Medieval Christian philosophy

Philosophy · Medieval and Muslim philosophy. The idea in plain words, the rules to remember, the mistake to avoid and a worked example, written and checked by Mega Lecture.

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The idea

Medieval Christian thinkers used Greek philosophy to explain and defend their faith. Augustine (354 to 430) drew on Platonism. He taught that evil is not a substance but a privation, a lack of good, arising from the misuse of free will. He also held that time was created with the world, so God is eternal and outside time.

Thomas Aquinas (1225 to 1274) united Aristotle with Christian doctrine and gave five ways of arguing from the world to God.

The schools debated universals: does a general term such as 'humanity' name something real, or is it only a word? Scholasticism handled such questions by formal disputation, with the aim of reconciling faith and reason.

Rules to remember

Augustine's works: Confessions (his conversion) and The City of God
Augustine on time: past, present and future are measured in the mind as memory, attention and expectation
Aquinas's five ways (in the Summa Theologiae): motion (unmoved mover), efficient cause (first cause), contingency (a necessary being), degrees of perfection, governance of the world (things without knowledge act for ends)
The ontological argument belongs to Anselm, not Aquinas, who rejected it
Realism: universals really exist. Nominalism (William of Ockham): only individuals exist and universals are names
Moderate realism (Aquinas): universals exist in individual things and are abstracted by the mind
A Summa article: question, objections, 'on the contrary', the author's answer, replies to the objections

Common mistake

Listing the ontological argument among the five ways. All five ways start from facts about the world (a posteriori); Anselm's argument starts from the definition of God.

Worked example

A philosopher says: 'There is no such thing as redness over and above red things. "Red" is just a word we apply to many individual objects that look alike.' Which position on universals is this?

Realism would say that redness is something real, so this is not realism.
Moderate realism would say redness really exists in red things and the mind abstracts it; the speaker denies any such common nature.
The speaker allows only individual things and a shared name.

Answer: Nominalism, the view linked with William of Ockham.

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