Medieval Philosophy
- LAST REVIEWED: 28 November 2022
- LAST MODIFIED: 26 June 2012
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396577-0172
- LAST REVIEWED: 28 November 2022
- LAST MODIFIED: 26 June 2012
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396577-0172
Introduction
Medieval philosophy includes the four branches of a single tradition, rooted principally in the Platonic-Aristotelian schools of Late Antiquity: Latin philosophy (from western Europe), Greek philosophy (from Byzantium), Arabic philosophy (in Islam), and Jewish philosophy (in Arabic and Hebrew). Although most writers follow this division, some group Jewish philosophy in Arabic along with Islamic and Christian philosophy in that language. The chronological boundaries of the period are disputed. Although “medieval” philosophy in Latin begins only at the Court of Charlemagne (late 8th century), surveys usually begin with Boethius (d. c. 525) or go back to Augustine (d. 430). The Arabic tradition begins shortly after the Islamic empire has been established, in the mid-8th century, and Jewish-Arabic philosophy begins a little later. Some historians of Byzantine philosophy start with ancient Greek Christian writers such as Origen (d. c. 254), whereas others begin with Photius, in the 9th century. The end point of medieval philosophy is even less easily discernible, except for the Greek tradition, which dwindles after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Many historians of Latin medieval philosophy bring their subject to a close by this date or before, but philosophers such as Suárez (d. 1617) are considered to be strongly medieval in their outlook and methods. Fifteenth and 16th-century Latin philosophy, or some of it, is often labeled as “Renaissance” rather than medieval, but there seems to be no principled criteria for the distinction, which is also sometimes applied to Jewish philosophy (in Hebrew and by then in Latin too). As for Arabic philosophy, historians now recognize that it did not die with Averroes in 1198 but continued to flourish in the Islamic East until the 17th century and beyond. Given the restrictions of space, this bibliography starts from c. 500 and goes to c. 1500, but these starting and stopping points are arbitrary. Until the 1970s or 1980s, the historiography of medieval philosophy tended to be Christian in perspective, much of it heavily influenced by Neoscholasticism. Aquinas (d. 1274) was seen as the outstanding figure, and the Islamic and Jewish traditions were studied merely for their contribution to the Christian tradition he represented. Recent work, however, has brought out the importance of the Islamic and Jewish traditions in their own right, and of Latin philosophy before and after the 13th century. It has also recognized especially the importance and technical sophistication of medieval logic and the closeness in philosophical method and approach between medieval and contemporary analytic thinkers.
General Overviews
Although there are many general surveys of medieval philosophy available, most reflect a rather narrow view of the subject, dominated by Latin philosophy in the 13th century, and fail to introduce the range of the subject as it has emerged in the light of recent research. For this reason, the General Overviews is divided into three sorts: those that try to look at each of The Four Main Traditions, those that concentrate mostly or exclusively on The Latin Tradition, and those devoted to one of the Non-Latin Traditions.
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- Action
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- Adorno, Theodor
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- Anscombe, G. E. M.
- Anthropic Principle, The
- Anti-Natalism
- Applied Ethics
- Aquinas, Thomas
- Argument Mapping
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- Art and Morality
- Artifacts
- Assertion
- Astell, Mary
- Atheism
- Augustine
- Aurelius, Marcus
- Austin, J. L.
