THOMAS HOBBES

Thomas Hobbes was an English philosopher who is best known for his political philosophy, especially as articulated in his masterpiece Leviathan (1651).

Hobbes’s father was a quick-tempered vicar of a small Wiltshire parish church. Disgraced after engaging in a brawl at his own church door, he disappeared and abandoned his three children to the care of his brother, a well-to-do glover in Malmesbury. For nearly the whole of his adult life, Hobbes worked for different branches of the wealthy and aristocratic Cavendish family. Upon taking his degree at Oxford in 1608, he was employed as page and tutor to the young William Cavendish, afterward the second earl of Devonshire. Over the course of many decades Hobbes served the family and their associates as translator, travelling companion, keeper of accounts, business representative, political adviser, and scientific collaborator. Hobbes also worked for the marquess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a cousin of William Cavendish, and Newcastle’s brother, Sir Charles Cavendish.

INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT 

The two branches of the Cavendish family nourished Hobbes’s enduring intellectual interests in politics and natural science, respectively. Through them, Hobbes became a member of several networks of intellectuals in England. Farther afield, in Paris, he became acquainted with the circle of scientists, theologians, and philosophers presided over by the theologian Marin Mersenne. This circle included René Descartes.

Hobbes was exposed to practical politics before he became a student of political philosophy. Hobbes attended many meetings of the governing body of the Virginia Company, a trading company established by James I to colonize parts of the eastern coast of North America, and came into contact with powerful men there. (Hobbes himself was given a small share in the company by his employer.)

In the late 1630s Parliament and the king were in conflict over how far normal kingly powers could be exceeded in exceptional circumstances, especially in regard to raising money for armies. In 1640 Hobbes wrote a treatise defending King Charles I’s own wide interpretation of his prerogatives. Royalist members of Parliament used arguments from Hobbes’s treatise in debates, and the treatise itself circulated in manuscript form. The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic (written in 1640, published in a mis-edited unauthorized version in 1650) was Hobbes’s first work of political philosophy, though he did not intend it for publication as a book.

When strife became acute in 1640, Hobbes feared for his safety. Shortly after completing The Elements of Law, he fled to Paris, where he rejoined Mersenne’s circle and made contact with other exiles from England. He would remain in Paris for more than a decade, working on optics and on De Cive, De Corpore, and Leviathan.

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 

Hobbes presented his political philosophy in different forms for different audiences. De Cive states his theory in what he regarded as its most scientific form. Its break from the ancient authority par excellence—Aristotle—could not have been more loudly advertised. After only a few paragraphs, Hobbes rejects one of the most famous theses of Aristotle’s politics, namely that human beings are naturally suited to life in a polis and do not fully realize their natures until they exercise the role of citizen. Hobbes turns Aristotle’s claim on its head: human beings, he insists, are by nature unsuited to political life. They naturally denigrate and compete with each other, are very easily swayed by the rhetoric of ambitious men, and think much more highly of themselves than of other people. 

There is no natural self-restraint, even when human beings are moderate in their appetites, for a ruthless and bloodthirsty few can make even the moderate feel forced to take violent preemptive action in order to avoid losing everything. War comes more naturally to human beings than political order. Indeed, political order is possible only when human beings abandon their natural condition of judging and pursuing what seems best to each and delegate this judgment to someone else. This delegation is effected when the many contract together to submit to a sovereign in return for physical safety and a modicum of well-being. 

Although Hobbes did not assume that there was ever a real historical event in which a mutual promise was made to delegate self-government to a sovereign, he claimed that the best way to understand the state was to conceive of it as having resulted from such an agreement.The sovereign is not a party to the social contract; he receives the obedience of the many as a free gift in their hope that he will see to their safety. The sovereign makes no promises to the many in order to win their submission. Indeed, because he does not transfer his right of self-government to anyone, he retains the total liberty that his subjects trade for safety. 

He is not bound by law, including his own laws. Nor does he do anything unjustly if he makes decisions about his subjects’ safety and well-being that they do not like.Hobbes’s masterpiece, Leviathan (1651), does not significantly depart from the view of De Cive concerning the relation between protection and obedience, but it devotes much more attention to the civil obligations of Christian believers and the proper and improper roles of a church within a state. Hobbes argues that believers do not endanger their prospects of salvation by obeying a sovereign’s decrees to the letter, and he maintains that churches do not have any authority that is not granted by the civil sovereign.

RETURN TO ENGLAND 

There are signs that Hobbes intended Leviathan to be read by a monarch, who would be able to take the rules of statecraft from it. A specially bound copy was given to Prince Charles while he was in exile in Paris. Unfortunately, Hobbes’s suggestion in Leviathan that a subject had the right to abandon a ruler who could no longer protect him gave serious offense to the prince’s advisers. Barred from the exiled court and under suspicion by the French authorities for his attack on the papacy, Hobbes found his position in Paris becoming daily more intolerable. 

