Volume 1 · 1984
Essays in Medieval Studies
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The Philosophical Uses of Medieval Philosophy
Robert G. Wolf
As a philosopher engaged in the teaching of medieval philosophy, questions about the worth of what I am doing often intrude. Does medieval philosophy have anything more than mere antiquarian interest? Should it be taken seriously by a philosopher whose main interest is in contemporary philosophical problems and who is indifferent to the study of history? What is the utility of studying philosophers who worked on strange problems, utilizing assumptions fairly universally rejected since the 1600s?
In attempting to answer these questions, I have concluded that it is of great value to working philosophers who feel themselves indifferent to the dead past to examine that past for enlightenment about problems that exercise philosophers today. I would hope that some of the line of reasoning is relevant to workers in other areas; indeed, I think that the kind of case I am trying to make can be made for any area where a temporal dimension enters into consideration of problems, even perhaps in those areas which seem most ahistorical, such as the technical construction of solutions to engineering problems. The ahistorical character of those fields may be due more to a failure of imagination on the part of current practitioners than to any real irrelevance of the past.
My first argument (of three) for the usefulness of medieval philosophy is that examination of the past enlarges the mind of the examiner by opening up possibilities of being human that would b 737b124h e lost by a purely ahistorical approach. The initial alienness of the medieval mind (which I believe is largely an illusion) is paradoxically a reason for examination. In-
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sofar as a philosopher is supposed to be a critic of underlying assumptions and presuppositions of present-day culture, the prospect of the investigation of a culture which makes differing presuppositions should be a liberating experience, opening possibilities of philosophical examination that might otherwise be lost.
The important feature of presuppositions to be remarked on here is that they tend to be unconscious. The presuppositions we make we are apt to be unaware of; if a problem is wrongly posed because of such an unconscious assumption, the possibility of successful resolution of the problems is greatly reduced without bringing that assumption to light. Even more radically, the wrong problem itself may be posed because of such a presupposition. In such a situation, no amount of technical precision applied to the solution of the problem will be of any use. Indeed the more ingenuity brought to bear, the more harm done in creating the illusion that progress is being made. In such a situation, realization that a pseudo-problem is being investigated is the first step toward worthwhile philosophizing. Here is where I suggest that examination of philosophical work in an alien clime, such as the medieval period, can serve to open up the reality of alternative questions.
Lest such considerations be viewed as hopelessly abstract, I might mention that recently Richard Rorty in his influential 1979 work Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature1 has argued that modern western philosophy has chased after the illusion of discovering the essence of the substance "mind." Rorty recommends looking at Greek philosophy which discussed "knowing" without the hypothesis of a mind outside of physical reality looking down into such reality. Reading Greek philosophy would help shake the false picture of mind which vitiates most twentieth-century thought. Since medieval philosophy is at
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one with Greek thought here, a consideration of that tradition would also be of use.
We must be careful lest we prove too much. Medieval philosophy is part of our own past and its foreignness should not be overemphasized. If it were in fact too alien, it would be hard to identify what counts as philosophical. Its usefulness would thereby be lessened.
While I think that this sort of argument is correct, it can perhaps be sharpened in several ways. As it stands, the argument does not point specifically to medieval philosophy as a worthwhile object of investigation nor does it even point to philosophy as the point of the argument. First, the usefulness of the philosophy studied seems directly proportional to its deviation from the current norm. Indian or Chinese philosophy, which is even further removed from current presuppositions, seems even more suitable for study. Note that this hypothesis still finds value in studying medieval western philosophy, but merely points to the even greater utility of diverse options.
Second, to the extent that it is the study of different modes of thought that reveals the basis of our own thinking, tile study of philosophy by philosophers is not singled out. The study of medieval (and other) literature (e.g., T'ang poetry) might open up the mental horizon of a philosopher and help prevent mental arteriosclerosis. Also such study seems valuable to anyone interested in the human intellect. The literary critic concerned with courtly romance poetry might find the study of T'ang poetry liberating.
None of this detracts I hope from the force of the argument, but does move it to the more general, albeit true, claim that studying other ways of being human is of value to us all. Why, the question
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still remains, should philosophers in particular study medieval philosophy, as opposed to other areas?
A more pointed answer lies, I think, in some very real points of similarity between contemporary analytic, Anglo-American philosophy and the school philosophy treated in the Arts and Theology faculties in the European universities between 1090 and 1650. Those points, coupled with elements of foreignness alluded to earlier, make medieval philosophy and theology especially pertinent today. I find two quite striking areas of similarity: one is in the method and style of the philosophizing done and the other is the existence of a growing convergence in the problem areas under scrutiny.
The first similarity, then, is in the style of philosophy. Here two elements seem especially prominent. The first of these is the agonistic nature both of medieval school philosophy and of contemporary analytic philosophy. The second is the shared training in logic and philosophy of language.
