medieval philosophy capstone paper - faith seeking understanding

7/29/2019 Medieval Philosophy Capstone Paper - Faith Seeking Understanding

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Nick Timmons

CMRS Oxford Tutorial

Medieval Philosophy Capstone Paper3/09/07

Jorge Gracia has argued that in intensity, sophistication, and achievement, thephilosophical flowering in the thirteenth century could be rightly said to rival the golden

age of Greek philosophy in the fourth century B.C. This philosophical flowering began

with the early medievals, like St. Augustine and Boethius, continued with greats likeAnselm, and culminated in the thought of the likes of Aquinas, Henry of Ghent , Duns

Scotus and William of Ockham. After my period of intense study of these men and some

of their seminal ideas, I can confidently agree with Gracias idea that the breadth and

depth of medieval philosophy, up until its time, could only have been rivalled by theancient Greeks. Medieval philosophy can be thought of as being predicated upon three

principles: ratio, auctoritas and concordia. Ratio represents logical rigor or the principle

of reasoned argumentation present with these great thinkers.Auctoritas represents their

looking to antiquity, most principally in the philosophical systems of Plato and Aristotle.But these two represent a kind of secondary importance when compared to the third. If I

had to summate all of medieval philosophy, I think the most operative term to describethis concordia, is that of faith seeking understanding. These great philosophers

approached philosophy with the eyes of faith, but sought to elucidate this faith with

reason, to further unpack the revelation of Jesus Christ using a rigorous logical andreasoned approach, if you will in order to combat scepticism of faith. Medieval

philosophy, somewhat discarded today as a result of the Renaissance Humanists and

Post-Reformation thinkers, carries with it a depth that most today do not appreciate, a

rigor that successively developed into as complex and sophisticated a system comparableto anything else ever seen; a development that can doubtless be seen in each of the

selections studied this term.

First let us take a look at the main ideas of each of the seven medievals we looked

at this term. With Augustine, we looked at his investigation into whether or not we could

know that there is something unchangeable which is superior to human intelligence. Hisunderlying purpose was to protect from scepticism the existence of the I and the existence

of God. As regards the first, Augustine says, Well, if I am mistaken, I exist. For a man

who does not exist can surely not be mistaken either, and if I am mistaken, therefore I

exist. Essentially, we doubt and the very act of doubting tells us 1.)we exist 2.)weknow/think 3.)we love 4.)we live. This is an amazing line of thought, and it is little

known that it is here that Augustine prefigures Descartes cogito ergo sumby some 1300

years! As regards the second, He says, I promised, you remember, to show yousomething superior to the human mind and reason. There it is, truth itself. He also says,

The chief good is recognized to be truth and is possessed when truth is possessed, and

truth is wisdom, in wisdom let us discern the chief good and possess it and enjoy it.Truth, understood in this way, is God himself. So, we have one of the first investigations

into proving, through reason, what we know through faith, that is, that God exists to be

discerned, pondered, and above all, loved. With Augustine we have a beginning of sorts

of medieval philosophy. Augustine is considered more of a church father, than a


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medieval methodology creator. He sets up many of the problems, but he does so in his

own inimitable way. Boethius is pretty much the first real medieval thinker in the sense

that although hes only transmitting the problems and not all too original of a thinker,hes the first to take these problems outlined by Augustine and put them into the

medieval idiom. Nevertheless, Augustines acuteness and brilliance as a thinker fueled

this medieval school of thought. But, with Augustine there is a certain lack of logicalprecision. He goes on tangents, sticks on certain points too long as he does here with his

comments on the senses within the context of this argument, and has a flowery way with

language, if I can term if thusly. We can see this when one of his characters says, Iaccept what you have said with incredible and inexpressible joy, and I declare it to be

absolutely certain! We would never see something like this being uttered in work from

Scotus or Ghent. Nevertheless Augustines genius more or less created medieval

philosophy. He was the first to attempt a reconciliation between Christian dogma andGreek Philosophy, here represented in the person of Plato, something that would

profoundly influence the medievals that were to follow.

