Medieval Philosophy - Bryan Magee & Anthony Kenny (1987)

for purposes of teaching it's customary to divide history at least the history of the West into certain very broad periods such as ancient medieval and modern and we do exactly the same thing with philosophy we talk of ancient philosophy medieval philosophy and modern philosophy and you'll find that most histories of philosophy are divided into those three sections ancient philosophy is dominated by the writings of two people Plato and Aristotle of course there were other important and interesting philosophers in the ancient world not only before Plato and Aristotle but also after them but no one who has left writings of comparable quantity caliber and influence if you went to a university to study ancient philosophy you'd find yourself spending most of your time and perhaps even all of it on the work of those two philosophers you'd then probably skip straight from Aristotle to modern philosophy jumping over the medieval period entirely medieval philosophy is for a long time been the Cinderella of the subject's

history and we're talking now about a period of a thousand years or more from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance I think the chief reason for this is that throughout that period virtually every important philosopher was an ecclesiastic whereas in the century or two leading up to our own time there's been a widespread reaction against religion especially against its hold on thought during that reaction medieval philosophers came under suspicion of not pursuing the truth wherever it might lead but of trying to find good reasons for what they believed already like most reactions including healthy ones this one went too far the greatest medieval philosophers were true Giants doing genuine philosophy as we understand it today and we can still learn a lot from them as in the case of ancient philosophy among the medieval philosophers there are also two figures who stand out from the rest though in this case they're at almost opposite ends of the period from each other Saint Augustine was born in North Africa

in the year 354 A.D and died there in 430. two of his books are still universally acknowledged as being among the world's great literature the confessions and the City of God the other figure of comparable stature is Thomas Aquinas who was born in Italy in the year 1225 and died there in 1274. he was a much more technical sort of philosopher than Augustine his most famous works are two enormous compendia one called Suma Contra Gentiles which has been translated into English under the title on the truth of the Catholic faith and the other summer theologiai or summary of theology the death of Saint Augustine and the fall of the Roman Empire were followed by the period we call the Dark Ages during those centuries it was as much as the literate and learned in Western Europe could do to cling to the remnants of civilization they saw their role as essentially preservative and for a long time scarcely any new intellectual work of lasting importance was done during the 700 years from Augustine to Anselm there

was only one philosopher of the front rank John the Scott who lived in the 9th century but once we get to Anselm in the 11th century we embark on a steady flow of significant thinkers just a few of the names are abelard in the 12th century Roger Bacon and Thomas Aquinas in the 13th then done scotus followed by William of Arkham and then the medieval period itself is beginning to come to an end to tell us a little about this long but unfamiliar and fascinating period in philosophy's history I've invited the master of baleel College Oxford Anthony Kenny one of the few contemporary philosophers who have written extensively about medieval philosophy and himself a former Roman Catholic priest Anthony Kenny before we start talking about specific issues or the work of individual philosophers is there anything you'd like to add to that very brief sketch map of the period that I put forward just now I'd agree with the your choice of two philosophers to sum up the achievement of the Middle Ages Augustine and Aquinas

but they are both very different people Augustine is a solitary thinker somebody who's best known work as you said is an autobiography is confessions a book drawing enormously on his own meditation his own reading of the Bible his own interior life Aquinas is very different he lives as you said at a much later period and Aquinas is not a solitary figure he is somebody right in the middle of a religious and academic tradition he is one of the great order of Dominican Friars he lived his life within communities of Friars he's also a university teacher one of his great achievements was the production of these two magnificent University textbooks that's what his great works are they're essentially University textbooks an enormous contrast with Augustine who was such a lonely figure that at the end of his life when he was a bishop he was the only man in the whole town who had any books at all these These are in fact two perennial types of the philosopher aren't they the lonely isolated introspective thinker and the

