1215-1255 A crucial period for the West

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1215-1255 A crucial period for the West
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Thirteenth Century Changes

• Christian West, a cultural and scientific
  backwater compared with Islamic East
• (Ibn Sina d.1037, Ghazali d.1111, Ibn Rushd
  d.1198, Maimonides d.1204)
• Universities established
• Trivium (logic, grammar, rhetoric) ?
• Aristotelian philosophy (metaphysics, physics,
  psychology, biology, chemistry)

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Aristotelian Science

• An essential start ? Modern Science
• Set questions
• Demanded consistency in terminology
• Precision rigor
• Platos cosmology explains the order beauty of
  the world as the end achieved by a maximally
  excellent creator.

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Integrating Aristotelian philosophy

• Why not rejected as a whole?
• How was it transformed and transforming?
• Compendium philosophiae (1240) encyclopedia that
  shows how scholastics reconciled Plato and
  Aristotle on the rational soul.

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On sense and understanding

• Before Aristotle divine illumination
• Augustine (active sensation, visual rays)
• After Aristotle
• Gods role in human cognition minimized
• Alhazens theory of intromission accepted
• Aristotles claim that all knowledge originates
  in the senses accepted innate ideas
  sidelined.

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Challenges

• Extramission the Neoplatonic dictum
• Sense-based knowledge explananda
• how the soul receives species forms
• why species dont materially change the soul.
• how the soul understands itself
• why species dont make
• the air sense objects.

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Robert Grossetesete Thomas Aquinas

• Grosseteste less noble does not act on more n.,
• but the presence of perceptual objects
  excites.
• Aquinas perception is a passive process.
• Compendium The intellect abstracts species from
  their matter so that it can unite with them.

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Self-Perception

• Thomas twists reflect on presence abstract not
  general from the partic., but referencing truth
• Rufus takes a straight path We understand
  our-selves as we understand the rest of the
  world, by receiving intelligible species.
• Compendium shares the nature of species, since
  the products of abstraction have intelligible
  natures. But the intellect is rather at rest
  than in motion and does not act on anything
  external to itself (112). It has a special
  faculty for apprehending simples like itself
  unerringly (106-7).

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What makes a species different? the
spirit problem
Spirit may be something active and invisible
(heat, odor, tumor causing) something unextended
(soul, point), something sacred (an angel)
Compendium makes no attempt to explain the
differences between bodily and spiritual. Both
the sense and intellect are characterizes by
spiritual motion. The passions of desire, fear
and confidence and the actions of joy and love
must be common to body and soul, because they
affect the body (109).
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Innate Ideas
Theological doctrine Each soul is individually
created prior to birth with a complete set of
ideas, but those ideas are obscured at birth. We
do not know much about the origin of the soul
except that God creates it from nothing
(105). The faculties of the soul are innate and
its apprehension of simple things is unerring
(107, 111). The soul can contemplate immutable
objects independently of the body
(106). Accounting for intellectual errors is
difficult (113-114). The remedies are easy to
specify viz. education, virtue, and physical
exercise (115).
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Compendiums Response to the Challenges

• The soul is separable from the body, which
  irritates it (108), and does not act outside
  itself (112).
• The soul is like the species it receives, since
  they are intelligible not material (113).

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Aristotle Transformed

• Aristotle not very well-known (105), and
  liberally supplemented by appeals to Plato and
  theological doctrine.