The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Disintegration of Scholasticism, 1100-1600

The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy comprises over fifty specially commissioned essays by experts on the philosophy of this period. Starting in the late eighth century, with the renewal of learning some centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire, a sequence of chapters takes the reader through developments in many and varied fields, including logic and language, natural philosophy, ethics, metaphysics, and theology. Close attention is paid to the context of medieval philosophy, with discussions of the rise of the universities and developments in the cultural and linguistic spheres. A striking feature is the continuous coverage of Islamic, Jewish, and Christian material. There are useful biographies of the philosophers, and a comprehensive bibliography. The volumes illuminate a rich and remarkable period in the history of philosophy and will be the authoritative source on medieval philosophy for the next generation of scholars and students alike.

The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy

The just war

The Oxford calculators

First philosophy, divine science, and the science of ‘being as being’ The recovery of Aristotle's Metaphysics by medieval Western thinkers prepared the way for them to concentrate on the science of ‘being as being’ in the high Middle Ages. This work was enhanced by the translation into Latin of Avicenna's Metaphysics in the twelfth century and of Averroes' Commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics in the early thirteenth century. But as medieval Latin thinkers began to examine Aristotle's text more closely, they encountered a problem of interpretation relating to the very nature of metaphysics. In Metaphysics IV, c. 1 (1003a21–32), Aristotle speaks of a science which studies being as being and contrasts it with more particular sciences which restrict themselves to investigating the attributes of a portion of being. But in Metaphysics VI, c. 1 (1026a23–32), after referring to his investigation of ‘beings as beings’ and presumably, therefore, to his science of being as being, Aristotle distinguishes three theoretical sciences – physics, mathematics, and first philosophy or ‘divine science’ – and then seems to justify the viability of the last-mentioned one only insofar as it concerns itself with separate and immobile entities. One might wonder whether this first philosophy or divine science can be identified with Aristotle's general science of being as being, a difficulty which he himself recognises. He concludes the discussion by asserting that if there were no separate and immobile entity, then physics would be the first science.

Essence and existence

IT is well known that Ennead VI contains an onslaught by Plotinus on Aristotle's Categories, but that his pupil, Porphyry, established both the Categories and Predicables as part of the Neoplatonic and eventually the Scholastic philosophical curriculum. So far as this situation has been studied, it has been for the most part from the standpoint of its extemal history. Philology has traced many of Plotinus's criticisms to the commentaries of the Middle Academy, and many of Porphyry's expressions to Stoic logicians; historical enquiry has found motives in the social position of the Schools for the Neoplatonic acceptance of Aristotle's logic. This valuable work, however, tends at best to ignore the philosophical understanding of both the criticism and the reinstatement of Aristotle, and at worst to give an erroneous account of the place of Neoplatonism in the history of logic. First, the criticism is of intrinsic philosophical interest, because it aims to shew that 'inseparable' universals, and the whole theory of genus and species, are unable to do the task required of them. Secondly, the logic which Porphyry and his successors reinstate resembles that of the Stoics in being stripped of certain metaphysical implications. The reason for this is not corruption of Platonism by the Stoa, but the inevitable effect of wanting Aristotle the elementary logician without Aristotle the metaphysician. And the result is that a good deal of credit has gone to the Stoics which was due to the Neoplatonists. Useful as it is, Prantl's work needs rewriting. This must not be misunderstood. In dealing with Neoplatonists we cannot be concerned, as we can in the case of Stoics, withformal logic. I doubt whether there is a single theorem whose discovery can be attributed to them." We are concerned with logic in a wide sense, which can for the present purposes be quite accurately defined as the sense in which the Categories and Predicables are logical doctrines. What Porphyry achieved what he was driven to achieve was a logic of this kind, which, merely because of its restricted metaphysical implications, was valuable to Boetius and the Schoolmen and important in the history of philosophy. It allowed Aristotelian logic to become an autonomous

A.C. Lloyd

Papers

Neoplatonic logic and Aristotelian logic-I