Blackwell Readings in Medieval Philosophy - Fordham University ...

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General Introduction
Medieval Philosophy in Perspective
In the modern mind, the adjective “medieval” has often been associated with ideas of
darkness, dogmatism, oppression, and barbarity. This should not be surprising, if we consider
how modernity came to define itself, precisely in opposition to the medieval tradition,
as the Renaissance, the re-birth of ancient learning, the Reformation of a corrupt church, the
Enlightenment after an age of darkness, an Age of Reason after an age of ignorance and blind
faith. Even today, this mentality has its visible effects. To the intellectual reflexes of “the
modern mind” referred to above, the very phrase “medieval philosophy” until fairly recently
sounded almost like an oxymoron, indeed, so much so that in modern curricula of the history
of philosophy the medieval period was barely mentioned, and even nowadays it is skipped
by some philosophy departments, boldly leaping from ancient philosophy directly to the study
of Descartes (ignoring about two thousand years of Western intellectual history).
To be sure, this situation is happily changing. In the larger scheme of things this is probably
due to the fact that we live in a postmodern period, in which the grand, defining ideas
of modernity itself have become at least questionable, if not discredited, as a result of modern
historical experience (think world wars, industrialized genocides, global exploitation of
people and nature, the manipulative uses of “values,” ideologies and religions, etc.). This
postmodern perspective, by revealing the various limitations of the “grand ideas” of modernity,
naturally prompts historical and philosophical reflection on their validity in history,
and thus on their emergence from developments in the medieval period.
But, on a smaller scale, recent developments in philosophy as a profession also promoted
the growing interest in medieval philosophy. Perhaps the most important of these recent
changes is the transformation of mainstream analytic philosophy. Being the descendant
of early twentieth-century logical positivism, analytic philosophy used to be strongly
anti-metaphysical, secularist, and ahistorical (indeed, sometimes anti-historical: it was not
uncommon among analytic philosophers to sneer at the work of their historian colleagues
as consisting of book reports, as opposed to serious philosophy). By the 1980s (if not
earlier), however, analytic metaphysics emerged as a legitimate philosophical discipline,
followed by analytic philosophy of religion and a new interest in analytic historical studies,