The agonistic quality of school philosophy may be well known, but a brief review would, perhaps, not be amiss. Medieval Arts and Theology training emphasized the debate aspect of reasoning. The characteristic literary genre is the "quaestiones." Even in works that advertise themselves as "commentaries,'' such as the ubiquitous "Commentaries on the Sentences of Peter Lombard," required of all Bachelors in the Theology faculty, the underlying text is often the springboard for the discussion of disputed "questions" only remotely connected with the text to be examined. The last year of a Bachelor's training, just before moving to the magisterial level, was spent in being a "respondent" during the public debates on questions, requiring the bachelor to oppose whatever side of the debate had already been taken by members of the audience.
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The graduation exercise itself involved the resolution of three ritual debates where the incepting master was expected to resolve the questions at issue, analyzing and, if necessary, refuting on the spot arguments on both sides of the issue. Once the master was in place leading his own students through similar exercises, he was expected on solemn feast days to propose disputed questions and take on all corners in public combat. The highest form of this contest was perhaps the quadlibetal questions in which the master would undertake to resolve questions and refute arguments which were proposed on the spot by members of the audience who would often be professional rivals who would have weeks to prepare their topics and arguments.
Contemporary analytic philosophy has fewer such head-to-head contests, but manages to reproduce the same atmosphere with a different rhythm. The existence of journals such as Analysis or Philosophical Studies mainly devoted to objecting to and refuting previous contributions is more suited to the dispersed philosophical community of today. The chain of point and counterpoint can go on long after the initial occasion for conflict (witness articles with titles such as, "On Cumming on Derrida on Shapiro on Heidegger on van Gogh").
More public head-to-head fights occur in annual philosophy meetings, where speakers normally have respondents whose purpose is to critically evaluate the main papers (with time for rebuttal allowed before the free-for-all is opened up to the audience). Even the typical doctoral dissertation (the equivalent of the medieval Sentence-commentary) is a critical evaluation of whatever book or author happens to be topical. Even hardened bibliophiles blanch at the thought of reading all of the dissertations devoted to W. V. Quine's Word and Object John
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Rawls' A Theory of Justice Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity,4 or Alvin Plantinga's The Nature of Necessity,5 which last involves a polemic against the Quine and Kripke works.
The second similarity in style mentioned is the very similar concentration on logic and philosophy of language. The typical medieval Master of Arts studied the text of Aristotle for a minimum of seven years. What is crucial here is the slant toward Aristotle; it was very heavy on the logical writings (the logica vetus and the logica novus), less heavy on the physical and metaphysical writings (which were thought to be the special preserve of the theologian), and very light on the moral, political, aesthetic, and biological works. Even the metaphysical positions that exercised an Arts master could be generated by the logical writings, such as the early discussion on the nature of universals raised in Porphyry's Introduction (Eisagoge) to the logical writings of Aristotle. Moreover the logical writings included works such as the Categories and the Topics that would fit more naturally into the current category of the philosophy of language.
This can be seen in the characteristic productions of Arts masters. The fourteenth-century productions often revolve around the nature of reference and the analysis of sophisms, such as the liar paradox. A striking example is the Obligationes literature of the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries which attempted to formalize the very rules of rational debate which governed the classroom and public disputes.
Now a concentration on logic (although the very different mathematical logic of Frege and Pierce, invented in the late nineteenth century) is the distinguishing mark of formal language analytic philosophy. Here again entire journals, such as the
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Journal of Philosophical Logic, exist to apply this logic to a myriad of philosophical problems. Logic is a lingua franca for serious work in much of analytic philosophy and many of the doyens of this movement are top-flight mathematical logicians.
A sign of the affinity of the medieval and analytic philosophies is the fact that many of the current historians of medieval philosophy are themselves well-known analytic philosophers. Norman Kretzmann, chief editor of the recent Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy has among his credits a textbook on symbolic logic. Another sign is the interesting saga of the resurrection of the Obligationes literature mentioned earlier; it is the effort by current logicians to formalize dialogue games as a model for rational inference which has led them to look at the medieval's similar efforts.
The similarities
sketched here have led to strikingly similar results to both cases: the growth
of a professional tradition in philosophy where experts certified by their
peers work on technical problems far removed from general cultural concerns,
writing only for their peers, normally indifferent to the wider public
evaluation of their efforts. In both cases, given similar institutional bases,
the tradition survives for several generations, leading to an increasing use of
technical vocabulary (jargon?) and a narrowing concentration on the quality of
the arguments presented, rather than the overall truth of the positions.
(Indeed the Universities of Oxford,
It is an interesting paradox that the agonistic, logical-argumentative bias of medieval philosophy is a rather current discovery. Until recently the visionary aspect of medieval thought was presented as typical:
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Aquinas was viewed as proclaiming a total world-view that had to be accepted whole-cloth, rather than as a fighter in the trenches, presenting reasons for his views. The changeover has in fact been generated by the replacement of the Thomistically trained, theologically oriented historian by the analytically trained, logically oriented historian since the Second World War.
Another major similarity between analytic and medieval philosophy, equal in importance to the similarity of style on which we have been concentrating, is the growing convergence in topics discussed. Analytic philosophy has recently become engaged with many of the very same substantive issues which dominated scholastic philosophy for four hundred years before being shoved aside by the Reformation and the Renaissance.
