The rise and fall of Rome follows the golden age of ancient Greece. Greek philosophical traditions undergo assorted transformations during this period, but Rome is not known for making significant original contributions to either philosophy or science. Intellectual progress requires a degree of liberty not so available in the Roman Empire. Additionally, the intellectual talent and energy available in ancient Rome would have been pretty fully occupied with the demands of expanding and sustaining political power and order. Rome had more use for engineers than scientists, and more use for bureaucrats than philosophers.
Christianity becomes the dominate religion in Rome after emperor Constantine converts in the 4th century A.D. Plato’s philosophy provides much of the basis for what will become orthodox Catholic doctrine, more specifically known as Neoplatonism (see the video in Part 1). In the 4th century, the great Christian philosopher Augustine, after a rather dissolute and free-wheeling youth, studies Plato and Neoplatonism and find’s much to make Christianity reasonable by way of these philosophical systems.
With the rise of the Catholic Church, learning and inquiry are pursued largely exclusively in the service of religion for well over a millennium. Philosophy in this period is often described as the handmaiden of theology. The relationship between philosophy and theology is perhaps a bit more ambiguous, though. As we’ve just noted in the case of Augustine, much ancient Greek philosophy gets infused into Catholic orthodoxy. But at the same time, the new faith of Christianity spearheads an anti-intellectual movement in which libraries are destroyed and most ancient Greek thought is lost to the world forever.
Through the West’s period of Catholic orthodoxy, most of what we know of Greek science and philosophy, most notably Aristotle’s thought, survived in the Islamic world. What remains of the complete works of Aristotle covers subjects as far ranging as metaphysics, ethics, politics, rhetoric, physics, biology, and astronomy, and amounts to enough writing to fill 1500 pages in the fine print translation on my bookshelf. But even this consists largely of lecture notes and fragments. Most of his polished prose is lost forever.
The Crusades, which were a series of conflicts between the Christian and Islamic world towards the end of the middle ages, offered occasion for cultural exchange, and the Crusades led to the re-introduction of Aristotle and other ancient Greek scholarship to the west. Aristotle’s philosophy and science was too carefully reasoned, systematic, and subtle to be dismissed as pointless pagan speculation. Instead, Christian thinkers in the west set out to understand Aristotle and interpret him a manner that would cohere with Catholic doctrine. St. Thomas Aquinas is the most famous philosopher to engage in this work of Christianizing Aristotle. He found ways to harness Aristotle’s metaphysical arguments in the cause of advocating the existence of a Christian God.
Aristotle’s views about the natural world quickly come to be received as the established truth in the Christian world. Aristotle’s physics, for instance becomes the standard scientific view about the natural world in Europe. Aristotle also wrote about the methods of science, and he was much more empirical than his teacher Plato. Aristotle thought the way to learn about the natural world was to make careful observations and infer general principles from these. For instance, as an early biologist, Aristotle dissected hundreds of species of animals to learn about anatomy and physiology. The Scholastics who studied Aristotle obviously did not adopt the methods Aristotle recommended. But some other people did. Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Copernicus were among the few brave souls to turn a critical eye to the natural world itself and, employing methods Aristotle would have approved of, began to challenge the views of Aristotle that the Scholastics had made a matter of doctrine. Thus begins the Scientific Revolution, which informs and is informed by Modern Philosophy….
View: Great Medieval Philosophers: Augustine and Aquinas
Philosophy of Religion (Films on Demand historical overview about philosophy of religion)