institution man the university teacher yes as you go on in the history of philosophy you'll find people falling into these two types in the pattern of Augustine you have the solitary Geniuses like Descartes and Spinoza spinning their thought out of their own heads as it were you also have the Learned University professors like Kant and Hegel developing systems which were then to be handed on and modified to pupils and later generations of philosophers now it's during the period that we're discussing the Middle Ages that universities were invented and this very fact had a simply enormous influence on philosophy didn't it and the way it was taught the way it was studied can you say a little bit about that yes I think that is one of the most important contributions of the Middle Ages to philosophy is that it founded the university by University meaning a corporation of people engaged professionally full-time on the teaching of a corpus of knowledge handing it on to their pupils having an agreed syllabus having agreed methods of

teaching and having very high Professional Standards it's very remarkable thing how professional philosophy was in the Middle Ages first of all there's just the enormous output of the philosophers Aquinas wrote at about the lowest estimate eight million words there are a number of other disputed Works which might bring it up to 11 million now 8 million words is a lot to write the whole of the surviving works of Aristotle are only a million Works words the whole of the surviving works of Plato are only half a million Aquinas in quite a short lifetime writes 8 million words and they're not words just tossed off they're words that Scholars to this day can argue about the meaning of so the output is enormous the rigor is very great aquinas's works bear the stamp of the medieval technique of disputation it was one of the great medieval methods of teaching the teacher would put up two of his pupils a senior and Junior one the senior pupil would have to defend some particular thesis for instance that the

world was not created in time or for that matter the world was created in time the opposite thesis would have to be presented and the main thesis attacked by one of the other pupils the two would argue it out with each other they had to argue according to strict logical rules and then the teacher would settle the dispute try to bring out what was true in what had been said by one what was wrong in the criticisms made by the others and if you open Saint Thomas's summer theologia though it's not itself a record of of live disputations it Bears the stamp of that whenever Aquinas is going to present a particular Doctrine or philosophical thesis or theological thesis he begins by presenting three of the strongest arguments he can think of against the truth of that thesis a marvelous intellectual discipline it prevents you from taking things for granted makes you think now who have I got to convince of what and what are the strongest things they could say on the other side that's those are two of the things the

voluminous output the rigorous method of presentation then there's the syllabus a university syllabus means that you have a lot of topics which anybody going to University is expected to learn a corpus of knowledge that they're expected to master state of the art which they have to reach and then they add their own little bit their own little Stone to the can of the scientific edifice and then hand it on to their pupils hopefully enhance but it must be preserved now in the Middle Ages the syllabus is set especially by the surviving works of Aristotle Aristotle's works at the beginning of the high Middle Ages were translated into Latin very few of the great medieval philosophers could read Greek but they had good translations of Aristotle and they worked a way to extract all the knowledge that it was possible to expect from Aristotle and then develop it and I want to put you about the period as a whole it may sound at first blush rather a parochial question but it could possibly have an interesting explanation by way

of answer I think any British person coming to the study of medieval philosophy is likely to be struck by how very many of the leading figures either came from the British Islands or splinter very significant part of their career here says something like Archbishop of Canterbury I mean that's true of those I mentioned in my introduction it's true of John the Scott Saint Anselm Roger Bacon dance scotus William vaucom is a cheer coincidence or is there actually an interesting explanation for it I think it is a striking fact but I think that it's an optical illusion if it suggests that there was something specially British about philosophy I wasn't suggesting in the Middle Ages uh it's true that a lot of the philosophers spent some of their time in Britain and some of them were British by birth but after all Anselm one of your figures was in fact an Italian and Dan scotus and William of ochem spent quite a lot of their time on the continent the reason why if you picked any country you would be able to say quite a number

of the great philosophers spent time here it was because the European university community in the Middle Ages was very much a European Community the Christendom the the nations of Christianity were all a single academic Community is somebody graduating in one University would go and teach in another University all the universities spoke a Common Language the Latin of the church and there was a great deal of academic migration at least in the Early Middle Ages later on you'll get nationalistic Wars like the Hundred Years War between England and France that means that you get an interruption of travel you get the development of the vernacular literatures which means that people even if they go on speaking Latin are beginning to think in English it's a significant fact I think that the the last of the really great medieval philosophers um was John Wycliffe just after William of Arkham and he was also of course is well known for the translation of the Bible into English whether he did it himself or whether he got a gang of his