At the end of 1651, at about the time that Leviathan was published, he returned to England and made his peace with the new regime of Oliver Cromwell. Hobbes submitted to that authority for a long time before the monarchy was restored in 1660.

From the time of the Restoration in 1660, Hobbes enjoyed a new prominence. Charles II received Hobbes again into favour. It was not until 1666, when the House of Commons prepared a bill against atheism and profaneness, that Hobbes felt seriously endangered.Hobbes, then verging upon 80, burned such of his papers as he thought might compromise him.Although he was impugned by enemies at home, no Englishman of the day stood in such high repute abroad as Hobbes, and distinguished foreigners who visited England were always eager to pay their respects to the old man, whose vigour and freshness of intellect remained unquenched. 

In his last years Hobbes amused himself by returning to the Classical studies of his youth. In 1675 he produced a translation of the Odyssey in rugged English rhymes, with a lively preface, “Concerning the Virtues of an Heroic Poem.” A translation of the Iliad appeared in the following year. As late as four months before his death, he was promising his publisher “somewhat to print in English.”

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FRANCIS BACON, VISCOUNT SAINT ALBAN (OR ALBANS), BARON OF VERULAM

Francis Bacon was a philosopher, lawyer, and statesman who served as lord chancellor of England from 1618to 1621. 

Bacon attended Trinity College, Cambridge, and then went to Paris (1576). Recalled abruptly after the death of his father (1579), he took up residence at Gray’s Inn, an institution for legal education, and became a barrister in 1582. He progressed through several legal positions, becoming a member of Parliament in 1584, but had little success in gaining political power. About 1591 Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex and a favourite of Queen Elizabeth, became his patron. By 1600, however, Bacon was the queen’s learned counsel in the trial of Essex, and in 1601 he drew up a report denouncing Essex as a traitor.

With the accession of James I in 1603, Bacon sought anew to gain influence by means of unsparing service in Parliament, persistent letters of self-recommendation, and the help of important associates. He was engaged in a series of conflicts with Sir Edward Coke, the great jurist, in an effort to safeguard the royal prerogative. After a succession of legal posts, he was appointed lord chancellor and Baron Verulam in 1618; in 1620/21 he was created Viscount St. Albans. Between 1608 and 1620 he prepared at least 12 draftings of his most celebrated work, the Novum Organum, in which he presented his scientific method; he developed his Instauratio Magna, a plan to reorganize the sciences; and he wrote several minor philosophical works.

Bacon fell from power in 1621, following his being charged with bribery. He spent his final years writing what are considered some of his most valuable works.

THE IDOLS OF THE MIND 

In the first book of Novum Organum Bacon discusses the causes of human error in the pursuit of knowledge. Aristotle had discussed logical fallacies, commonly found in human reasoning, but Bacon was original in looking behind the forms of reasoning to underlying psychological causes. He invented the metaphor of “idol” to refer to such causes of human error.

Bacon distinguishes four idols, or main varieties of proneness to error. The idols of the tribe are certain intellectual faults that are universal to mankind, or, at any rate, very common. One, for example, is a tendency toward over-simplification, that is, toward supposing, for the sake of tidiness, that there exists more order in a field of inquiry than there actually is. Another is a propensity to be overly influenced by particularly sudden or exciting occurrences that are in fact unrepresentative.

The idols of the cave are the intellectual peculiarities of individuals. One person may concentrate on the likenesses, another on the differences, between things. One may fasten on detail, another on the totality.

The idols of the marketplace are the kinds of error for which language is responsible. It has always been a distinguishing feature of English philosophy to emphasize the unreliable nature of language, which is seen, nominalistically, as a human improvisation. Nominalists argue that even if the power of speech is given by God, it was Adam who named the beasts and thereby gave that power its concrete realization. But language, like other human achievements, partakes of human imperfections. Bacon was particularly concerned with the superficiality of distinctions drawn in everyday language, by which things fundamentally different are classed together (whales and fishes as fish, for example) and things fundamentally similar are distinguished (ice, water, and steam). But he was also concerned, like later critics of language, with the capacity of words to embroil men in the discussion of the meaning-less (as, for example, in discussions of the deity Fortune).

The fourth and final group of idols is that of the idols of the theatre, that is to say mistaken systems of philosophy in the broadest, Baconian sense of the term, in which it embraces all beliefs of any degree of generality. Bacon’s critical polemic in discussing the idols of the theatre is lively but not very penetrating philosophically. He speaks, for example, of the vain affectations of the humanists, but they were not a very apt subject for his criticism. Humanists were really anti-philosophers who not unreasonably turned their attention to nonphilosophical matters because of the apparent inability of philosophers to arrive at conclusions that were either generally agreed upon or use-ful. Bacon does have something to say about the skeptical philosophy to which humanists appealed when they felt the need for it. Insofar as skepticism involves doubts about deductive reasoning, he has no quarrel with it. Insofar as it is applied not to reason but to the ability of the senses to supply the reason with reliable premises to work from, he brushes it aside too easily.