In Boethius Second Commentary on PorphyrsIsagoge we studied his analysis

of the problem of universals and his solution. This problem, made famous and prettymuch defined by Boethius, is truly one of the pillars of philosophy. It is taught in every

philosophy 101 beginner class and debated in doctoral dissertations. And here we have itsmost famous, although not its very first, detailed exposition and his subsequent attempt to

solve the problem. He delineates the problem thusly; As for genus and species

(a.)whether they subsist or are posited in bare understandings only (b.)whether, if theysubsist, they are corporeal or incorporeal and (c.) whether they are separated from

sensibles or posited with sensibles and agree with them. He analyzed the arguments for

and against the existence of universals. He stated his solution, that of a moderate realist

like Aristotle, as opposed to Platos extreme realism and later Ockhams nominalism, likethis: This likeness becomes sensible when it exists in singulars, and becomes intelligible

when it is in universals. In the same way, when it is sensible it stays in singulars, but

when it is understood it becomes universal. They subsist therefore in the realm ofsensibles, but are understood apart from bodies. Boethius thus opens up a debate that

rages on vehemently still today.

We then took a look at Anselm, an incredibly original thinker, and hisRefutation of the Correspondence Theory in On Truth. His major conclusion is that a

proposition is true when correspondence obtains, but that it is just a condition for truth.

He wants to know, what is the purpose of the affirmation? Affirmations are used for

correspondence. That tree is green. If the affirmation is true, then the correspondenceobtains. So, the purpose of affirmations is correspondence. This is not so with negation,

or command. Negation would not be true because of correspondence. That tree is not red.

There is a purpose to this negation, but its not for correspondence Since the tree is green,the negation is true, but there is no correspondence here. Likewise, if I command you to

Stop That!, there is a purpose to this command, but again, it does NOT require

correspondence. Whether or not I write in red ink does not matter if the command is tonot write in red ink. The unique move that Anselm makes here is in discussing purpose.

The purpose of a command is to tell me something. The purpose of an affirmation is to

correspond, and thus correspondence with affirmations matters because of this purpose.

Truly, Anselm is incredible and this focus on purpose in an utterance prefigures modern


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speech act theory by nearly a millennium. Not only this, but he conceived of the

ontological argument, one of the major proofs for Gods existence that has been studied

in depth ever since its inception. His complexity can be seen in full force in Chapter 13 ofthis selection, a passage that no human since has been able to adequately interpret.

After Anselm, we looked at the foundation of a particular type of knowledge for

Aquinas, called scientia, in his Commentary on the Posterior Analytics. It is here, withAquinas and later Scotus and Ockham that we see the core of the medieval golden age. In

this selection, Aquinas began with the sceptical position, when they question, like so;

How can we consider scientia to be certain knowledge, as it comes from premises whichare not certain by way of syllogism? Aquinas systematically breaks this question down

and arrives at the necessity of looking at immediate premises as his answer. Essentially,

we can know conclusions precisely because the entire syllogistic foundation lies upon

immediate premises, which are not proven by scientia, but rather are self-evident and thebedrock of scientia. Aquinas concludes it is always the case that how something is on its

own terms is the cause of how it is on something elses terms. Q.E.D. Aquinas famous

Summa Theologica is a momentous work, forming a great deal of Catholic dogma. But it

is in an example such as this where we truly see Aquinas as a teacher. His overallsystemization is paralleled by others like Scotus and Ockham and Aquinas still has the

same sophistication embedded into his work as Ockham and Scotus, but neither couldmatch his clarity and ability to teach others through his writing. In this way, we are able

to see not only a great mind, but a supreme teacher.

From Aquinas we moved into Henry of Ghent, who was a little crazy, and so washis philosophy. But, his importance lay in the fact that he spurred Scotus to greatness as

the great mind spent a great deal of time drafting replies to Ghents inanities. We looked

at his refutation of scepticism in the form of his investigation into whether or not we

could know without Divine Illumination. The issue is whether God does somethingfurther in special cases to permit certain human beings to have a knowledge of pure truth,

as Henry calls it. We see in this argument the beginnings of a logical rigor that will be

picked up and improved upon by Scotus and Ockham. It is the continuation of thesuccessive increase in complexity in argumentation that began with Augustine. There is a

great deal to unpack here, and when one does, he or she arrives at Ghents conclusion,

For it is not by any natural necessity that these rules bestow themselves so that a humanbeing sees the truth in them. This is the case for corporeal light, so that one sees colors in

it, but it is not the case for the bare divine essence itself. It should be said absolutely,

therefore, that there is nothing concerning which a human being can have pure truth by

acquiring a cognition of it by purely natural means.Instead, God bestows it, throughfree will, to whomever he wants.

