A crucial period for the West

Thirteenth Century Changes Christian West, a cultural and scientific backwater compared with Islamic East (Ibn Sina d.1037, Ghazali d.1111, Ibn Rushd d.1198, Maimonides d.1204) Universities established Trivium (logic, grammar, rhetoric) → Aristotelian philosophy (metaphysics, physics, psychology, biology, chemistry)

Aristotelian Science An essential start ≠ Modern Science Set questions Demanded consistency in terminology Precision & rigor Plato’s cosmology explains the order & beauty of the world as the end achieved by a maximally excellent creator.

Integrating Aristotelian philosophy  Why not rejected as a whole?  How was it transformed and transforming? Compendium philosophiae (1240) encyclopedia that shows how scholastics reconciled Plato and Aristotle on the rational soul.

On sense and understanding  Before Aristotle: divine illumination Augustine (active sensation, visual rays)  After Aristotle: God’s role in human cognition minimized Alhazen’s theory of intromission accepted Aristotle’s claim that all knowledge originates in the senses accepted; innate ideas sidelined.

Challenges Extramission & the Neoplatonic dictum Sense-based knowledge explananda:  how the soul receives species forms  why species don’t materially change the soul.  how the soul understands itself  why species don’t make the air sense objects.

7 Robert Grossetesete & Thomas Aquinas Grosseteste: less noble does not act on more n., but the presence of perceptual objects excites. Aquinas: perception is a passive process. Compendium: The intellect abstracts species from their matter so that it can unite with them.

Self-Perception Thomas twists: reflect on presence; abstract not general from the partic., but referencing truth Rufus takes a straight path: We understand our-selves as we understand the rest of the world, by receiving intelligible species. Compendium shares the nature of species, since the products of abstraction have intelligible natures. But the intellect is rather at rest than in motion and does not act on anything external to itself (112). It has a special faculty for apprehending simples like itself unerringly (106-7).

What makes a species different? the spirit problem: Spirit may be something active and invisible (heat, odor, tumor causing); something unextended (soul, point), something sacred (an angel) Compendium makes no attempt to explain the differences between bodily and spiritual. Both the sense and intellect are characterizes by spiritual motion. The passions of desire, fear and confidence and the actions of joy and love must be common to body and soul, because they affect the body (109).

Innate Ideas Theological doctrine: Each soul is individually created prior to birth with a complete set of ideas, but those ideas are obscured at birth. We do not know much about the origin of the soul except that God creates it from nothing (105). The faculties of the soul are innate and its apprehension of simple things is unerring (107, 111). The soul can contemplate immutable objects independently of the body (106). Accounting for intellectual errors is difficult ( ). The remedies are easy to specify – viz. education, virtue, and physical exercise (115).

Compendium’s Response to the Challenges: The soul is separable from the body, which irritates it (108), and does not act outside itself (112). The soul is like the species it receives, since they are intelligible not material (113).

Aristotle Transformed Aristotle not very well-known (105), and liberally supplemented by appeals to Plato and theological doctrine.