John Marenbon

This special issue grew out of a small conference The Known & the Unknown: Exploring Twelfth-Century Philosophy, which was funded by the Carlsberg Foundation, hosted by the Saxo Institute, and held at the University of Copenhagen in April 2018. Its central topic was the many, mostly unexplored, commentaries on Aristotle, Boethius, and Porphyry that constitute the key textual evidence for a fascinating phenomenon that, although it played a pivotal role in the philosophical revival of Western Europe, remains frustratingly underexplored to this day: the logical schools of the twelfth century. The present introduction has two parts. In the first part, John Marenbon lays out the background to this special issue of Vivarium as a whole, explaining both what the philosophical project pursued by twelfth-century logicians was and how, and how far, the historical project of understanding it has progressed over the last two hundred years. In the second part, Heine Hansen briefly presents the issue and its contents.

Pagans and Philosophers explores how writers—philosophers and theologians, but also poets such as Dante, Chaucer, and Langland, and travelers such as Las Casas and Ricci—tackled the Problem of Paganism. Augustine and Boethius set its terms, while Peter Abelard and John of Salisbury were important early advocates of pagan wisdom and virtue. University theologians such as Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, and Bradwardine, and later thinkers such as Ficino, Valla, More, Bayle, and Leibniz, explored the difficulty in depth. Meanwhile, Albert the Great inspired Boethius of Dacia and others to create a relativist conception of scientific knowledge that allowed Christian teachers to remain faithful Aristotelians. At the same time, early anthropologists such as John of Piano Carpini, John Mandeville, and Montaigne developed other sorts of relativism in response to the issue.

William of Ockham is known to be one of the major figures of the late Middle Ages. The scope and significance of his doctrine of human thought, however, has been a controversial issue among scholars in the last decade, and this book presents a full discussion of recent developments. Claude Panaccio proposes a richly documented and entirely original reinterpretation of Ockham's theory of concepts as a coherent blend of representationalism, conceptual atomism, and non reductionist nominalism, stressing in the process its special interest for current discussions in philosophy of mind and cognitive sciences.

Roberto Pinzani has written a closely-argued, highly original, valuable but difficult book. The Problem of Universals, indeed, is—and has been for nearly two centuries—the most frequently treated topic in medieval philosophy, and solutions to it proposed by two of the philosophers discussed here, Boethius and Abelard, have been examined countless times. But no one has before tried to cover the whole period, from circa 500 to circa 1150, looking in detail at a whole variety of writers. Moreover, what Pinzani has to say even about Boethius and Abelard is new.After a chapter setting out the problem, as he understands it, and looking especially at predication in Aristotle, Pinzani goes on to Boethius and then the...

Discusses Boethius's logical monographs: his treatises on division, on categorical syllogisms, and most importantly, his works on the theory of topical argument and on hypothetical syllogisms. The theory of topics, as developed in late antiquity and known almost entirely through Boethius, concerns the devising of arguments that rest on obvious general principles but are not, in their basic formulation, formally valid deductions. In his work on hypothetical syllogisms, Boethius seems to take account of Stoic propositional logic, but in fact, he does not properly grasp its principles. This chapter shows how Boethius's logical mongraphs fit with the Aristotelianizing approach of his commentaries.

After looking at the verse in the Consolation of Philosophy and other more literary aspects of it, this chapter proposes an interpretation of the work as a whole, which takes account of the fact that it is a prosimetrum – a genre in which the claims of learning were often challenged. Boethius, the chapter argues, regards philosophy with great respect, but considers it limited when it comes to providing a comprehensive and coherent understanding of the order of things. The differing attitudes of Boethius and Augustine, as Christians, to pagan Neoplatonism are contrasted.

For many of us, the term 'medieval philosophy' conjures up the figure of Thomas Aquinas, and is closely intertwined with religion. In this Very Short Introduction John Marenbon shows how medieval philosophy had a far broader reach than the thirteenth and fourteenth-century universities of Christian Europe, and is instead one of the most exciting and diversified periods in the history of thought.Introducing the coexisting strands of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish philosophy, Marenbon shows how these traditions all go back to the Platonic schools of late antiquity and explains the complex ways in which they are interlinked. Providing an overview of some of the main thinkers, such as Boethius, Abelard, al-Fârâbî, Avicenna, Maimonides, and Gersonides, and the topics, institutions and literary forms of medieval philosophy, he discusses in detail some of the key issues in medieval thought: universals; mind, body and mortality; foreknowledge and freedom; society and the best life. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

My article surveys philosophical discussions of Abelard over the last twenty years. Although Abelard has been a well-known figure for centuries, his most important logical works were published only in the twentieth century and, so I argue, the rediscovery of him as an important philosopher is recent and continuing. I concentrate especially on work that shows Abelard as the re-discoverer of propositional logic (Chris Martin); as a subtle explorer of problems about modality (Simo Knuuttila, Herbert Weidemann) and semantics (Klaus Jacobi); as a metaphysician before the reception of Aristotle's Metaphysics (Peter King); and as an ethical thinker who echoes the Stoics (Calvin Normore) and anticipates Kant (Peter King).

According to Alain de Libera, Boethius replies to Porphyry’s famous three questions about universals by using a theory of abstraction. Universals can exist only in thought, although they derive, through abstraction, from what is common in things. I contrast this “neutral abstractionism” with a “realist abstractionism” — the view that it is only by conceiving universals that humans are able properly to grasp the form or likeness according to which particulars belong to a given species or genus. I try to show that, in his second commentary on the Isagoge, Boethius is uncertain which sort of abstractionism to prefer, but in the Consolation he opts for realist abstractionism.

Boethius, though a Christian, worked in the tradition of the Neoplatonic schools, with their strong interest in Aristotelian logic and Platonic metaphysics. He is best known for his Consolation of Philosophy, which he wrote in prison awaiting execution. His works also include a long series of logical translations, commentaries and monographs and some short but densely-argued theological treatises, all of which were enormously influential on medieval thought. But Boethius was more than a writer who passed on important ancient ideas to the Middle Ages. The essays here by leading specialists, which cover all the main aspects of his writing and its influence, show that he was a distinctive thinker, whose arguments repay careful analysis and who used his literary talents in conjunction with his philosophical abilities to present a complex view of the world.

Although Abelard arrived at a view ofens nearer to Aristotle''s than his sources would suggest, unlike thirteenth-century thinkers he did not work out a view of transcendentals in terms ofens, its attributes and their convertibility. He did, however, regard unity (though not goodness or truth) as an attribute of every thing. At first, Abelard suggested that unity, being inseparable, could not be an accident according to Porphyry''s definition (that which can come and leave a subject without the subject being corrupted): either it is some type of form not classified by Porphyry, or not a form at all. In his later logical work, Abelard argued differently. Unity, he said, is an accidental form, but Porphyry''s definition of an accident must be understood negatively, not as asserting something about what could happen in reality (since the form of unity could never leave its subject) but rather something about an absence of connection: were it,per impossible, to occur, the loss by a subject of its form of unity would not lead to the loss of its specific or generic status.