categories
What kinds of things can be in a substance?

• Place
• Position
• State
• Activity
• Passivity

• Substance (itself)
• Quality
• Quantity
• Relation
• Time

To gain real knowledge (science, episteme) we
need to get beyond these categories to claims
that tell us not only what is in a substance,
but what it is.
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In this case genus and species can help.

• What kind of thing is Felder?
• Human (species)
• Animal (genus)
• Living thing (?)
• The less general, the more substantial.
• The more general classifications depend on the
  individual substances (not the other way around).

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But are universals real?

• I think this is a problem for Aristotle, but he
  improves on Plato.
• Aristotle thought that Plato was wrong, for
  example, to see Beauty as a substance instead of
  as a quality that inheres in things.

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Change

• How and why do things change?

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HOW do things change?
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There are two kinds of change

• A substance changes some aspect of its character.
• Felder gets a sunburn.
• The mug develops a crack.
• For Aristotle, this means that some or other of
  its categories is transformed.
• In the second case, something comes to be out of
  nothing.
• One day there was no statue, a month later there
  is.
• What kind of change has occurred here?
• Aristotle wants us to recognize that the statue
  is matter.
• But matter is NOT a substance, or even something
  more basic than a substance, it is simply the
  thing out of which substances come (a mug, a
  vase, and desk, etc.). Matter is amorophous and
  characterless (for Aristotle).
• The basic things (substances) in the world come
  about as a combination of Form and Matter.

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• Aristotle developed this into his idea that
  substances are characterized as having purpose
  (design?). They are for something.
• The form is internal in the acorn.
• The form is external in the sculpture.
• (In a way, for Aristotle., the more natural
  expressions of form are the more basic.)

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• WHY do things change?
• Because he believes substance is basic, not
  matter, he wants to have an explanation for the
  why of change that functions at the substance
  level.
• Also, while we tend to locate causal explanations
  prior to the change, Aristotle, teleologically
  minded as he is, locates it after the change
• I got off the couch and got into my car in order
  to go to the movies.
• When we move in this way to consider substances
  and their various transformations, Aristotle
  tends to locate the causes of the change in the
  nature of the substance. (Why does the acorn
  become an oak? Why does Felder get a sunburn?)

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• In The Physics he had listed four types of
  causes
• Material Cause
• Efficient Cause
• Formal Cause
• Final Cause
• It seems to me the final cause in The Physics is
  most closely related to the nature of the
  substance in The Metaphysics.
• But when you try to apply this to a variety of
  substances, you have to wonder if any of this is
  real, and if so what? What is real about my mug?
  Its clearly the result of the second kind of
  transformation, so is it real by virtue of its
  form or its matter?

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• Aristotle seems to suggest that the key to
  understanding the place of things in the world is
  in terms of what is Potential in them, and what
  is Actual.
• You could think of matter as 100 potential.
• You could think of God as 100 actual (or not?).
• But in general substances are a mixture of
  potential and actual.

