PHILOSOPHY IN THE
THIRTEENTH CENTURY
Saint Bonaventure
Bonaventure was the son of an Italian physician. According to Bonaventure we do
acquire information through our senses, but this by itself is inadequate to generate the clarity and certainty necessary for real knowledge. Only our inborn knowledge of God and his eternal reasons enables us to achieve the unchanging truth. Bonaventure accepts the distinction between the active and the receptive intellect, but unlike the Arabic philosophers he thinks they are both faculties of the individual soul. (Anthony Kenny An Illustrated Brief History of Western Phılosophy, Blackwell Publishing 2006 p.147.)
Bonaventure, though willing to make use of concepts drawn from Aristotle,was highly suspicious of the Aristotelianism just becoming fashionable in university faculties of Arts. In the latter half of the twelfth century many hitherto unknown texts of Aristotle had been translated into Latin; early in the thirteenth century these new versions flooded into the libraries of Western Europe. Aristotle’s Analytics and Topics were
available by 1159, a ‘New Logic’ to add to the Categories and De Interpretatione which had formed part of the traditional corpus deriving from Boethius. James of Venice, who translated part of the new logic, also put into Latin the Physics, the De Anima and part of the Metaphysics. (Anthony Kenny An Illustrated Brief History of Western Phılosophy, Blackwell Publishing 2006 p.148.)
St Thomas Aquinas
Aquinas’ philosophy of physics has been antiquated by the progress of natural science, and his treatment of logic has been rendered archaic by the development of mathematical logic in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But his
contributions to metaphysics, philosophy of religion, philosophical psychology and moral philosophy entitle him to an enduring place in the first rank of philosophers.
(Anthony Kenny An Illustrated Brief History of Western Phılosophy, Blackwell Publishing 2006 p.152.)
Aquinas’ most famous contribution to the philosophy of religion is the Five Ways or proofs of the existence of God to which he refers early in his Summa Theologiae.
(Anthony Kenny An Illustrated Brief History of Western Phılosophy, Blackwell Publishing 2006 p.152.)
The most valuable part of Aquinas’ philosophy of religion is his examination of the traditional attributes of God, such as eternity, omnipotence, omniscience,
benevolence. He takes great trouble with the exposition and resolution of many of the philosophical problems which they raise. (Anthony Kenny An Illustrated Brief History of Western Phılosophy, Blackwell Publishing 2006 p.153.)
In metaphysics Aquinas was a faithful follower of Aristotle – though not a slavish one, as the example of the eternal universe illustrates. He
accepted the analysis of material bodies in terms of matter and form, and the thesis that change is to be explained as the reception of different
successive forms in the same matter. (Anthony Kenny An Illustrated Brief History of Western Phılosophy, Blackwell Publishing 2006 p.154.)
Matter and form are the concepts used by Aristotelians to analyse
substantial change, the type of change when one kind of thing turns into another. To analyse the less drastic change when one and the same thing gains or loses a transient property (e.g. grows taller or becomes
sunburnt), the concepts used were substance and accident. (Anthony Kenny An Illustrated Brief History of Western Phılosophy, Blackwell Publishing 2006 p.154.)
