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Marenbon, John. “Why Study Medieval Philosophy?” en Warum noch

Philosophie?Historische, systematische und gesellschaftliche
Positionen, Edited by Ackeren, Marcel / Kobusch, Theo / Müller, Jörn,
DE GRUYTER, 2011,Pages: 65–78

Why Study Medieval Philosophy?

John Marenbon

The simplest answer is a rather shocking one. ‘Medieval philosophy’

should not be studied at all! But this answer – as the inverted commas indi-
cate – is about the packaging rather than the goods themselves. There are
very good reasons for studying philosophers such as Boethius, Abelard,
Avicenna, Aquinas, Maimonides, Scotus, Ockham and many others, but
the term ‘medieval philosophy’ itself is unhelpful or even misleading, and
we would do better to drop it, and give up the subject-division for which it
stands. This is the theme of Part III. The subject of Part I is more general.
It considers the justifications for studying what I shall label ‘antiquated
philosophy’ of any sort. ‘Antiquated philosophy’ certainly includes the
texts usually labelled as medieval philosophy, and so Part I provides a
justification for why they should be studied; but there is a particular char-
acteristic – their frequent connection with revealed religion – which might
be used either to provide a different, special justification for studying them,
or, by contrast, a reason for thinking that the medieval material should be
excluded from the general justification. These two possibilities are the
theme of Part II.1

I. Studying antiquated philosophy: some justifications

Some of the philosophy of the past is connected with present-day phi-

losophizing, because it regularly provides at least the starting-points for
discussion. Many parts of the work of Hume, Kant and Frege, for exam-
ple, and certain aspects of Descartes, Leibniz and perhaps Aristotle are
connected to philosophy now in this way. For philosophy of the past

1
I have deliberately kept the annotation sparse. For those wishing to investigate
further into the methodological questions about medieval philosophy, see Aertsen
and Speer 1998, 19–68; Cameron/Marenbon 2011; Flasch 1987; de Libera 1991,
2000; Marenbon 2000; Rosemann 1999 and, for references to the older literature,
Marenbon 1987, 214 f.

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66 John Marenbon

which does not have such a connection, I shall use the description ‘anti-
quated philosophy’. Where past philosophy is not antiquated, no special
justification needs to be sought for studying it, because it clearly needs to
be studied as part of studying and practising contemporary, living phi-
losophy. By contrast, when it is antiquated, then studying it needs special
justification, beyond whatever justification there is for studying philoso-
phy itself.
Most historians of philosophy, and many philosophers themselves, will
object to the label ‘antiquated philosophy’. ‘Antiquated’ carries the impli-
cation of no longer being of value. A computer is antiquated when it can
no longer function with up-to-date programs, a custom is antiquated when
it serves no purpose in the modern world, but can philosophy be anti-
quated? Yet it is not a description that should be lightly dismissed. We
speak of ‘antiquated medicine’ and ‘antiquated physics’, and we do not
expect today’s doctors or physicists to devote professional time to them. If
there is a difference to be made in this respect between these subjects and
philosophy, it needs to be described and argued for. Indeed, this is pre-
cisely what is done by some of the justifications for studying antiquated
philosophy – they try to show that, in one way or another, even if philoso-
phy of the past lacks a connection with philosophy now, it remains valu-
able. The pejorative implication in the expression ‘antiquated philosophy’
is useful precisely because it points out the burden is on those who study it
to provide a justification of this sort or another.
It is easy to be lulled into a false security by the fact that even the most
analytical Department of Philosophy include in their undergraduate courses
a few great texts of philosophy from the past, including some that are,
arguably, antiquated. Since everyone agrees that such texts should be read,
there must be some reason to read them – so it is tempting to think. But
maybe they are there on the syllabuses just because no one has thought to
remove them, or because philosophers think, quite irrationally, that a show
of historical knowledge gives weight to their ideas.
For those whose special interest is medieval philosophy, the need to
find a justification is particularly pressing, because so much of it is anti-
quated. Writers from the Middle Ages like Anselm, Aquinas and Scotus do
provide the points of departure for some parts of contemporary work in
philosophy of religion, and so there are a few aspects of their thinking that
are not antiquated – but just a few.
Here, then, are six types of justification for studying antiquated philoso-
phy. They certainly do not cover the whole range of possible justifications,
nor all the positions different writers take. But much of the debate about this
area relies on a version of one or another or a combination of these views –

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Why Study Medieval Philosophy? 67

as, indeed, will a sixth type of justification, my own, which borrows some-
thing from most of these positions, but also offers something new.