pupils to do it he was the inspiration of the translation of the Bible he stands at the end of the international Latin academic community and at the beginning of the gradual fission of the different National cultures in their own languages now one uh concern that was perennial throughout the Middle Ages among philosophers and you just started to touch on this earlier was the desire to reconcile the great classic philosophers of ancient Greece Plato in the earlier Middle Ages predominantly perhaps Aristotle in the later and ages with the Christian religion wasn't it that was something they were preoccupied with from beginning to end can you say something about that that was particularly so with regard to Aquinas and those who succeeded him Augustine was much more interested I think in the philosophy of Plato than he was of Aristotle and he was very much more interested in the the Bible as a source of knowledge and information than he was in any philosopher at all Augustine's presence Broods over the

whole of the Middle Ages and he's regarded by the later medieval philosophers as you might say the best codification of all the religious knowledge that's to be found in the Christian tradition Through the Bible in Saint Paul and then through Saint Augustine Aristotle is translated into Latin they begin to realize in the 12th and 13th centuries that there's another great Corpus of information about the world about human beings about why we're here about where we're going what we should do and that is the philosophy of the Ancients and especially of Aristotle Aristotle was a genius in so many different ways he founded so many of the disciplines that later grew into branches of philosophy and later grew into branches of science such as logic metaphysics biology psychology botany meteorology all these and many others are Sciences which really began with Aristotle and the most mature version of these Sciences available to the Early Middle Ages was the presentation I was going to ask you a question which Bears

on that but the question really is this why did they care because of their commitment to the Christian religion were they not of the view that Christianity provided them with all the knowledge of the nature of things that they already needed Christianity provided them with enough knowledge for for salvation that the The Humble Russian woman who knew the truths of the Christian faith and was completely ignorance of the ignorant of the science of the Ancients she had just as much chance of getting to heaven and living in glory with God as somebody has learned as Thomas Aquinas but it would be quite wrong to think of them of people like Aquinas as having only their eye on religion they were men of intellectual curiosity who wanted to know all they could about human beings and about the world of course they were interested in human beings in the world as God's creatures but they thought that God had not only things to tell the world through the sacred books like the Bible but that we could learn a great

deal about God's plans by looking at God's Own creation by looking at the world and what the different Sciences could tell us about them I think something that struck me very heavily when I came to read medieval Philosophy for the first time was how much of it didn't have to do with religion I mean how much really solid work in logic there is how much linguistic analysis of the very modern seeming kind to us there is and then work in things like um mechanics or psychology I mean the the field is enormously wide isn't it oh it is it's the The Germ of many of the Sciences which now have set up house on their own after the Renaissance set up as disciplines on their own they're all to be found as where children growing up in this great household of philosophy in the Middle Ages the titles of some of the professors at the ancient universities uh Echo this I mean there is a professor of physics in Oxford whose title is Professor of natural philosophy because that was how the discipline of physics began as the study

of natural philosophy itself a meditation on the text of Aristotle called the physics the Aristotelian Works themselves traced out the syllabus for the Middle Ages Aristotle's work began with the logic which the science which he created and which grew enormously in the Middle Ages one of the first things which anybody going to a medieval University would learn was logic and we've rediscovered in recent years many highly refined theorems and techniques of logic which were quite familiar to beginning undergraduates towards the end of the Middle Ages logic at the Renaissance and the Reformation was cut off short and only a small truncated torso of logic was then taught in most European universities until the end of the 19th century then in the 19th century a new generation of logicians mathematical logicians people like gotlab Fraga in Germany and Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead in Cambridge they coming to logic from a different Viewpoint from a mathematical Viewpoint tracing mathematics back to its origins in logic

they set on foot a great new Rebirth of logic one of its flowerings was principia Mathematica the great work in which Russell and Whitehead tried to show that the whole of arithmetic could be derived simply from Pure logical truisms if you study them systematically enough this Rebirth of logic in the present Century led to the rediscovery in the 30s and later branches of logic which had been totally lost since the Middle Ages and it's only in my own generation that people have begun to put the two together and realize that some of the most modern ideas of logic were things that were well known in the Middle Ages would it be true to say that that philosophy has studied and taught in Western Europe was logic centered in the Middle Ages is logic centered now but hasn't been for most of the period in between would that be true I would agree with that and I think it's why one sometimes gets an extraordinary feeling of sympathy and familiarity coming from a modern philosophical background and