This claim may seem obviously wrongheaded given the reputation of analytic philosophy as being resolutely antimetaphysical. When A. J. Ayer in his 1935 classic Language, Truth and Logic7 needed examples of meaningless statements, claims about God and an objective morality are a ready source of nonsense. Even the more scientifically minded philosophers, such as Carnap and Reichenbach, are materialists, suspicious of the point of grand claims about the nature of reality inherent in metaphysics.
Theology was at the top of the pecking order in the medieval university and the questions that exercised the attention of generations of active workers had to do with God and His relation to the world. Questions about the nature of language (so intensely debated by Arts masters) arose because of the difficulty in speaking positively about God. Questions of the overall structure of the universe arose out of considerations of the range of creative options open to an omnipotent and totally free deity.
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It seems strange to claim, as I do, that the topics studied by analytic philosophers, most of whom have no theistic bent, resemble those discussed in Catholic and (later) Protestant universities.
Yet it is arguable that the anti-metaphysical and anti-theological bias of analytic philosophy is mainly a thing of the past. In the immediate post-war period, most of the barriers to consideration of metaphysical questions eroded through internal criticism. The definitions of "meaning" used to stigmatize propositions about God as nonsense were shown either not to do so or to be so restrictive as to rule out all discourse. During the 1960's, with the growth of the field of modal logic, philosophers trained in the analytic tools began to become interested in older metaphysical questions, using their newly forged tools to investigate such questions, rather than sweep them under the rug.
Within the past few years, groups specializing in such questions have arisen, such as the newly formed Society for Christian Philosophy. As always, the appearance of specialty journals is a sign of the times. Journals such as Faith and Reason, the International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, Religious Studies, and Sophia, whose contributors overlap significantly those of more mainstream analytic journals, show the growth of interest in formerly taboo topics. Even the mainstream philosophical journals have opened up to such topics. A journal such as Nous, whose contents usually give the lie to its proud motto Nihil philosophici a nobis alienurn putamus, has recently printed an article devoted to the burning question as to whether William of Ockham's Christology is Nestorian or not.
Much of the work in these journals revolves around the question of the consistency of theological positions. For example, the question of a non-
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contradictory definition of "omnipotence" is a hot one, as is the reconcilability of an omnipotent, omniscient God with human freedom. Yet it is precisely such a concentration on questions of consistency, rather than truth, that I find the greatest source of affinity with medieval thought.
In the twentieth century, there is little unanimity of belief among philosophers. Even the membership of the Society for Christian Philosophy is not restricted to Christians, or even theists. In such a mixed environment, questions of consistency abstract from the specific doctrinal commitments of the questioners. In the medieval period, almost complete unanimity of belief served the same purpose: given the shared commitment to basic religious views, there was no debate about them; rather one debated the quality of the arguments for known truths or disputed the intelligibility of varying interpretations of those truths.
In fourteenth-century thought, for example, the absolute power of God to do whatever he wished was a touchstone for determining what properties the world had to possess. In twentieth century analytic philosophy, a similar touchstone is found in the plurality of possible worlds, the limits of whose variations spell out the range of the possible and the necessary. It is easy for thinkers, such as Alvin Plantinga, to pass indifferently from talk of the absolute power of God to the range of possible worlds which God could create, generating links between the two modes of discourse.
The end result is that for an analytic philosopher of today interested in metaphysical questions and the evaluation of arguments about those questions, the eleventh through sixteenth centuries provide a gold mine of discussions of those very questions, often evincing more sophisticated and
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nuanced positions than have been generated in the shorter period of intense twentieth-century interest. The medieval master speaks as an equal on such topics and is not merely the object of historical curiosity.
For example, interest has revived recently in what are called divine-command theories of morality, where the meaning of "X is good" is equated with the meaning of the statement "X is willed by God."8 Such theories have major problems associated with them, especially problems about the arbitrary character of God's will. The medievals struggled with such theories and their problems. Investigation of their responses to these theories can only serve to move current discussions from simplified versions to more nuanced theories.
In conclusion, one last feature of similarity between current analytic philosophy and medieval philosophy can be mentioned: namely, the nature of the opposition to them. The medieval schoolman was the subject of a vigorous polemic mainly from the humanist tradition. The growth of the prestige of the Renaissance of ancient thought, with its non-technical, rhetorical, literary, and amateur orientation, probably did more to change cultural tastes and kill scholastic thought than did any internal perceptions of sterility. Similarly, today analytic philosophy stands condemned by an existential-phenomenological-Marxist movement which sees sterility where the university-trained philosopher only sees challenge. Without entering into the rights and wrongs of either polemic, the appearance of isomorphic critiques five hundred years apart shows the affinity of what is criticized. For one, such as myself, who does not subscribe to today's critique, the existence of similar calumnies bespeaks the presence of similar virtues which should be treasured.
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Notes
1. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).
2. W. V. O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1960).
3. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971).
4. Saul A. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980).
5. Alvin C. Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974).
6. Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg (eds.), The
7. Alfred J. Ayers, Language, Truth and Logic (London: Victor Gollancz, 1936).
8. Philip L. Quinn, Divine Commands and Moral Requirements (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978).
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