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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Locating the Self Within the Soul – Thirteenth-Century Discussions

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According to the traditional picture of the history of Western philosophy the High Middle Ages was intellectually Aristotelian, dominated by the Thomist approach. To some extent, this picture was formed already in the Early Modern Era, when many important thinkers distinguished their own philosophy from that of the scholastics. The university philosophy rejected by Descartes, for example, was indeed characteristically Aristotelian, and to a considerable extent even based on a thirteenth-century interpretation of Aristotle by Thomas Aquinas. It may be true that the scholastic philosophy, superseded in the seventeenth century by new approaches, was a direct extension of certain Classical trends. However, as a description of what really happened in thirteenth-century Western philosophy, simply categorising it as “unoriginal Aristotelianism” is clearly inappropriate. In fact, many of the crucial philosophical innovations typically associated with early modern thinkers were already established in the thirteenth century or at the latest in the beginning of the fourteenth century. We should not, thus, locate the borderline between Classical and Modern thinking at the Renaissance, as is often done. But it seems equally inappropriate to locate it at the fall of the Roman Empire, like Jonathan Swift did in his tale Battle of the Books. On the contrary, medieval philosophers were in deep debt to classical civilization. The dark centuries in the latter half of the first millennium did imply a significant break in Western European philosophical thinking, but it is nevertheless clear that the medieval schools were established on the basis of the literary heritage of Classical tradition, in the Latin community almost as directly as on the Arabic side. It was only little by little that the discussions in medieval universities were able to formulate from this material new kinds of philosophical thinking that could be called distinctively modern. The historical picture looks remarkably similar to this also in the case of the philosophy of the self. Medieval philosophers brewed modern thought from classical materials. The first full century of university life, the thirteenth century, initially saw a radical expansion in the knowledge and command of the ancient literary material, and then a radical re-evaluation of the deeper philosophical issues involved. The century began with an approach that can broadly be regarded as Platonist. The philosophy of self, in particular, was at first largely based on an Augustinian brand of the neoplatonic–stoic thinking, which was dominant in the