reading late medieval and I say that that was true for me in a very strong way when I read writers like Dan scotus and William moroccum for the first time it was like reading the young Bertrand Russell you mentioned or Fraga I mean these were people obviously uh serving in the same shop so to speak we're in business at the same stand I expected it to be something alien and distant and strange and quite to the contrary it was something utterly familiar to me after the Middle Ages people lost interest in logic and to a great extent lost interest in in language at least lost interest in the philosophical study of language they were very interested in the rhetorical and literary study of language but lost interest in the philosophical study of language from Descartes onwards philosophers put epistemology in the center of their discipline that is the question how do we know what do we know how can we know what we know logic and language go to the background since Fraga and Russell and in the present generation

particularly in Britain and America logic and language are in the Forefront of philosophy the Philosopher's great question nowadays is not what do you know but what do you mean and the question of the meaning of what we say the insistence that any other question whether it's in science or mathematics or anything thing else must be accompanied with a very careful awareness of what we mean by asking the question if we're ever to get an answer that's something that was very typical of the Middle Ages and is typical of philosophy again now but had disappeared in the intervening period now I suppose the commonest charge made against medieval philosophy in general and I mentioned this in my introduction to this discussion is the charge that because it was carried out by people who were already committed before they started to the Christian faith they weren't really as I put it earlier pursuing the truth wherever it might lead they were looking for good reasons for what they already believed what

would your answer be to that accusation well first of all I'd say that it isn't necessarily a serious charge against a philosopher to say that he's looking for good reasons for what he already believes in Descartes for instance sitting beside his fire wearing his dressing gown was looking for good reasons for believing that and took a remarkable long time to find them Bertrand Russell who accused Aquinas of not being a real philosopher because he was looking for reasons for what he already believed it's extraordinary that that accusation should be made by Russell who in that book principia Mathematica which I mentioned takes hundreds of pages to prove to you that two and two make four which is something he's believed all his life but more seriously I think that well I mean it's worth interrupting at that point I think to to say quite explicitly that provided it's acknowledged in a fully professional way that the goodness of the reasons is essential then in a way it doesn't matter what you already

believe provided arguments and reasons are subjected without limit to fully rigorous tests yes I think that's right it doesn't matter what you believe as a philosopher the the philosopher is the person whose task it is to tell good arguments from bad and uh it doesn't in a way matter what the starting or ending point is for a philosophy it may matter a lot for other reasons indeed the distinction that you and I have just made between what you believe and the reasons for which you believe it is something that was very much brought out by Thomas Aquinas perhaps more than by any other philosopher because he was committed to a lot of beliefs as a Christian there were a lot of other things which he believed because she'd read Aristotle and he's very careful to make a distinction between these things a distinction which we might say in modern terminology is making a distinction between his job as a theologian and his job as a philosopher he sees his job as a theologian above all to articulate make explicit and

defend the revelation of the history of the world and the future of the world and the salvation of the world contained in the sacred books of Christianity and in the teaching of the church as a as a philosopher his job is to get as far as he can in discovering what kind of place the world is in what truths we know necessary truths about the world and about all of thought just using the unaided reason not appealing to any alleged divine revelation he makes a very striking point with regard to one specific issue about that which sticks in my mind he says at one point that if one considers the philosophical arguments then there is no uh compelling reason why one shouldn't believe that the world has always existed but as a Christian he doesn't believe that he Believe As a Christian he believes that the world had a beginning because God created it that's right that's a very good example there there were a number of Christian philosophers who thought that you could prove that the world must have had a beginning essentially because

they didn't believe in certain kinds of infinite series Aquinas shows the flaws in their arguments and says no there's nothing self-contradictory in the idea that the world went on has gone on forever and will go on forever as indeed Aristotle believed it had so that Aquinas thinks that with the unaided human reason you cannot prove that the world had a beginning equally you can't prove that it didn't have a beginning and he objects to Aristotle who thought it could Aquinas is much more agnostic as a philosophy he says you can't prove it either way um if you asked him well then why do you believe that the world did have a beginning he'd say well because it says so in the first verse of the Book of Genesis in the Bible but that's something I believe as a Christian as a theologian not as a philosopher you mentioned his two great works at the beginning the summer Contra Gentiles and the summer theologiai summer Contra Gentiles is meant as a philosophical work that is it's directed to people who

