Philosophy Summaries - Medieval

In the 4th Century Christianity became the official state religion of the Roman Empire. Over the following Centuries it spread over the rest of Europe and basically everyone was compelled to follow it.

Philosophers in the Christian world were generally clergy and their philosophy was essentially a contemplation of the details of the Christian faith.

From the 7th Century, Islam took over the Middle East and North Africa. To a lesser extent, philosophy there was then influenced by the Muslim faith.

The medieval period started to give way to the Renaissance in the 14th and 15th Centuries, then to the Scientific Revolution in the 16th Century. However, a couple of early Renaissance thinkers, Erasmus and Machiavelli, are included in this section.

St Augustine of Hippo, Christendom, 354-430 [1]

Augustine was born to a Christian mother and a pagan father. For a while, he followed Manichaeism, a religion that saw good and evil as competing forces in the world. Under the influence of Archbishop Ambrose of Milan, he converted to Christianity and spent much of his subsequent life as the Bishop of Hippo in North Africa. He wrote extensively on Christian theology and philosophy.

Augustine was concerned with the problem of evil. If God is all-powerful, why is there evil in the world? He suggested that evil wasn't a thing in itself, but the lack of something good. A murderer's evil is really just a lack of compassion. But the problem remained of why God allows these deficiencies.

Another argument was that, if God was to make man as a rational being, then he had to have free will, which leaves open the possibility of evil. Yet another argument was that evil is necessary to allow us to see the good in the world the way that dark regions in a painting cause the bright regions to stand out.

Augustine's later writings argued that God's sovereignty means that he alone initiates salvation, and thus that man cannot receive salvation by an act of will. John Calvin later developed this idea into Calvinism.

Boethius, Christendom, 480-525 [5]

Boethius provided an answer to the problem proposed by Aristotle that, if God knows the future, then the future is already determined and humans have no free will. He suggested that there are different types of knowing and that, by human knowing, humans still have free will.

Avicenna, Islamic World, 980-1037 [3]

Ibn Sina, known in the West as Avicenna, was a Persian Muslim who wrote on many subjects including astronomy, alchemy, geography and geology, psychology, Islamic theology, logic, mathematics and physics. He saw himself as a philosopher rather than an Islamic theologian, choosing to follow Greek wisdom with its emphasis on reasoning and proof.

Avicenna's main philosophical writings concerned the relationship between body and soul. In his 'Flying Man' thought experiment, he imagines someone who has just come into existence, and who is floating in space with no sensory input. That person would have a mind that knows that it exists, but, because it doesn't know that it has a body, that mind must be independent of the body. Thus body and soul are two different independent things, the soul not made of anything physical.

Because of this, he believed that the soul continues to exist independently of the body after death. Though this view allows for an afterlife, it differed from standard Islamic theology that says that body and soul are resurrected together. For this he was labelled a heretic. However, his work was translated into Latin and thus reached the Christian world, where it fitted better and thus was more readily accepted.

Anselm, Christendom, 1033-1109 [0]

Anselm was born in Italy, but became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093. His notable contribution to philosophy was the Ontological Argument which has been used since as an argument for the existence of God. In brief, it goes as follows.

God is defined as the "greatest conceivable being". Then, because existing in reality is greater than existing only in the mind, the greatest conceivable being must exist in reality to fit the definition.

Averroes, Islamic World, 1126-1198 [4]

Ibn Rushd, known in Europe as Averroes, lived in Muslim Spain. He studied and wrote commentaries on Aristotle's works. Where Aristotle's scientific ideas contradicted the Qur'an he accepted that the Qur'an was 'poetic truth'. However, he believed that only the educated elite could understand this and that the general population should take the Qur'an as literal truth. This didn't sit well with the Islamic hierarchy to whom the Qur'an was entirely and literally true.

Thomas Aquinas, Christendom, 1225-1274 [3]

Thomas Aquinas was born in Italy, joined the Dominican Friars and later became Master of Theology in Paris.

He was heavily influenced by Aristotle. He argued that the universe was changing, that changes had to be caused by earlier changes, and so on ad infinitum, and thus that the universe must always have existed, in accordance with Aristotle's view. However, being Christian, he believed that God had created the universe at a point in time.

To get around the apparent contradiction, he said that God could have, at a specific time, created a universe that was eternal. In general, Aquinas believed that correct human reason and Christian doctrine could never disagree because both came from God.

Despite Aristotle's position to the contrary, to be true to his Christian faith, Aquinas argued that, the soul can survive the death of the body. In general, Aquinas promoted the view that religious belief can be arrived at by reason as well as by faith.

In 1273, Aquinas experienced some sort of vision, or maybe a medical episode, after which he said that everything he had done was mere straw, and he never wrote again, dying the following year.

Desiderius Erasmus, Christendom, 1466-1536 [3]

Erasmus lived during the renaissance and the early stages of the reformation and wrote about the corruption and doctrinal wranglings of the Catholic church. He believed that using reason to argue about theological points just leads to problems and promoted a simple faith based on simlpicity, naivity and humility.

Niccolo Machiavelli, 1469-1527 [2]

Machiavelli lived in Florence during a time of political and military upheaval including invasion by the French and wars with Spain and the Papal state. He aspired to a political career, but the turbulence of the time meant that positions of influence were short-lived. When Cardinal de Medici was insalled as governor of Florence, Maciavelli was tortured, fined and briefly imprisoned.

In an attempt to gain favour with later authorities, he wrote a book, The Prince, and presented it to the then governor, Lorenzo de Medici. This book contains the thoughts for which he is remembered. However, the book was witty, cynical and possibly satirical, and it may be that the thoughts he penned were not so much his own beliefs, as advice he thought Lorenzo would like to hear.

The main thrust of The Prince was that a ruler must do what it takes to secure his own glory and the success of the state. It gave ruthlessly practical advice and recommended the setting aside of Christian morality. The ruler should be feared and loved (in that order) and the state should be admired and imitated.