(a) The ‘Philosophical’ Approach. Arguments and positions in antiquated

philosophy can be found which contribute usefully to contemporary discus-
sions.
This position is tantamount to saying that some or all antiquated philoso-
phy is antiquated only until it is rescued by someone who forges a link,
missing until now, between it and present-day philosophizing. Its advo-
cates accept the idea that philosophy can become antiquated, but being so
is a provisional condition (though presumably they accept that much past
philosophy will always remain antiquated).
It is hard to fault this argument in theory – if the philosophy ceases to
be antiquated, then studying it no longer needs a special justification. But
can arguments and positions in antiquated philosophy really be made to
contribute usefully to contemporary discussions? There are examples (for
instance, Aristotle’s virtue ethics, which was once antiquated but has been
made into a starting-point for some of the liveliest contemporary discus-
sions), but they are few and far between. Since the context of contempo-
rary philosophy, many of the concepts and the questions asked are so dif-
ferent from those in antiquated philosophy, it would seem very hard for
passages in it to be directly useful. Certainly, these philosophers of the
past may have contributed important ideas and arguments which have
become absorbed into the tradition of philosophy and have been gradually
adapted into the different contexts and languages of philosophy as it has
changed. But then these ideas and arguments will already be there, in the
tradition which students of philosophy learn as part of their apprentice-
ship, in a form in which they are useful, without there being any need to
go back to the old texts themselves.
It is sometimes said that there are directions of thought in past philoso-
phy which, it just so happened, were not followed up and were not ab-
sorbed into the philosophical tradition, although they have the capacity to
be philosophically fruitful. It is for the expert historian of philosophy to
search out these forgotten treasures, it is held, and present them to contem-
porary philosophers in a form in which they can use them in their own
philosophizing. So Gisela Striker writes: ‘there is the possibility of finding
in an older author different and illuminating perspectives that have, for one
reason or another, been forgotten or neglected by the more recent tradi-
tion.’ But does this happen much in practice? Striker cites, rightly, the
example of Aristotle’s ethics and also mentions Kant’s – but had Kantian
ethics ever become antiquated? She also mentions psychology, “where
philosophers have tried to look back beyond Descartes for theories that are

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68 John Marenbon

not tied to the dualism of mind and body.” (Striker 1996, xiii2) But medie-
val non-dualist theories are so different from contemporary ones in their
basis – even with regard to where any distinction between mind and body
might be drawn – that it is hard to say how they can be used by philoso-
phers now; and they do not in fact seem to have been used. Anyway, are
new philosophical insights so difficult to come by that it makes sense to
learn some difficult ancient language, spend years searching around in
neglected – usually justly neglected texts – in the hope, one day, of un-
earthing an original thought that had been forgotten and might, in some
way, be of interest to philosophers now? Would it not be simpler just to sit
down and think about the contemporary problems?

(b) The ‘Historical Approach’. Antiquated philosophy should be studied as

history, and is valuable as such.
Proponents of this position respond to the challenge posed by the notion of
antiquated philosophy by asking what is wrong with being antiquated. We
naturally have an interest in our past, they say, and part of our past is the
philosophy that was written then. We need to investigate it as we investi-
gate other types of history, by telling a causal story, explaining how and
why Aristotle, for instance, came to think the things he did (and which
were different from what Plato had thought), or how and why the questions
that fascinated the Parisian philosophers at the end of the twelfth century
were abandoned by the middle of the thirteenth for almost entirely differ-
ent ones. Such a story will have to take full account of all the factors, ex-
ternal and internal, that accounted for these developments – political and
economic changes, broad cultural movements, developments in educa-
tional practice. The history of philosophy is, then, intellectual history, and
intellectual history is just another branch of history, to be justified because
it answers our curiosity about the past. There is no more reason to neglect a
piece of philosophizing because it is antiquated – unconnected with present
debates – than there would be to stop studying trebuchets because they
have no part in modern warfare.
Yet when the history of philosophy is told in this way as intellectual
history, it rarely satisfies those who have a philosophical training and
know the texts well. The analysis seems superficial, if it can be called an

2
As part of a brief but multi-faceted justification. Striker also mentions “epistemol-
ogy, where empiricism, at least in the Anglophone tradition, seems to have reached
the status of an obvious fact rather than a philosophical theory.” Here the sort of
contribution which Striker has in mind for antiquated philosophy seems not to be so
much directly providing ideas or arguments, but showing how a whole area can be
envisaged otherwise – on which, see below, (f) Making the Familiar Strange.