are not Christians who may be Muslims who may be Jews who may be atheists and it aims to present them with purely human reasons with reasons that any human being of Good Will can see to be good reasons for believing that there is a God that the soul is Immortal and so on the son of theology is very different it's addressed to Christians it does accept as being good starting points for arguments that it says in the Bible such and such though there's an enormous amount of philosophical reflection contained in this work even though its title describes it as a book of theology hey now a particular issue about which there was uh argument throughout the period the existence of God and whether or not this could be demonstrated uh as you say uh it was clear to Christian philosophers that if we were addressing Muslims or Jews it was no word appealing to the authority of the church or the Bible because Muslims didn't accept that Authority so you were thrown back on argument and they seemed to me to have taken a very professional

view of precisely what what did and what did not constitute a good argument in this field now I suppose the most famous of all Arguments for the existence of God in the history of philosophy at any rate is the ontological argument it crops up later in Descartes in Spinoza in leibniz it's even of interest to a number of philosophers today and it's classic formulation was in the 11th century by sundansen can you tell us what it was yes but perhaps before I do that I ought to explain to our listeners what an ontological argument is what's meant by the word ontologically that is it in the Middle Ages and later there were two different kinds of arguments offered for the existence of God one set of which the best known are the five ways of Saint Thomas Aquinas they take us their starting point some feature of the external World usually some very obvious feature of the external world as that some things move from place to place or that some things come into existence and go out of existence starting with those and a few

Universal truths of philosophy uh Saint Thomas will offer to prove to you that there is something which is recognizable as what all men called God there are cosmological arguments because they begin from the cosmos but the ontological argument is a kind of argument which is meant to begin just from the notion of God from the very conception of God you don't we have to go outside the realm of ideas to get its starting point are they as you said the most well-known formulation now it is that of sentence indeed syndance film seems to have been the inventor of the ontological argument whereas the other arguments are developments of things to be found in Aristotle now Anselm's argument is very ingenious it takes as its starting point a definition of God he says well God is is something that you can't conceive anything greater there now that seems a pretty harmless definition of God and somebody who didn't believe in God might might accept it as a definition and after all if you don't believe in something you need a

definition of what it is you don't believe in certain atheist might agree all right I accept that definition of God as something that you can't conceive anything greater than well then Anselm will say to the atheist well let's suppose that that God only exists in the mind and not in reality of course you've got to agree that God exists in the mind because you're thinking of him at this very moment and that's a way of him existing in the mind but now if God existed only in the mind and not in reality then you could conceive of something greater than God because you could conceive of something that was exactly like the god you're just conceiving of only existed in reality as well as in your mind and that would be greater therefore there would be something greater than God but God was something that couldn't be that then which you could conceive nothing greater and you've just conceived of something greater than God that's an absurdity it's something self-contradictory what led us to this contradictory result

was the assumption that God existed only in the mind and not in reality therefore we have to say that God exists in reality as well now that's the sort of argument that when one hears anyone intelligent nowadays who hears it is almost bound to think well there's something wrong with this but the disconcerting fact is that when you try to put your finger on precisely what it is that is wrong with it it's very difficult to do so isn't it yes I agree with you I'm one of those who think there's something wrong with that argument but it's not any particularly modern uh vision of philosophy that makes people think there's something wrong with the argument some Thomas Aquinas spends quite a bit of time trying to prove to you that there's something wrong with that argument he wasn't convinced by it either but the most interesting thing is that a lot of the great philosophers through history have thought there was something wrong with the argument they all give different reasons for saying what's