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The medieval system of thought was thoroughly
engaged with these issues, as well as with those
that had been raised by Plato (and the
Neoplatonists). Though modern philosophers
would tend to draw sharp distinctions between
their approach to philosophy and the medieval
approach, the philosophers of the medieval laid
an important foundation for all subsequent
western philosophy. The key component of this
foundation was a fundamental structuring of the
relationship between language, thought, and
reality. The most important tenet of this
structure was the idea that words, as the
fundamental units of language, express our
thoughts, as concepts, and that these concepts
are meaningful because they conform to objects
(reality). The reason the words expressing our
concepts are true of the things we conceive is
because those things are informed by the same
forms that inform our minds. This brings up the
problem of universals.
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Consider these billiard balls
I can say they are distinct instances of the same
shape. But what does it mean to say this same
shape exists in these separate
substances? Furthermore, in what sense does this
shape inform the mind of those who are
considering it?
Just because Im thinking of spheres does not
mean my mind has become spherical. For Plato the
answer seems to have been that all these balls
are exemplars of the Form of a ball that exists
in some Ideal realm. My mind/soul recognizes it.
(Think of a song on multiple iPods, or multiple
copies of the same book.) The same applies to
Platos ethics, etc. the good. But for
Aristotle, the human mind could abstract from
particular instances to form such universal
concepts.
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For Augustine, and many other philosophers after
him, these Ideal Forms are not abstractions, but
the creative Ideas of God. For Augustine, seeing
these Ideals as an expression of the mind of God
had implications that were ontological,
epistemological, and ethical. But an obvious
problem emerges at this point. How can their be a
plurality of divine Ideas alongside a unity of
divine essence? This philosophy presupposes a
divine unity, but such a unity seems implicit in
the concept of God. If God refers to an
absolutely perfect being, this being must be
absolutely simple. For thing composed of multiple
parts those things must be either accidental or
essential. If they are accidental, the thing is
changeable (like Felders sunburn), but a thing
that is changeable can become more or less
perfect, and then the thing would not be
absolutely perfect. If they are essential, that
means they are parts without which it could not
exists, and they would make Gods existence
dependent on those parts.
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So God must be absolutely simple. But if God is
absolutely simple (in these terms), how can He
(sic) have a plurality of ideas? If they are the
archetypes of creation, they cannot be creatures,
yet they cannot be the creator either. In
general, the scholastic solution was to, in one
way or another, argue that the multiplicity of
ideas is really the infinite multiplicity of the
ways in which God conceives of the infinite
perfection of His own essence as imitable by the
limited perfection of any finite, created
essence. But the multiplicity of the ways of
conceiving of something does not have to imply
any multiplicity of the things conceived.
(Klima, 15) (Felder can be conceived as a
husband, father, professor, surfer, writer,
etc.)
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They were also interested in understanding the
epistemological role of these ideas. For
Augustine, God provides access to the divine
Ideas for those who have been regenerated. But if
this turns out to be a supernatural gift, how is
it possible for the unregenerate to know
anything? For Aquinas and Duns Scotus (et al)
the solutions was to make this natural faculty
only nominally a divine gift. For this approach,
Aristotle was especially useful. But some of
Aristotelians argued that if the human intellect
was capable of receiving all material forms, it
could not have a material form itself. But if
this is the case, then is there some kind of
Intellect in which all humans participate?
Aquinas challenged this view because it seemed
to undermine belief in the afterlife (there would
be no individual mind). But wasnt belief in
the afterlife an article of faith, not a subject
of philosophy? For Aquinas if reason led to a
conflict with an established truth of religion,
an error must have been made in the reasoning
process, because there cannot be a conflict
between truths.
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Aquinas unity of substantial forms. A
substance can have only one substantial form to
account for all its essential characteristics. Thi
nk of all the essential characteristics of the
substance Felderhuman, living, body, rational,
etc.and understand that these are distinct
conceptually, but are not really distinct in
Felder himself. But Aquinas also argued for
distinction between essential predicates (that
form the essence of a thing) and the predicate
exists which is not part of its essence. Only
God (with his absolute simplicity and perfection)
has a unity of essence and existence. This is
Aquinas notion of the real distinction of
essence and existence.
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We can now understand the point of Ockhams
Razor entities are not to be multiplied beyond
necessity. William of Ockham (ca 1288-1348)
The assumption of universals leads to many
inconsistencies. An alternative explanation of
universality that doesnt require them, should be
preferred. Already for a thousand years most
philosophers had tended to not take Platos ideal
forms too literally. In his earliest writings on
this Ockham characterized them as fictathe
universal thought content of our universal
thoughts. His ultimate solution seems to be a
kind of nominalism, arguing that there arent
really universals, but only individual instances
mapped conceptually using universal terms. He
radicalized Aristotles abstraction according to
the principle of indifference. (Conceptual
distinctions are made when it is not a matter of
indifference.)