The Medieval Worldview | Philosophy in the Middle Ages
Dr. Dennis E. Bradford [ Ссылка ]

What was the medieval worldview? What was the medieval world like?

The modern world in which we find ourselves followed and emerged from the abandonment of medieval worldview.

By contrasting the two, we can not only come to understand the world of our predecessors better, but we can also more clearly understand our own world, the world in which we live.

In the previous video I mentioned that Descartes, the Father of Modern Western Philosophy, had one foot in the phil0sophy of the middle ages
and broke intellectual ground that enabled the modern understanding of the world to emerge.

What was the philosophy of the middle ages?

How did those who were intellectually alive then understand the world?

In other words, what were the fundamental axioms accepted by philosophers and other serious thinkers including, for example, Dante?

They’re worth noting because it’s the negation of those axioms that allowed the emergence of the fundamental modern understanding of the world.

Of course, the breakdown of the medieval world view took time. Eventually, though, all its fundamental positionalities were undermined, many by the rise of modern science.

If you’re looking for a prolonged discussion of that important transition here, you’ll be disappointed.

There are many illuminating books written by qualified scholars about it.

To cite just one example, I highly recommend A. O. Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being.

This video is just my quick take on it.

I characterize the medieval worldview as having 9 fundamental axioms.

Permit me simply to list them in no particular order.

If you consider them as a whole instead of one at a time, I think you’ll come away with a rather good understanding of the medieval world view.

1. The world was made for humans and is good for us, a benevolent place to live.

2. The world (as a whole) has a purpose.

3. The best explanations are teleological (i.e., in terms of what something is for) because every individual is of a category that has a natural end or purpose.

4. The universe is harmoniously full and fixed.

5. Human beings are both the physical and moral center of the world.

6. The universe is small in space and time.

7. The earth is special with respect to natural laws.

8. There is no special difficulty with respect to our knowing reality.

9. There are no important new truths to be discovered.

If you find any of these not fully intelligible, that’s understandable.

There’s a lot to unpack here.

I’m not an expert, but I have taught an introductory course in Medieval Philosophy and am familiar with the history of western philosophy and science.

I’ve boiled my understanding of philosophy in the middle ages down to those 9 propositions.

Each of them has a history.

By itself that’s an important point.

According to what John of Salisbury wrote Metalogicon in 1159, “Bernard of Chartres used to compare us to dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants . . . we see more and farther than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted up and borne on their gigantic stature.”

Each of those 9 propositions also has intellectual consequences that philosophers like Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, and Kant worked over and revised or discarded.

That’s why books have been written about each of them.

It’s extremely interesting that there was a kind of grand intellectual synthesis or worldview worked out by the philosophers of the middle ages.

The breakdown of that synthesis resulted in a new, more scientific understanding of the world.

Our world, in other words, is radically different from the world, say, 500 years ago.

Our fundamental positionalities are, for better or worse, radically different than theirs were.

We think about the world and our place in it in a radically different way than the way that those in the west who were intellectually alive just a few centuries ago thought of the world and their place in it.

Some people still believe some of these 9 propositions. That’s not surprising. After all, some people still believe that the earth is flat.

What’s really astonishing, though, is how little really remains of that grand medieval worldview.

In the next video in this sequence, let’s look at one important reason for that breakdown.

We’ll connect the discussion of the Causal Principle in the previous video to how it was challenged and used to attack the medieval worldview.

It’s not only important to understand our understanding of the world, but it’s fun, too, isn’t it?

Be well . . .

Dr. Dennis E. Bradford

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