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Why Study Medieval Philosophy? 69

analysis at all. And when a deeper analysis of arguments is given, histori-

ans lose interest, because the discussion has become too technical, too
philosophical.

(c) The Division of Labour Approach

A way of overcoming this inadequacy in the ‘Historical’ Approach might
be by a division of professional spheres – so the distinguished writer on
medieval philosophy Calvin Normore has suggested.3 The intellectual
historians tell the causal story, without worrying too much about analysing
arguments. The historians of philosophy analyse the arguments, with little
concern for causal stories. Everyone is happy. Or perhaps not – because
there are two problems that remain. First, since the historians of philoso-
phy seem not to have historical ends primarily in view – those ends are for
the intellectual historians – their ends are presumably philosophical ones;
and so they still need to find some adequate justification for those ends.
Second, many of the causal stories the so-called intellectual historian
should want to tell will involve internal analysis of arguments of the sort
which the division-of-labour view assigns to the historians of philosophy,
because more often than not the causes why philosophers write what they
write are internal: because A saw that the third step in B’s argument failed
on account of an equivocation; because C wanted to accept D’s first and
third premises, but not the second, which was inconsistent with what he
had established earlier … The labour cannot, therefore, be neatly divided.

(d) The Great Philosophers approach. Philosophy is so difficult that there

have only ever been a handful of really great philosophers. The great phi-
losophers are worth studying whenever they wrote.
Explaining why it is worth reading Aquinas, Anthony Kenny (1993, 9)
writes:

Philosophy is so all-embracing in its subject-matter, so wide in its field of op-

eration, that the achievement of a systematic philosophical overview of human
knowledge is something so difficult that only genius can do it. So vast is phi-
losophy that only a wholly exceptional mind can see the consequences of even
the simplest philosophical argument or conclusion. For all of us who are not
geniuses, the only way to come to grips with philosophy is by reaching up to
the mind of some great philosopher of the past.

Kenny is putting with characteristic force and clarity a view that is often
held, though not fully articulated, as a reason for studying some philosophy

3
See Normore 1990. I am following Normore roughly here, dropping his idiosyn-
cratic labeling of the philosopher’s approach to past philosophy as ‘doxology’.

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70 John Marenbon

of the past. Kenny combines the idea, as an exponent of this ‘Great Minds’
view is well advised to do, with a rejection of progress in philosophy in
any normal sense of the word. There are non-philosophical matters, such as
truths in the natural sciences, where we now know more than people in the
past, but ‘philosophical progress is largely progress in coming to terms
with, in understanding and interpreting, the thoughts of the great philoso-
phers of the past.’
Even if it is accepted, this line of justification does not justify studying
lots of what historians of philosophy (especially medieval philosophy) do
actually study – for instance, an anonymous commentary on Aristotle’s
Categories from the twelfth century, patched together from the teaching of
various uninspired, mediocre, imitative logicians, or the ruminations of an
uninspired disciple of Scotus. Moreover, the view that philosophical pro-
gress consists in a dialogue with past thinkers does not seem to reflect
accurately how work goes on in most of the specialized areas of analytic
philosophy, where so much of the debate concentrates on attacking, ex-
tending or qualifying the most recent contributions to it. True, texts by
philosophers of the past have often been the starting-points for these de-
bates, but then these texts are precisely those which are not labelled here as
‘antiquated’. (Very few of them are from the Middle Ages).
Although this view is not, then, entirely credible, it contains two very
interesting suggestions. First, it proposes a somewhat aesthetic approach to
philosophy, in which a work of philosophy is valued not because of the
number of conclusions it proposes that we are likely to find well-
established and wish to accept, but because of how well, how deeply and
broadly, it goes about the task of thinking philosophically. Secondly, this
view addresses itself, apparently, to philosophers, or would-be philoso-
phers, but it does not promise them direct answers to their questions or
contributions to their discussions from the philosophers of the past. Rather,
it says that people need to read the great philosophers (who are few, and
most of them antiquated) in order to see how philosophy is done at its best.
Studying philosophy from the past makes a contribution to doing philoso-
phy now, but an indirect, second-order one.