- Autonomy
- Bacon, Francis
- Bayesianism
- Beauty
- Belief
- Bergson, Henri
- Berkeley, George
- Biology, Philosophy of
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- British Idealism
- Buber, Martin
- Buddhist Philosophy
- Burge, Tyler
- Business Ethics
- Camus, Albert
- Canterbury, Anselm of
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- Causation
- Cavendish, Margaret
- Certainty
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- Childhood, Philosophy of
- Chinese Philosophy
- Cognitive Ability
- Cognitive Phenomenology
- Cognitive Science, Philosophy of
- Coherentism
- Color
- Communitarianism
- Computational Science
- Computer Science, Philosophy of
- Computer Simulations
- Comte, Auguste
- Concepts
- Conceptual Role Semantics
- Conditionals
- Confirmation
- Confucius
- Connectionism
- Consciousness
- Constructive Empiricism
- Contemporary Hylomorphism
- Contextualism
- Contrastivism
- Cook Wilson, John
- Cosmology, Philosophy of
- Critical Theory
- Culture and Cognition
- Daoism and Philosophy
- Davidson, Donald
- de Beauvoir, Simone
- de Montaigne, Michel
- Death
- Decision Theory
- Deleuze, Gilles
- Democracy
- Depiction
- Derrida, Jacques
- Descartes, René
- Descartes, René: Sensory Representations
- Descriptions
- Dewey, John
- Dialetheism
- Disability
- Disagreement, Epistemology of
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- Dispositions
- Divine Command Theory
- Doing and Allowing
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- Dummett, Michael
- Dutch Book Arguments
- Early Modern Philosophy, 1600-1750
- Eastern Orthodox Philosophical Thought
- Education, Philosophy of
- Emotion
- Engineering, Philosophy and Ethics of
- Environmental Philosophy
- Epicurus
- Epistemic Basing Relation
- Epistemic Defeat
- Epistemic Injustice
- Epistemic Justification
- Epistemic Philosophy of Logic
- Epistemology
- Epistemology and Active Externalism
- Epistemology, Bayesian
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- Epistemology of Education
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- Ethical Deontology
- Ethical Intuitionism
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- Evidential Support Relation In Epistemology, The
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- Evolutionary Debunking Arguments in Ethics
- Evolutionary Epistemology
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- Extended Mind Thesis, The
- Externalism and Internalism in the Philosophy of Mind
- Faith, Conceptions of
- Fatalism
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- Feminist Philosophy
- Feyerabend, Paul
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- Fiction
- Fictionalism
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- Foucault, Michel
- Free Will
- Frege, Gottlob
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- Generics
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- God, Arguments for the Existence of
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- Hart, H. L. A.
- Heaven and Hell
- Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: Aesthetics
- Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: Metaphysics
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- Heidegger, Martin: Early Works
- Hermeneutics
- Higher Education, Philosophy of
- History, Philosophy of
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- Horkheimer, Max
- Human Rights
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- Husserl, Edmund
- Idealizations in Science
- Identity in Physics
- Images
- Imagination
- Imagination and Belief
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- Impossible Worlds
- Incommensurability in Science
- Indian Philosophy
- Indispensability of Mathematics
- Inductive Reasoning
- Infinitism
- Instruments in Science
- Intellectual Humility
- Intentionality, Collective
- Intuitions
- James, William
- Japanese Philosophy
- Kant and the Laws of Nature
- Kant, Immanuel: Aesthetics and Teleology
- Kant, Immanuel: Ethics
- Kant, Immanuel: Theoretical Philosophy
- Kierkegaard, Søren
- Knowledge
- Knowledge-first Epistemology
- Knowledge-How
- Kristeva, Julia
- Kuhn, Thomas S.
- Lacan, Jacques
- Lakatos, Imre
- Langer, Susanne
- Language of Thought
- Language, Philosophy of
- Latin American Philosophy
- Laws of Nature
- Legal Epistemology
- Legal Philosophy
- Legal Positivism
- Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm
- Levinas, Emmanuel
- Lewis, C. I.
- Liberty
- Literature, Philosophy of
- Locke, John
- Locke, John: Identity, Persons, and Personal Identity
- Logic
- Lottery and Preface Paradoxes, The
- Lucretius
- Machiavelli, Niccolò
- Martin Heidegger: Later Works
- Martin Heidegger: Middle Works
- Marx, Karl
- Material Constitution
- Mathematical Explanation
- Mathematical Pluralism
- Mathematical Structuralism
- Mathematics, Ontology of
- Mathematics, Philosophy of
- Mathematics, Visual Thinking in
- McDowell, John
- McTaggart, John
- Meaning of Life, The
- Mechanisms in Science
- Medically Assisted Dying
- Medicine, Contemporary Philosophy of
- Medieval Logic
- Medieval Philosophy
- Memory
- Mental Causation
- Mereology
- Merleau-Ponty, Maurice
- Meta-epistemological Skepticism
- Metaepistemology
- Metaethics
- Metametaphysics
- Metaphilosophy
- Metaphor
- Metaphysical Grounding
- Metaphysics, Contemporary
- Metaphysics, Feminist
- Midgley, Mary
- Mill, John Stuart
- Mind, Metaphysics of
- Modal Epistemology
- Modality
- Models and Theories in Science
- Modularity
- Montesquieu
- Moore, G. E.
