PHIL20750 Intro to Premodern Thinking

Academic Year 2024/2025

What is the point of studying the thoughts of authors that most people ignore and numerous academics decide not to read? To ask the question in this way is to be faced with an easy choice. We can either 'answer' with a shrug of the shoulder and continue to remain in a comfort zone, the zone of questions asked on radio and television programmes, on social media or on YouTube. Or we take the question seriously and choose to follow the path of learned curiosity. We want to understand our tradition of thought - which most of the time we claim to know, but which is either a textbook cliché at best, or a prejudice we've heard in various circumstances and assimilated without thinking critically. Or we may simply want to adopt a position of resistance to the fashion effect: we want something else that everyone else does, because we want to know something else or something more. In the end, what was there before Descartes and modernity? Which authors did Descartes or Spinoza or Leibniz study? The answer is simple: authors from the Middle Ages. But what did these authors think? And what subjects were they interested in? Do we have the same questions as they did? And what language were they writing in? In Latin only? Who knows of authors who wrote in Arabic, Hebrew, Georgian or Greek? Did these authors of the past have anything in common? And if so, what exactly? And what did they have in common? Were they really controlled by the religious authorities of their time? Did they have independent rational thought, outside the theological tradition in which they lived? Ultimately, what was philosophy during the period we know as the Dark Ages of humanity?