(e) The Philosophy as Literature approach

No one (except sometimes for officials in government departments) says
that, because Homer or Virgil or Shakespeare or Goethe lived long ago,
and the literary styles and ways of thought they used are far from today’s,
they are not worth studying, probably more so than even the best poetry
being written today. It might be argued that the same is true of good phi-
losophy from the past. It is no more subject to becoming antiquated than
the Iliad, Aeneid or King Lear.

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Why Study Medieval Philosophy? 71

This view has something in common with the last one; both see works
of philosophy in quasi-aesthetic terms. In one way, this approach has much
to recommend it. The Republic or the Meditations, we might want to say,
are books everyone should read, just as they should read the Iliad and King
Lear, or they will remain ignorant of what human culture has achieved. But
this parallel is not quite exact. The discrepancy is brought out if one asks
whether, by the same token, everyone should read Aristotle’s Prior Ana-
lytics or Scotus’s Ordinatio: as philosophy, these works are equally great
or greater, but they could never have a large public, because of their com-
plexity and technicality. If their value is to be considered aesthetic, it will
be more like that of the aesthetic value of a mathematical proof, evident
only to the eyes of highly-trained practitioners of a specialized discipline.

(f) Making the Familiar Strange

Bernard Williams was a subtle and original contemporary philosopher,
who also had a strong interest in the history of philosophy and wrote fre-
quently on it.4 Although he sharply distinguished himself and his philoso-
phical approach from that of an historian of ideas, he did not share the
usual aim of the Philosopher’s approach of arriving at a continuity between
a philosophical text from the past and present-day philosophers’ arguments
and positions. On the contrary, he sees the history of philosophy as, in part,
“of making the familiar seem strange.” “To justify its existence”, says
Williams, the history of philosophy “must maintain a historical distance
from the present, and it must do this in terms that sustain its identity as
philosophy. It is just to this extent that it can indeed be useful, because it is
just to this extent that it can help us to deploy ideas of the past in order to
understand our own.” (Williams 2006, 259)5
Williams’s idea indicates a way in which antiquated philosophy can
serve philosophy now, in virtue of its being antiquated! It is a very attrac-
tive view but one that has yet to be developed in more detail. Merely
exposing contemporary philosophers to a discussion of a kind that fails to
engage with their interests is not likely to have much direct effect. The

4
See Williams 1978, 1993, 2006.
5
In a planned general essay on the history of philosophy, for which Williams made
notes, he would have written, according to his friend Adrian Moore (Williams
2006, ix–x): “The contribution [of the history of philosophy to philosophy J.M.]
was not, as philosophers in the analytic tradition used to think, to indicate voices of
yore which could be heard as participating in contemporary debates: precisely not.
It was to indicate voices of yore which could not be heard as participating in con-
temporary debates, and which thereby called into question whatever assumptions
made contemporary debates possible.”

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72 John Marenbon

manner of the indirect effect that may be intended needs to be further

explored.
Moreover, maybe it is limiting to present the value of the history of
philosophy just in terms of how it can help contemporary philosophers,
even if that is one of its important functions.

(g) A better justification?