- Moral Contractualism
- Moral Naturalism and Nonnaturalism
- Moral Responsibility
- Multiculturalism
- Murdoch, Iris
- Music, Analytic Philosophy of
- Nationalism
- Natural Kinds
- Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mathematics
- Naïve Realism
- Neo-Confucianism
- Neuroscience, Philosophy of
- Nietzsche, Friedrich
- Nonexistent Objects
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- Normative Foundations, Philosophy of Law:
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- Objectivity
- Occasionalism
- Olfaction
- Ontological Dependence
- Ontology of Art
- Ordinary Objects
- Other Minds
- Pacifism
- Pain
- Panpsychism
- Paradoxes
- Particularism in Ethics
- Pascal, Blaise
- Paternalism
- Patriotism
- Peirce, Charles Sanders
- Perception, Cognition, Action
- Perception, The Problem of
- Perfectionism
- Persistence
- Personal Identity
- Phenomenal Concepts
- Phenomenal Conservatism
- Phenomenology
- Philosophy for Children
- Photography, Analytic Philosophy of
- Physicalism
- Physicalism and Metaphysical Naturalism
- Physics, Experiments in
- Plato
- Plotinus
- Political Epistemology
- Political Obligation
- Political Philosophy
- Popper, Karl
- Pornography and Objectification, Analytic Approaches to
- Practical Knowledge
- Practical Moral Skepticism
- Practical Reason
- Pragmatics
- Pragmatism
- Probabilistic Representations of Belief
- Probability, Interpretations of
- Problem of Divine Hiddenness, The
- Problem of Evil, The
- Propositions
- Psychology, Philosophy of
- Punishment
- Pyrrhonism
- Qualia
- Quietism
- Quine, W. V. O.
- Race
- Racist Jokes
- Rationalism
- Rationality
- Rawls, John: Moral and Political Philosophy
- Realism and Anti-Realism
- Realism, Pictorial
- Realization
- Reasons in Epistemology
- Reductionism in Biology
- Reference, Theory of
- Reid, Thomas
- Relativism
- Reliabilism
- Religion, Philosophy of
- Religious Belief, Epistemology of
- Religious Experience
- Religious Pluralism
- Ricoeur, Paul
- Rights
- Risk, Philosophy of
- Rorty, Richard
- Rousseau, Jean-Jacques
- Rule-Following
- Russell, Bertrand
- Ryle, Gilbert
- Sartre, Jean-Paul
- Schopenhauer, Arthur
- Science and Religion
- Science, Theoretical Virtues in
- Scientific Explanation
- Scientific Progress
- Scientific Realism
- Scientific Representation
- Scientific Revolutions
- Scotus, Duns
- Self-Knowledge
- Sellars, Wilfrid
- Semantic Externalism
- Semantic Minimalism
- Semiotics
- Seneca
- Senses, The
- Sensitivity Principle in Epistemology
- Shepherd, Mary
- Singular Thought
- Situated Cognition
- Situationism and Virtue Theory
- Skepticism, Contemporary
- Skepticism, History of
- Slurs, Pejoratives, and Hate Speech
- Smith, Adam: Moral and Political Philosophy
- Social Aspects of Scientific Knowledge
- Social Epistemology
- Social Identity
- Sounds and Auditory Perception
- Space and Time
- Speech Acts
- Spinoza, Baruch
- Stebbing, Susan
- Strawson, P. F.
- Structural Realism
- Suicide
- Supererogation
- Supervenience
- Tarski, Alfred
- Technology, Philosophy of
- Testimony, Epistemology of
- Theoretical Terms in Science
- Thomas Aquinas' Philosophy of Religion
- Thought Experiments
- Time and Tense
- Time Travel
- Toleration
- Torture
- Transcendental Arguments
- Tropes
- Trust
- Truth
- Truth and the Aim of Belief
- Truthmaking
- Turing Test
- Two-Dimensional Semantics
- Understanding
- Uniqueness and Permissiveness in Epistemology
- Utilitarianism
- Vagueness
- Value of Knowledge
- Vienna Circle
- Virtue Epistemology
- Virtue Ethics
- Virtues, Epistemic
- Virtues, Intellectual
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- War
- Weakness of Will
- Weil, Simone
- Well-Being
- William of Ockham
- Williams, Bernard
- Wisdom
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- Wittgenstein, Ludwig: Later Works
- Wittgenstein, Ludwig: Middle Works
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