wrong with it and to this day there isn't any consensus about what is wrong with it indeed there isn't any consensus that there's something wrong with it at all and there is a recently has grown up in America a group of philosophers of religion using the latest techniques of mathematicized logic to revamp the argument and to try and present it in a way which is convincing within the background structures of contemporary logic it would take too long and I would need a Blackboard to spell out how they do it but it's something which when I was first coming to philosophy was thought of as completely dead dark it is now alive and living in Indiana and in California earlier you were drawing certain parallels between medieval philosophy and modern philosophy I mean and uh you've given us another one now with interest in the Revival of interest in the ontological argument you were saying earlier that um logic in the Middle Ages was Language Center uh uh well yes just to a large degree logic and language

centered and that's again true now though it wasn't true for much of the period in between and there seems to be another way in which philosophy now can be likened to philosophy then and that is that after a long period in which model philosophers uh were not concerned with specific problems of living but were concerned with the analysis of logical arguments and Concepts and so on they are now coming back to being concerned with what philosophers call first order problems now that was so in the Middle Ages wasn't it for most of the time this again is a fairly recent change in the anglo-american philosophy that you and I were brought up in um I think at the time when we were starting philosophy we would be told that the it wasn't the task of the moral philosopher to tell you whether it was ever permissible to tell lies or whether there was anything wrong with adultery or what were the criteria by which you would decide whether a war was being justly and fairly waged and so on these were thought to be matters of importance

no doubt but not the business of the philosopher the Philosopher's task was a second order task it was to analyze the language and Concepts which we used to make these first order decisions whereas in the last decade I think there has been a great swing of Interest back to the real live moral questions as being something which concerns philosophers as philosophers not just as Citizens or model human beings there's been an enormous input from philosophers into questions of medical ethics for instance questions of the preservation of life and of such questions as when it is right to turn off lights of life support systems whether it's right to experiment on embryos and so on after all in this country it was a philosopher Mary Warner who chaired the committee of inquiry into that uh there's been in particular um an interest in the relationship between moral philosophy and the waging of warfare I'd like to I'd like us to take this up because you yourself have written a book recently about nuclear

deterrence and one question to which you have to address yourself is Central to your book is either are there any imaginable circumstances in which nuclear war would be justified and you refer to the whole medieval tradition of discussion of the just war and you say in your own book that you think that any intelligent person ought to take an interest in these arguments can you tell us something about what they were yes the theory of the just war is something of which there's the germ in the Middle Ages in Aquinas and in later thinkers it gets more developed just after the end of the Middle Ages in the post-medieval Scholastics but it is the question about in what circumstances is it morally right to wage war and if you go to war what moral constraints are there on the way in which you wage war on what you choose as targets what you do with prisoners and things like that now the theory of the just war is a theory in the middle between two opposing views on the one hand there's the pacifist view that there's no such

thing as a just War all wars are immoral and wicked no matter how Noble the causes are for which they are waged on the other hand there's what you might call the view that no Wars are unjust that is that though war is a terrible thing once you get into war there are no moral laws at all the only moral imperative is just to win the war by the most effective possible means now the tradition of the just War says no neither of those are true there are some values that are more important than life itself and therefore values for which you can legitimately make war but within War they have to be constraints uh the they have to has to be a a good reason for going to war they're the values for which you go to war have to be ones really important enough to defend in that way and when you go to war there are constraints on what you choose as targets there must be no deliberate killing of the innocent whether by the innocent you mean civilians not involved in the war making or um ex-combatants who are now prisoners

and so on now it's very interesting I think that this medieval just War tradition lies behind two of the most significant contributions to the debate recently about nuclear weapons in this country the Church of England's book the church and the bomb and in the United States uh the Pastoral letter of the American Catholic Bishops on the use of nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence much of what you've been saying refers though you didn't mention the name to the work of Thomas Aquinas isn't it the case that Aquinas is now as it were the official philosopher of the Roman Catholic Church I think we've just about come to the end of the period in which it that could have been said before the 19th century though he was held in enormous respect I don't think he was in any way the official philosopher of the Roman Catholic Church he was perhaps the official philosopher of the Dominican order but that's only a small part of the Catholic church then in the late 19th century pope Leo the 13th wrote an