My own justification for studying antiquated philosophy, drawing on many
of the ideas just sketched, is this:
Studying the history of philosophy (most of which is antiquated) is a
way – a very good way, and probably an indispensable one – of coming to
understand what philosophy is. In their ordinary work, philosophers are
engaged in posing and trying to resolve philosophical problems; one of
these problems, which should be central for any genuinely committed phi-
losopher, is the question of what philosophy is: what sort of questions phi-
losophical questions are, and how and to what end they can be answered.
This problem, then, is a second-order problem, a reflection about phi-
losophers’ first-order activity. It is an open-ended problem, and knowing
about the history of philosophy helps – arguably, is intrinsic to – exploring
it. For philosophy is not a natural kind, but a human practice, or rather, a
family-resemblance of human practices, and understanding what it is rests
on understanding how it has been practised in history, what has been com-
mon to it, and what diverse, in different social and cultural circumstances.
If it is to meet this justification, history of philosophy must be pursued
in a way which always violates the distinction of spheres between histori-
ans of philosophy and intellectual historians by advocates of the Division
of Labour Approach. It must be a study of arguments, by those who under-
stand the arguments as philosophers (and so consider what objections can
be raised to them, how they could be extended or adapted), but of argu-
ments as developed in a real historical context, where external factors
played a part, too, in shaping how this or that individual reasoned on a
given subject. Such an approach can profitably used with any philosophy
of the past, antiquated or not. So, for instance, Frege might both be studied
for his direct contribution to the living tradition of philosophy and in a
more historical way, for the second-order illumination which studying his
thought in this manner can provide.
This justification incorporates some aspects of the five discussed above,
whilst rejecting others. It shares with ‘Philosophical’ Approach the idea that
studying the history of antiquated philosophy is, at least in part, justified by
its value to working philosophers now, but like Williams’s Making the Fa-
miliar Strange it rejects the idea that antiquated philosophy helps today’s
philosophy in so far as it contains ideas very close to theirs, so that it can

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Why Study Medieval Philosophy? 73

become like another voice in the contemporary debate. Indeed, it goes fur-
ther and sets aside the view that antiquated philosophy helps philosophers to
answer first-order philosophical questions; rather, it is of the greatest value
in answering a central second-order question. It shares with the ‘Historical’
Approach the view that the past of philosophy needs to be approached and
appreciated as history, but it rejects the idea that it is part of an ordinary
intellectual historian’s purview. Philosophy is, indeed, included within the
field discussed by intellectual historians, but, writing for a general audience,
and usually themselves without specialized philosophical training, they can
only treat philosophy from the outside; just as they might treat music, but
can do so only externally, and not in the manner of an historian of music,
writing for a technically qualified audience. There is, then, a division of
labour, but not the one envisaged in the Division of Labour view. The intel-
lectual historians do just that – intellectual history, even when they are writ-
ing about philosophy. But, because they are not entering into specialized
philosophical questions, they have the great advantage of being able to write
for the wide audience of those with a general interest in history and intellec-
tual matters. The historian of philosophy is, no less than them, a genuine
historian, of philosophy. But his or her audience will be much smaller.
The Great Philosophers approach can also fit with this conception of
the history of philosophy, since one of the reasons for philosophers to read
the classics is to understand the nature of their subject. But, more impor-
tantly, it and the Philosophy as Literature approach can provide a valuable
alternative way of justifying antiquated philosophy to a different and
wider audience. The aesthetic justification for reading antiquated philoso-
phy is a way of claiming a role for some outstanding texts of philosophy
from the past within the broad run of cultural life, whereas my justifica-
tion is for history of philosophy conceived as a specialized discipline
within philosophy.
There are, then, three different, justifiable ways of studying antiquated
philosophy:
(i) As a specialized historical discipline within philosophy, designed to
help philosophers understand their subject better and answer second-
order questions about it.
(ii) Within more widely accessible intellectual history, along with other
intellectual phenomena, by intellectual historians.
(iii) As part of general education, in the form of reading and introductory
commentary of great philosophical texts from the past.
My special concern is with (i), which alone grounds the history of philoso-
phy as an individual academic discipline. But (i), (ii) and (iii) are inter-
connected. Research and writing in (i) fructifies work in (ii) and (iii).

