EARLY MEDIEVAL
PHILOSOPHY II
Abelard and Héloïse
Abelard is unusual in the history of philosophy as being also one the world’s most famous lovers, even if he was tragically forced into the celibacy which is more typical of great philosophers, whether medieval or modern. (Anthony Kenny An Illustrated Brief History of Western Phılosophy, Blackwell Publishing 2006 p.135)
Abelard’s importance as a philosopher is due above all to his contribution to logic and the philosophy of language. Logic, when he began his teaching career, was studied in the West mainly from Aristotle’s Categories and On Interpretation, plus Porphyry’s introduction and some works of Cicero and Boethius. (Anthony Kenny An Illustrated Brief History of Western Phılosophy, Blackwell Publishing 2006 p.135)
Abelard was an innovator in ethics no less than in logic. He was the first medieval writer to give a treatise the title Ethics, and unlike his medieval successors he did not have
Aristotle’s Ethics to take as a starting point. But here his innovations were less happy.
Abelard objected to the common teaching that killing people or committing adultery was wrong. What is wrong, he said, is not the action, but the state of mind in which it is done. It is incorrect, however, to say that what matters is a persons’s will, if by ‘will’ we mean a desire for something for its own sake. (Anthony Kenny An Illustrated Brief History of Western Phılosophy, Blackwell Publishing 2006 p.137)
Averroes
The other significant philosophers of the age were the Arab Averroes and the Jew Maimonides. Both of them were natives of Cordoba in Muslim
Spain, then the foremost centre of artistic and literary culture in the whole of Europe. (Anthony Kenny An Illustrated Brief History of Western
Phılosophy, Blackwell Publishing 2006 p.139)
Averroes’ importance on the history of philosophy derives from his
commentaries on Aristotle (see Plate 8). These came in three sizes: short, intermediate, and long. For some of Aristotle’s works all three
commentaries are extant, for some two, and for some only one; some survive in the original Arabic, some in translations into Hebrew and Latin.
(Anthony Kenny An Illustrated Brief History of Western Phılosophy,
Blackwell Publishing 2006 p.139)
Maimonides
Maimonides wrote copiously, in both Hebrew and Arabic, on rabbinic law and on
medicine, but as a philosopher he is known for his book The Guide for the Perplexed, which was designed to reconcile the apparent contradictions between philosophy and religion which troubled believers. (Anthony Kenny An Illustrated Brief History of
Western Phılosophy, Blackwell Publishing 2006 p.141.)
Maimonides’ account of the structure and operation of the natural world was indeed taken largely from Aristotle, ‘the summit of human intelligence’. But as a believer in the Jewish doctrine that the world was created within time to fulfil a divine purpose, he rejected the Aristotelian conception of an eternal universe with fixed and
necessary species. It is disgraceful to think, he says, that God could not lengthen the wing of a fly. (Anthony Kenny An Illustrated Brief History of Western Phılosophy,
Blackwell Publishing 2006 p.142.)
The aim of life, for Maimonides, is to know, love, and imitate God. Both the prophet and the philosopher can come to the knowledge of whatever can be known about God, but the prophet can do so more swiftly and surely. (Anthony Kenny An Illustrated Brief History of Western Phılosophy, Blackwell Publishing 2006 p.142.)