encyclical letter giving him a special place in the teaching of philosophy and theology in Catholic seminaries and universities second Council I have the impression that the hold of Aquinas on Catholic institutions has become much looser and he's been replaced largely by other philosophers I think not always by philosophers who are um deserves better not not always better but I think in fact the reputation of Aquinas in the non-catholic world has enormously gained from the fact that he's now no longer seen as just the spokesman for a party line and particularly in the United States there's a growing interest in his work by people who aren't Catholics perhaps aren't even Christians at all who are just impressed by the sheer philosophical Genius of the man I'd like to take up one other question which is always of interest to people outside philosophy as well as in it and which was of special interest to philosophers in the Middle Ages and that concerns the question of what what extent we have

free will uh in the Middle Ages it was particularly important to Christian thinkers because of the doctrine of grace the doctor according to the doctrine of grace it simply is not up to us as individuals whether to secure our own salvation I mean whether or not we will be saved depends at least in part on Divine Grace but if that is so then to what extent do we have free will in any respect that matters I mean that that was in a way the num of the problem can you tell us something about that well there were two problems in the Middle Ages interwoven but one of them a philosophical problem and one a theological problem the philosophical problem was the problem of reconciling Divine foreknowledge and human freedom because not only medieval philosophers but most ancient philosophers and Islamic philosophers who had considered the nature of God thought that one of the things that we knew about God if we knew anything about him at all was that he could foretell the future that he knew what was going to happen in the

future well of course if we are free if you and I are free it looks as if what you and I decide to do today is what determines what's going to be the future tomorrow but if God already knows what you and I are doing tomorrow how can we be free to decide that today now that's a problem which arises for anybody who believes in an omniscient God at all whether or not they believe in anything that the Bible says about God but there was a special problem for Christians especially for Christians who took the version of Christianity presented by Saint Augustine because Saint Augustine particularly in his later days lay his enormous emphasis on the fact that on the doctrine that nobody achieved salvation goes to glory in heaven unless they're predestined to do so by God and that was an extra problem for Christians but what is interesting philosophically is that the patient work which was done by the theologians and philosophers in the Middle Ages unraveling the concepts of freedom and the concepts of

determinism to try to show that the tour can be reconciled replicated often in ignorance today by people who are not interested in God at all but are interested in determinism and physical scientific scientific determinism but the actual logical moves which somebody in the 20th century will use who's trying to reconcile physical determinism with our experience of Freedom will be the same steps being gone through as somebody in the 14th century trying to reconcile Divine predestination with human freedom the last we're going to have to draw this discussion to a close if uh anything that we've said stimulate some of our viewers to go off and try and read some medieval philosophy no doubt in most cases for the first time in their lives have you any advice that you give them about where to start I think that they there are not many medieval Works which are easier for beginners this is because of what I said about it most of the great works being within a university tradition they are highly

Technical University textbooks but there are two short books that one could pick out the first is the one you yourself began with Augustine's confessions I think that's a wonderful work well it's one of the greatest autobiographies ever written and I think it's probably the first autobiography in the modern sense ever written it's full of a great deal of personal reflection of tender memory of his family of insight into his own childhood and his own development but it also moves on to the most abstract levels of philosophizing at the end of it raising questions about the nature of time which are still very much alive um the other book which I would recommend is the pros logion of sentence cell which is the book in which he presents that ingenious argument for the existence of God that I tried to paraphrase earlier on I think your readers might find this interesting to to look at that book it only takes an afternoon to read and see whether they think I represented his argument rightly and see whether they find it convincing

I said right at the beginning of this discussion in my introduction that for a long time medieval philosophy has been the Cinderella of the subject and there's no doubt that has been true in the past but I'm also beginning to get the impression of that that and your own writings are perhaps one of the swallows that pressage this Summer that there are all the signs of a Revival of Interest a serious Revival of Interest not quite perhaps with us yet but on the way do you perceive that of course it's only true of anglo-american philosophy that medieval philosophy has been a Cinderella on the continent medieval philosophy has been thriving for as a a subject of study for quite a long time I think that the Revival in English-speaking philosophy at the moment is particularly in America where there's a great Revival of interest in all things medieval not just in medieval philosophy thank you very much Anthony Kennedy thank you