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74 John Marenbon

II. The problem of medieval philosophy and religion

When a specialist explains to a stranger that he works on philosophy in the

Middle Ages, the most common question is: “But wasn’t that all reli-
gious?” Though they might put it in a more sophisticated way, a similar
feeling is at the basis of many contemporary philosophers’ lack of interest
in, or even hostility towards, this area of their history. Even if studying
antiquated philosophy can be justified in the way suggested above, they
might argue, the justification does not apply to medieval philosophy, be-
cause it is not philosophy at all, but a sort of theology.
One answer to this objection would be to identify the large areas of
medieval philosophy that are not at all based on revealed religion: in the
Latin West, all the work in logic and all the writings in the Arts Faculties;
much of the tradition of falsâfâ in Arabic; the Byzantine tradition of Aris-
totelian commentaries. There are a number of excellent historians of phi-
losophy who, in practice, confine themselves to this material, and it is cer-
tainly open for an individual to do so. But to remove most of Aquinas and
Maimonides, much of Ockham, almost all Anselm and Scotus and, indeed,
most of the best fourteenth and fifteenth-century thinking from the realm
of philosophy altogether is to pay far too high price for an answer to this
objection. And the objection is misplaced. As said above, philosophy is a
family-resemblance of human practices, not a natural kind open to some
sort of essential definition. And it is clear from its history that philosophi-
cal and religious discussion and indeed practice have been intertwined at
most times and in most places; indeed, that a central theme in philosophy
has usually been its relation to religion. Rather, then, than rejecting much
of medieval philosophy because large parts of it involve premises taken
from revealed religion or are circumscribed by doctrines accepted by faith
alone, philosophers should realize that by studying this very feature of it
they will be helped to reach a better understanding of what it is that they
are doing now, however little religious questions may figure in their ver-
sion of the contemporary agenda.
The objection might, though, be put in a different and subtler way. The
historian has a duty to respect historical truth. There were, indeed, some
areas of philosophical thinking in the Middle Ages that were, at the time,
recognized as discrete from revealed religion. When writing about the
history of medieval thought, either – it is argued – a sharp distinction of the
sort just rejected must be made between pure philosophical material and
everything else; otherwise there will be no principled way of selecting
from, for instance, Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, material about philoso-
phy of mind, individuation and identity, semantics and the virtues, and
leaving behind discussion of the Trinity and Incarnation, grace, the Eucha-

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Why Study Medieval Philosophy? 75

rist and the Last Judgement. As a result, a great deal of the discussion will
fall outside the range of even a broad-minded philosopher’s interests.
Such an objection does not take account, however, of the complexity
of the relations between a historian and his or her subject-matter on the one
hand, and audience on the other. All history writing is partial: historians
cannot but reflect their own interests and framework of ideas, and the audi-
ence and purpose for which they are writing, in choosing their evidence
and interpreting it.6 Each account aims to be true, but there are many dif-
ferent true accounts of the same area to be written. Historians of philoso-
phy are writing for philosophers, and so it is their duty to focus on those
areas of the material which are of present philosophical interest (even
though the antiquated texts will rarely discuss exactly the questions now at
issue). They are, then, justified in studying works like Aquinas’s Summa
theologiae or Scotus’s Ordinatio, which are written as theology, and
choosing just those parts of philosophical interest, although they certainly
need to give enough attention to the theological and other context to be
able fully to understand the author’s train of thought.
The links between medieval philosophy and religion might be taken,
however, in a quite different sense. To some Christians (the case seems
different, for various reasons, for Muslims and Jews with regard to their
traditions of medieval philosophy) studying the philosophy of medieval
Christian Europe is not in need of the sort of justification I have been try-
ing to make for antiquated philosophy in general, because it, rather than
any of the more recent schools of philosophy, seems to provide a sophisti-
cated and, at least in large part rational, way of thinking which supports
Christian doctrine.
Believers would be ill-advised to use medieval philosophy for this pur-
pose. In the Middle Ages (and, in fact, for a much longer period) there
existed a widely-held set of presuppositions, metaphysical and moral,
which made it seem plausible that many (though not all) aspects of Chris-
tian doctrine could be defended by philosophical reasoning as important
general truths about the world. These presuppositions are no longer gener-
ally accepted, and without them the philosophical arguments by which
earlier thinkers bolstered Christianity are usually found to fail. Religious
believers can, indeed, turn to various areas of contemporary philosophy to
find well-considered, serious arguments to show that their outlook is no
less rational than that of those who reject religious belief. But antiquated
philosophy is a very weak ally for them in a present battle.

6
For a beautiful exposition of a theory along these lines, which has greatly influ-
enced my thinking, see Williams 2002, 233–269.

