History of medieval philosophy [LPHIB002]

Learning outcomes

This course is designed to enable students to acquire an attitude towards the understanding of medieval thought and more particularly of philosophical reflection as it developed in this period of history. This work of understanding will be acquired by the student through the manipulation of several tools. • First of all, the student will be confronted with a lecture on a given subject. The student will have to follow the lecture and work on the material according to the teacher's instructions. The content of the lecture changes every year. The teacher will provide a support for the course and a bibliography. At the end of the course, the student must demonstrate mastery of the subject and knowledge of at least one title from the bibliography. • Secondly, the student will have to choose, from the bibliography indicated, a history of philosophy and study it. A list of questions concerning the same history of philosophy will be provided to the student as a guide for the study. At the end of the course, the student will have to demonstrate knowledge of the history of philosophy in its general features and with regard to the fundamental authors. At the end of the course, the student should be able to : • to have a thorough knowledge of the part of the subject developed in the lecture and to be able to provide, at least orally, a personal and critical view of it • master in its fundamental lines and more precisely for the most important authors, the history of philosophy of the ancient period.

Objectives

The main objective of the course is to familiarise the student with this period of the history of thought which is often perceived as being distant from our contemporary questions. Through the reading of texts from this tradition, the course aims to open the student to a greater understanding of the culture and thought of the Middle Ages, in order to discover what they still have to tell us that is important today.

Content

The programme of this year's medieval philosophy course will lead us to work on a certain number of notions that refer to fundamental ethical themes. These themes were developed in an original way by medieval authors but have often been misunderstood. These are themes that will lead us to reflect on happiness, good and evil, freedom, desire, will, moral conscience. Generally speaking, contemporary philosophical reflection believes that these categories can only be described in a "factual" way, referring to the experience that each person can have of them in his or her existence. The medievals, on the contrary, testify that it is possible to speak of desire, freedom, will, and moral conscience in a way that is universally acceptable to all, because they recognize these categories as data proper to human nature as such. The course will seek to explore this problematic and test this hypothesis. Alongside this, the relationship between Will and Intelligence will be explored. How did the medievalists think about this relationship? How did they envisage the will in relation to moral conscience? What about the 'weakness' of the will, the 'freedom' to do evil and therefore the notion of sin, of guilt too? To do this, we will try to work on the notion of moral conscience or syndesis, as developed in the 13th century by Thomas Aquinas in particular. The purpose of the analysis is twofold: • to show how the articulation between knowledge of the good and practical good action was to be thought of; • to elucidate the anthropology that makes possible such thinking about moral consciousness and good action From the historical point of view, it is a question of clarifying the controversy that animated the medievalists (in the 13th and 14th centuries especially) concerning the relationship between will and intelligence around the question of which was the nobler virtue: to know God or to love him? The Franciscans (e.g. Bonaventure and Duns Scotus) gave priority to love and therefore to the will; the Dominicans (e.g. Master Eckhart) to knowledge, and therefore to the intelligence. Since this controversy is based on a long history of medieval philosophy that goes back to Augustine via Anselm and Abelard, the course will study these authors first.Introduction: medieval philosophy and its history.