A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein, Second Edition Read Online Free Page A
Author: Unknown Author
Consolation of Philosophy (one of the most popular works of philosophy ever to have been written), influenced his predecessor St Augustine (354-430 AD)—who nevertheless retained a sceptical stance towards much of Plato’s metaphysics—and reappears in one or another variant, described, upheld and celebrated in countless works of medieval and early Renaissance literature, from popular lyrics to such masterpieces of high art as Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, Dante’s Divine Comedy and Spenser’s Faerie Queene.
The consoling vision of neo-Platonic physics was accompanied, however, by no prescription against metaphysical uncertainty. At every point in the neo-Platonic system problems of seemingly insuperable difficulty were presented to the enquiring mind. What, for example, is this ‘reason’ upon which our knowledge of ultimate truth depends, and what are the laws of its operation? In what sense does it generate eternal, as opposed to transient, insights, and how do we learn to distinguish between the two? What is the nature of God, and how do we know of his existence? What are the laws which govern the movement and generation of sublunary things, and how is the Platonic hypothesis—that man’s residence among them is temporary, and that the end of his being lies elsewhere—compatible with his subjection to those laws? At every point the neo-Platonic cosmology raises problems of a philosophical kind. These problems seem not to be amenable to scientific resolution. On the contrary, they are posed precisely by the suggestion that sensory perception, which is the principal vehicle of scientific thought, leads us not to truth but to systematic (if sometimes persuasive) illusion.
As the theories of Aristotle began to become known among European thinkers—filtered through the writings of Arab philosophers and theologians who had gained them, as it were, by right of conquest— they were avidly studied as the source of new answers to these metaphysical queries. Some of the Aristotelian arguments were familiar to the early Christians. In particular, these arguments had been used in giving philosophical formulation to the doctrine of the Trinity. It was thanks to the philosophers of Alexandria, in particular to Clement (c. 150-215) and Origen (c. 185-254), both of whom had seen the inadequacies inherent in the neo-Platonism of their day, that all the resources of Greek philosophy were used together in the attempt to achieve a coherent statement of Christian dogma. And with the victory over Arianism, and the consequent acceptance of the doctrine of the Trinity, one of the most important of all Aristotelian concepts, the concept of substance, took a central place in the formulation of the credo of the Christian Church. Thus already, by the time that the Council of Nicaea (325) declared the Son to be consubstantial with the Father, a dependence of theology upon Aristotelian metaphysics had arisen. Boethius, in his writing on the Trinity and his surviving translations of Aristotle, did much to reinforce this dependence. But it was only later, at the end of the ‘dark ages’, that the full content of Aristotelian metaphysics began to enter into the philosophical speculations upon which the Christian world-view sought to found itself; and by then the Aristotelian theories had been systematised and adapted by such thinkers as Al-Farabi (875950), Avicenna (890-1037) and Averroes (c. 1125 to c. 1198), all of them Moslems, and Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), a Jew well versed in the philosophical speculations by which the doctrines of the Koran were currently supported. Aristotelian doctrine therefore entered the arena of theology already bearing the stamp of a monotheism which had found it congenial.
The final conversion of Christian theologians to Aristotelian ways of thinking occurred during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and led, with the founding of universities at such important centres as Paris and Padua, to the rise of
The consoling vision of neo-Platonic physics was accompanied, however, by no prescription against metaphysical uncertainty. At every point in the neo-Platonic system problems of seemingly insuperable difficulty were presented to the enquiring mind. What, for example, is this ‘reason’ upon which our knowledge of ultimate truth depends, and what are the laws of its operation? In what sense does it generate eternal, as opposed to transient, insights, and how do we learn to distinguish between the two? What is the nature of God, and how do we know of his existence? What are the laws which govern the movement and generation of sublunary things, and how is the Platonic hypothesis—that man’s residence among them is temporary, and that the end of his being lies elsewhere—compatible with his subjection to those laws? At every point the neo-Platonic cosmology raises problems of a philosophical kind. These problems seem not to be amenable to scientific resolution. On the contrary, they are posed precisely by the suggestion that sensory perception, which is the principal vehicle of scientific thought, leads us not to truth but to systematic (if sometimes persuasive) illusion.
As the theories of Aristotle began to become known among European thinkers—filtered through the writings of Arab philosophers and theologians who had gained them, as it were, by right of conquest— they were avidly studied as the source of new answers to these metaphysical queries. Some of the Aristotelian arguments were familiar to the early Christians. In particular, these arguments had been used in giving philosophical formulation to the doctrine of the Trinity. It was thanks to the philosophers of Alexandria, in particular to Clement (c. 150-215) and Origen (c. 185-254), both of whom had seen the inadequacies inherent in the neo-Platonism of their day, that all the resources of Greek philosophy were used together in the attempt to achieve a coherent statement of Christian dogma. And with the victory over Arianism, and the consequent acceptance of the doctrine of the Trinity, one of the most important of all Aristotelian concepts, the concept of substance, took a central place in the formulation of the credo of the Christian Church. Thus already, by the time that the Council of Nicaea (325) declared the Son to be consubstantial with the Father, a dependence of theology upon Aristotelian metaphysics had arisen. Boethius, in his writing on the Trinity and his surviving translations of Aristotle, did much to reinforce this dependence. But it was only later, at the end of the ‘dark ages’, that the full content of Aristotelian metaphysics began to enter into the philosophical speculations upon which the Christian world-view sought to found itself; and by then the Aristotelian theories had been systematised and adapted by such thinkers as Al-Farabi (875950), Avicenna (890-1037) and Averroes (c. 1125 to c. 1198), all of them Moslems, and Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), a Jew well versed in the philosophical speculations by which the doctrines of the Koran were currently supported. Aristotelian doctrine therefore entered the arena of theology already bearing the stamp of a monotheism which had found it congenial.
The final conversion of Christian theologians to Aristotelian ways of thinking occurred during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and led, with the founding of universities at such important centres as Paris and Padua, to the rise of
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