Medieval philosophy
Medieval philosophy is the philosophy of Western Europe and the Middle East during what is now known as the medieval era or the middle ages, roughly extending from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance. Medieval philosophy is defined partly by the rediscovery and further development of classical Greek and Hellenistic philosophy, and partly by the need to address theological problems and to integrate sacred doctrine with secular learning.
Some problems discussed throughout this period are the relation of faith to reason, the existence and unity of God, the object of theology and metaphysics, the problems of knowledge, of universals, and of individuation.
Philosophers from the middle Ages include the Muslim philosophers Alkindus, Alfarabi, Alhazen, Avicenna, Algazel, Avempace, Abubacer and Averroes; the Jewish philosophers Maimonides and Gersonides; and the Christian philosophers Anselim, Peter Abelard, Roger Bacon, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham and Jean Buridan.
Metaphysics, Epistemology and Ethics.
Students of Plato and other ancient philosophers divide philosophy into three parts: Ethics, Epistemology and Metaphysics. While generally accurate and certainly useful for pedagogical purposes, no rigid boundary separates the parts. Ethics, for example, concerns how one ought to live and focuses on pleasure, virtue, and happiness. Since, according to Plato and Socrates, virtue and happiness require knowledge, e.g., knowledge of goods and evils, Plato's ethics is inseparable from his epistemology. Epistemology is, broadly speaking, the study of what knowledge is and how one comes to have knowledge. Among the many topics included in epistemology are logic, belief, perception, language, science, and knowledge. Integral to all of these notions is that they typically are directed at something. Words refer to something; perception involves perceptible; knowledge requires a known. In this respect, epistemology cannot be investigated without regard to what there is.
Metaphysics, or alternatively ontology, is that branch of philosophy whose special concern is to answer the question ‘What is there?’ These expressions derive from Aristotle, Plato's student. In a collection of his works, the most detailed treatise on the general topic of things that are comes after a treatise on natural things, taphusika. Since the Greek for ‘after’ is Meta, this treatise is titled ‘Metaphysics’. In that work one finds the famous formula that (first) philosophy studies being the Greek for which is on qua being. Hence the account of being is ‘ontology’ the English suffix ‘-logy’ signifying ‘study of’: e.g., biology is the study of living things.
Metaphysics, then, studies the ways in which anything that is can be said or thought to be. Leaving to sciences like biology or physics or mathematics or psychology the task of addressing the special ways in which physical things, or living things, or mathematical objects, e.g., numbers, or souls (minds) come to have the peculiar qualities each, respectively, has, the subject-matter of metaphysics are principles common to everything. Perhaps the most general principle is: to be is to be something. Nothing just exists, we might say. This notion implies that each entity has at least some one feature or quality or property. Keeping at a general level, we can provisionally distinguish three factors involved when anything is whatever it is: there is that which bears or has the property, often called the ‘subject’, e.g., Socrates, the number three, or my soul; there is the property which is possessed; e.g., being thin, being odd, and being immortal; and there is the manner or way in which the property is tied or connected to the subject. For instance, while Socrates may be accidentally thin, since he can change, that is, gain and lose weight, three cannot fail to be odd nor, if Plato is correct, can the soul fail to be immortal. The metaphysician, then, considers physical or material things as well as immaterial items such as souls, god and numbers in order to study notions like property, subject, change, being essentially or accidentally.
The images of the central books do not settle the question of whether or not the objects of the different faculties are the same. In appealing to a contents analysis, fundamentally an analysis that takes propositions to be the contents or ‘objects’ of belief and knowledge, as opposed to the objects themselves, i.e., material particulars or Forms, one allows that there is a path from belief to knowledge. The same proposition can be believed, depending on one's reasons for holding the belief. But a contents analysis is not committed to a justified true belief account of all knowledge. It is left open that the knowledge of the Forms is somehow the basic. Descending the line furnishes justification for the claims of the diagnostic sciences and beliefs about the material world, including the states of affairs in actual cities. What to do about the basic knowledge of Forms is a key issue. Sun, Line and Cave suggest to many readers that the knowledge of Forms is intuitive. On the other hand, the refrain that one who knows can give an account of what he knows suggests knowledge by description or a propositional analysis. To emphasize relations between Forms, starting from the relation of the Good to all Forms, lends credence to the view that Plato is an epistemological holist. Holism is fueled by the search for definitions, since in order to know what, for instance, Human is, one must know all the elements of its definition, Animal, Rationality, Bipedality, and thus the definition of these elements, and so on. In order to know a given Form, one must know all the Forms, an extreme version of holism, or at least one must know all the Forms in a given science. The results of this analysis, the genera and species of a given science, are then hypostasized as Forms, nodes in a web or the elements of a field. There is a virtuous circle of justification.