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76 John Marenbon

III. Why we should not study medieval philosophy

The idea of a Middle Ages, as is well known, was introduced into history by
Renaissance writers who wished to separate themselves from their immedi-
ate past and so strengthen their links with Antiquity. The early historians of
philosophy, to some extent at least, followed this period division, and it had
become fully established by the time of nineteenth-century historians of
philosophy, such as Victor Cousin and Barthélémy Hauréau. Neo-scholas-
ticism gave an added reason to consider medieval philosophy as a discrete
period. The influence of neo-scholasticism passed, and styles of treating the
history of philosophy changed, but the label ‘medieval philosophy’, and the
idea that there it names a distinct subject-area constituted by philosophy
from the eighth century (with perhaps the addition of some earlier Christian
authors such as Augustine and Boethius) to c. 1500 (or perhaps later: see
below), has persisted.7 Publishers ask for Histories of Medieval Philosophy;
jobs are advertised in the area and universities run courses in medieval phi-
losophy (or, more often, candidates are turned away from jobs because they
are perceived as medievalists and, in the UK almost universally, universities
do not run a course precisely on the area which is considered medieval phi-
losophy). Specialists in philosophy from c. 500/600/700–c. 1500 have made
for themselves an apparently well-identified enclave, and all together in it
they stand – or, more usually, fall.
But why accept the standard chronological division as a useful one?
Even if in political, economic and cultural history, the Middle Ages forms
a coherent unit of study, rather than a convenient administrative division –
and that is far from certain, there is no reason to expect that the history of
philosophy should best be divided up in the same way. Moreover, once the
accepted division begins to be scrutinized, it starts to seem less clear and
coherent than at first sight. As regards the Latin tradition: if we begin with
Augustine, at the end of the fourth century, on what grounds should we
exclude Proclus, Simplicius and the other late ancient Greek pagan writ-
ers? And, at the other end, it is usual to include thinkers like Suárez
(d. 1617, well into Descartes’ lifetime) within medieval philosophy, whilst
excluding, for instance, Ficino (d. 1499). And, although regarded from the
perspective of Latin tradition, the Arabic tradition is often considered to
end with Averroes, from a more properly Islamic perspective there is no
reason not to include Mulla Sadra (d. 1636) or indeed later seventeenth and

7
On the historiography of medieval philosophy, see Imbach/Maierù 1991 and, espe-
cially for neo-scholasticism in the nineteenth century, Inglis 1998.

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Why Study Medieval Philosophy? 77

eighteenth-century work, especially in logic, which is part of the Avicen-

nian tradition.8
One option would be to abandon set periodization altogether. People
would specialize in the history of philosophy, and within that they might
choose one or more authors or specific periods and areas (e.g. the Stoics
at the time of Chrysippus, ninth/tenth-century philosophy in Baghdad,
twelfth-century philosophy in France, philosophy in sixteenth-century
Northern Europe), without grouping these into larger divisions such as
ancient philosophy, medieval philosophy, early modern philosophy. But
there is, arguably, a continuous tradition that runs from the time of Plotinus
through until Leibniz, and there are gains in understanding from trying to
become acquainted with it as a whole. (In the Arabic tradition, this period
would stretch forward to the seventeenth century too; in the Jewish tradi-
tion to Spinoza, and in Byzantium it could include the philosophy which
continued to be done there for a century or so after the fall of Constantin-
ople.) Of course, Plotinus and the Neoplatonists depend on their predeces-
sors, especially Plato and Aristotle. But Plato and Aristotle are transmitted
to the later tradition as envisaged and ordered by the Neoplatonic tradition,
although it was open to later thinkers to go behind this interpretation, at
least in the case of Aristotle, since they had translations of his own texts.
And there are, certainly, important discontinuities between Descartes, Spi-
noza and Leibniz and the various traditions of philosophy in the previous
centuries, and important continuities between their thinking and that of
Hume and Kant. But long period divisions are not exclusive, and they ne-
ver have sharp edges. For some historians of philosophy to specialize in
the longue durée from Plotinus to Leibniz does not exclude others starting
with Descartes and going on to Kant or later, and others starting with Plato
and finishing with Simplicius.9

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8
I have tried to give a little more detail to these arguments in Marenbon 2007: see
esp. 2–4, 249 ff.
9
I am very grateful to Marcel van Ackeren for his very valuable advice and criticism
when I was composing this paper for the conference.

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78 John Marenbon

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