Medieval Philosophy: Key Figures and Concepts

Posted on Jan 10, 2025 in Philosophy and ethics

Medieval Philosophy

Patristic Philosophy

Patristic philosophy encompasses the thought of philosophers from the first century Christians to the fifth century. It is not a formally structured and systematic philosophy. The Christian religion, which is not a philosophy, needed to reconcile its teachings with the thought of the time.

Reason and faith are closely related because God is the only truth:

  • Faith needs reason: reason helps to see the rational motives.
  • Reason presupposes faith: reason alone is not sufficient to reach the truth because it is limited and imperfect; it needs faith.
  • They have a mutual cooperation: there are many truths that cannot be known without faith, and reason can also better inform faith.

Scholastic philosophy was the philosophy taught in schools.

Saint Augustine

Reason and faith are brought into a mutual relationship so that there is no opposition or confrontation: they need each other.

For the Augustinian, there is no separation between philosophy and theology, between faith and reason. Both work together in solidarity to get to the truth: reason serves faith, and faith illumines reason. Reason alone, without faith, cannot reach the truth (which is God).

Saint Anselm of Canterbury

For him, without faith, you cannot reach the truth. He follows the same line of thought as Saint Augustine on faith and reason.

Of great importance is his ontological argument to prove the existence of God. This is to prove the existence of God from the very idea of God:

“All men, even he that believeth not, has an idea, a definition of God: a being that is impossible to think of a greater than he”; “God understands, therefore, as being greater than which nothing might think.”

Averroes

He was called Aristotelian Averroes, and his fundamental theses were:

  1. The Eternity of the World: Following the Aristotelian cosmological model, Averroes considers the world eternal because the principle of motion is eternal. God is the unmoved mover that moves a timeless world in constant motion, a world that has always existed and that God does not even know. (God only knows himself)
  2. The Soul: The soul of every man is mortal, perishable, and corruptible.
  3. The Double Truth: Averroes asserts the double truth, that is, the existence of two truths, a theological and a philosophical, that is, a truth of faith and a truth of reason.

This was the attempt to defend the autonomy of reason against faith.

Saint Thomas Aquinas

  • He tried to provide a rational demonstration of the existence of God (5 ways).
  • There are truths of faith (theology) and truths of reason (philosophy).
  • God is a common content to faith and reason.
  • Mutual cooperation (No conflict can occur between the two because both come from God).
  • There is no contradiction (wrong reason). They are different but not contradictory. Reason and faith are separate.

General Argument of the Five Ways

  • We check through the senses that the world contains:
    • Things, things that move (1st way) (movement)
    • Beings that have a cause (2nd way) (efficient cause)
    • Contingent Beings (3rd way) (contingency and existence)
    • Beings with varying degrees of perfection (4th way)
    • Beings without intelligence, but act in order (5th way) (order of the world, theological way)
  • It turns out that:
    • Everything that moves is being moved by another, and implies an immobile mover (1st way).
    • Every being done involves an uncaused cause (2nd way).
    • Everything contingent requires a necessary being (3rd way).
    • Every imperfect being needs a perfect being (4th way).
    • Everything ordered requests a supreme being to be ordered (5th way).
  • Then there is an unmoved mover, uncaused cause, a necessary, perfect, supreme being.
  • As to this being, with these characteristics, we call God, God exists.