It is with this conclusion that we turn to Duns Scotus and his Refutation of

Henry and of Skeptics. Scotus, along with Aquinas and Ockham, is really theculmination of the scholastic method. He is incredibly dense and one of the most

sophisticated philosophers in the history of thought. Scotus outlined that we can have

four kinds of certain knowledge, in refutation of Ghents conclusion that we cannot knowtruth by looking at the intelligible species derived from the senses. The four types of

certain knowledge were: S1) Certitude of principles and what is concluded from them S2)

Certitude of what is learned from experience S3) Certitude of our own acts S4) Certitude

of sense knowledge. We focused on outlining and comprehending S1. Henry of Ghent


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takes the empiricist principle, that what I see causes my knowledge, that everything we

know, to use Kants terminology is a posteriori. If this is not the case, as Scotus holds,

there must be something in the intellect to make sense of sense data. This is the a priori.To illustrate, all non-complex cognitions come form the senses. There are two corollaries

to this, that A.) We only get them from the senses and B.) That the senses only deliver

simple cognition. So we have the senses delivering us the fact that there is a man namedSocrates and that he is white. These are two separate simple cognitions. We put these two

together and say, Socrates is white. As we saw above, it is the relation itself that is the

cause of this ability to see the conformity between A and B, between Socrates and white.So, in the anachronistic terms of the above, the a priorirelation between two things is

self-evidently trueand it is precisely this relation that allows our intellect to see thisconformity. This is a succinct and solid refutation of the empiricist principle that I

ONLY know by sense, and the intellect is simply a big memory bank that connects sensedata. The level of sophistication here is unbelievable, sick in Californian parlance or elite

population as we say in poker. Anyone who tries to rebuff this by brushing medieval

philosophy off with a cursory glance is fooling themselves. This argument here

prefigures the Hume-Kant debate that would take place some 500 years later, a debatethat shook philosophy to its core, and in a poll of modern philosophers, made Kant and

Hume and the 3rd and 6th most influential philosophers in history.After Scotus, the eminent Oxford don, we moved into William of Ockham, an

Oxford alumnus himself, and his argument against analogical predication. There is

univocation and equivocation, of which there are two types. . Equivocation by chance iswhen a word signifies more than one thing in an equally primary manner by virtue of

more than one position and by means of more than one concept. Next, we have

equivocation by design. This is when a word is imposed by virtue of more than one

imposition in order to signify more than one thing by means of more than one concept.This, more or less, is what Aquinas and Aristotle meant by analogy. We see that the

difference in the two types of equivocation is HOW the word has come to signify two

different concepts, or, HOW the word has come to be imposed. Ockham also argues thatthere is no intermediate between univocal, equivocal and denominative. In this very

airtight argument there is a great deal of sophistication here. He introduces his famous

theory of supposition and the outlining of his semantic theory here forms the basis formodern logic, along with Aristotle.

When one looks at all these thinkers in sum total, rather than separating, some

encouraging things begin to foment. One sees the foundation of logic, of reason usedrigorously, which I would postulate helps form the basis for inductive scientific discovery

(although their Platonic and Aristotelian emphases would be considered problematic by

people like Bacon). In reading the mathematical proofs of men like Galileo, Newton,Descartes and Leibniz, the connection to a foundational influence from the medievals

above makes a great deal of sense. There is a continual increase in complexity/density in

the argumentation itself, in order that the arguments themselves can be made more andmore sound. They all sought to irrefutably state the case for faith. Faith was their

foundation, and the sceptical refutations found in the ideas of these great thinkers are a

direct result of this foundation on faith. These great thinkers come from a distinctly

theological perspective, refreshing, to be sure. They were after faith seeking


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understanding, meaning they wanted to know exactly how one could, by reason, come to

the conclusions that they knew by faith. The quest was to create epistemological systems

of thought which, with the revelation by faith, mutually supported one another, ratherthan were mutually exclusive of one another. This quest to find the truth by both faith and

reason was reviled by Montaigne, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Voltaire and others. The

Post-Reformation Enlightenment has made scholasticism into the ugly stepsister ofphilosophy. It has created a situation in which many modern thinkers remain largely

ignorant of the incredible breadth and depth of this incredibly diverse and worthwhile

period of philosophical thought. In my study, I have come to a deeper and moremeaningful appreciation of medieval thought, and what it truly means to be a person of

faith seeking understanding.

medieval philosophy capstone paper - faith seeking understanding

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