Holist readings can also be combined with the narrow reading of recollection. The same proposition may well be entertained by the philosopher as by those who still rely on concepts gleaned from their everyday encounters. Whether or not one knows or believes that ‘The triangle has three sides’ depends on what one is doing with that content or how one is justifying one's belief. The problem is that if somehow knowing that the triangle has three sides makes ‘triangle’ in the statement refer to the Form, while believing that proposition makes it refer to something else, then the content of the two states is different, and the content of the states is different because, it seems, the objects of the two states are different. Or one can try to save one's holism by allowing that the different states of mind cause the propositions to be different. Those who see recollection as an act engaged in only by philosophers maintain that their concept differs from the empirically grounded concept of the non-re-collector, the occupant apparently of at least two of the other three stages of Line. But how one gets from the one concept to the other is unspecified. The concepts are linked by the ‘external fact’ that the temple, for instance, participates in Beauty. The holist program seems to entail that one can continue to add to beliefs about Beauty, where one is deploying the empirical concept, until one in a proper justificatory exercise acquires all the appropriately related beliefs about properties. Once that is accomplished, the philosophical concept is recollected. It remains open on this account, when one has recollected the Form and then descends, whether the contents of the philosopher's beliefs about the empirical world use the philosophical concept.
Those who read Plato as subscribing to different objects for Knowledge and Belief also need a story about how one gets from one stage to the next. If we assume that Forms are at work throughout the learning process, then Plato is best viewed as not identifying the Form with the propositional contents of his states. The same expression will, depending on the state of the agent, have different referents: the images; the material objects; some immaterial, abstract intermediary, or a mathematical in the case of dianoia. On the objects account, Plato has little to say about the status of the concepts deployed in thought. The Form of Equality is not the concept. The concept is present throughout the developmental life of the human. Because the Form is latent in the mind, sensation and everyday talk are capable of ‘triggering’ the concept. A select individual will come to disdain the senses and the material objects of the sensible world and try to explain what accounts for the similarities present in his experience. The first fundamental moment of transition seems to be a shift from the many particulars to some abstract general notion, an inchoate ‘one-over-many’. That she is able to isolate these ‘ones' at all is, according to the broad reading of recollection, due to the unconscious operation or influence of the Form that allows her to sort the perceptions into kinds. The ontological status of these kinds is not, as yet, clear to her. With the further development of her dialectical capacity, the philosopher-to-be comes to think that there are Forms; that is, comes to think that there are special entities variously related to particulars and property-instances. The objects of these beliefs are still not the Forms themselves, if the state of mind of the scientist is not yet knowledge. At this stage, one might even be in possession of the definition of the Form and still not have knowledge. Exactly why one lacks knowledge is hard to say. It is not, it seems, because he lacks beliefs about the relation the Forms bear to other mathematical notions. On the one hand, it is doubtful that Plato believes that one can know all of mathematics or that one can know what a triangle is only if one knows every other shape. On the other hand, the mathematician seems to know as much as would be needed to qualify as having knowledge of the mathematical Forms. The philosopher is not said to know more mathematics than the mathematician. He secures his knowledge in the way the mathematician can't.
If ‘more truths’ are added to the truths in the possession of the mathematician, these can only be truths about the nature of Forms. These higher logoi will then be general metaphysical principles about the role of the Good, the simplicity or complexity of Forms, the specification of the participation relation and so on (not a trivial ‘and so on’. ) Plato does then place fantastically high demands on knowledge. The desire to ensure irrefutability, perhaps the legacy of reflection on the Socratic elenchus drives him to the conclusion that one really has recollected the Form only when one has become a metaphysician. She needs to know the general metaphysical theory.
There is little reason to think that Plato espouses a holism of knowledge of the sort discussed above. Plato never says that the mathematician or the philosopher needs to know all the truths of mathematics or ethics to know some Form. Moreover, while Plato does prescribe a course of study in the Republic designed to promote one's dialectical abilities, and while it is agreed by both holists and intuitionists, those who allow for atomic knowledge of a Form, that the same Forms are the basic objects of knowledge, it does not follow that Plato thinks that there is only one way to secure knowledge of the Forms. If there are different paths to get knowledge, or different ways to know a given Form, then Plato's epistemology is liable to appear to be both holistic and acquaintance-like. As for when and where Recollection is operative, or whether Plato allows that a philosopher or scientist can know anything about the physical world, it is left to each reader of the dialogues to judge whether Plato is committed to gulfs between both the ordinary concepts of most humans and the special concepts of the few philosophers, as well as between the perfect Forms and the seemingly imperfect physical world. Since a Platonic dialogue is a dialectical conversation designed to summon the mind of the reader towards philosophizing, it is appropriate that each reader struggle to discover for himself What the Knowledge Is?
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