THE NEW METHOD 

The core of Bacon’s philosophy of science is the account of inductive reasoning given in Book II of Novum Organum. The defect of all previous systems of beliefs about nature, he argued, lay in the inadequate treatment of the general propositions from which the deductions were made. Either they were the result of precipitate generalization from one or two cases, or they were uncritically assumed to be self-evident on the basis of their familiarity and general acceptance.

In order to avoid hasty generalization Bacon urges a technique of “gradual ascent,” that is, the patient accumulation of well-founded generalizations of steadily increasing degrees of generality. This method would have the beneficial effect of loosening the hold on men’s minds of  ill-constructed everyday concepts that obliterate important differences and fail to register important similarities.

The crucial point, Bacon realized, is that induction must work by elimination not, as it does in common life and the defective scientific tradition, by simple enumeration. Thus he stressed “the greater force of the negative instance”—the fact that while “all A are B” is only very weakly confirmed by “this A is B,” it is shown conclusively to be false by “this A is not B.” He devised tables, or formal devices for the presentation of singular pieces of evidence, in order to facilitate the rapid discovery of false generalizations. What survives this eliminative screening, Bacon assumes, may be taken to be true.

The conception of a scientific research establishment, which Bacon developed in his utopia, The New Atlantis, may be a more important contribution to science than his theory of induction. Here the idea of science as a collaborative undertaking, conducted in an impersonally methodical fashion and animated by the intention to give material benefits to mankind, is set out with literary force.

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WANG YANG MING

Wang Yangming was a Chinese scholar-official whose idealistic interpretation of neo-Confucianism influenced philosophical thinking in East Asia for centuries. Wang was the son of a high government official. In1492 he obtained the civil service degree “a recommended person.” Having failed in the metropolitan civil service examinations in 1493 and 1495, he shifted his interest to military arts and Daoist techniques for longevity. In 1499, however, Wang passed the “advanced scholar” (jinshi) examination and was appointed a Ministry of Works official. He recommended to the emperor eight measures for frontier defense, strategy, and administration, which earned him early recognition. In 1500 he was appointed a Ministry of Justice secretary and in 1501 was ordered to check prisoners’ records near Nanjing. He corrected injustices in many cases.

A critical event occurred in 1506, when Wang defended a supervising censor who had been imprisoned for attacking a powerful, corrupt eunuch. For his actions Wang was beaten with 40 strokes, imprisoned for several months, and banished to remote Guizhou as head of a dispatch station, where he lived among aborigines and often fell sick. The hardship and solitude led him to realize, suddenly one night at the age of 36, that to investigate the principles (li) of things is not to seek for them in actual objects, as the rationalistic Zhu Xi had taught, but in one’s own mind. Thus he brought Idealist (xinxue) neo-Confucianism—as first taught by a 12th-century philosopher, Lu Xiangshan— to its highest expression.

A year later he pronounced another epoch-making theory: that knowledge and action are one (zhixing heyi). One knows filial piety (xiao), he argued, only when one acts upon it, and correct action requires correct knowledge. As a magistrate in Jiangxi in 1510, he carried out many reforms, including a novel “joint registration system” whereby 10 families shared responsibility for security. An imperial audience followed and then appointments as Ministry of Justice secretary, Ministry of Personnel director (1511), Imperial Studs vice minister (1512), State Ceremonials minister (1514), and assistant censor in chief and governor of southern Jiangxi and adjacent areas (1516).

In 1521 the new emperor appointed him war minister and awarded him the title of earl of Xinjian. His father died in 1522, and he remained home to mourn his loss. For more than five years he stayed home and discussed doctrines with his followers, who came from various parts of China and numbered in the hundreds. These conversations and those earlier constitute his main work, Chuanxilu (“Instructions for Practical Living”). In 1521 he had enunciated his doctrine of complete realization of the innate knowledge of the good.

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NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI

Niccolò Machiavelli was an Italian Renaissance political philosopher and a statesman who is best known as the author of The Prince (Il Principe), a work that brought him a reputation as an atheist and an immoral cynic. From the 13th century onward, Machiavelli’s family was wealthy and prominent, holding on occasion Florence’s most important offices. His father, Bernardo, a doctor of laws, was nevertheless among the family’s poorest members. 

Bernardo kept a library in which Niccolò must have read, but little is known of Niccolò’s education and early life in Florence, at that time a thriving centre of philosophy and a brilliant showcase of the arts. In a letter to a friend in 1498, Machiavelli writes of listening to the sermons of Girolamo Savonarola (1452–98), a Dominican friar who moved to Florence in 1482 and in the 1490s attracted a party of popular supporters with his thinly veiled accusations against the government, the clergy, and the pope. Savonarola, who effectively ruled Florence for several years after 1494, was featured in The Prince (1513) as an example of an “unarmed prophet” who must fail.

On May 24, 1498, Savonarola was hanged as a heretic and his body burned in the public square. Several days later, emerging from obscurity at the age of 29, Niccolò Machiavelli became head of the second chancery (cancelleria), a post that placed him in charge of the republic’s foreign affairs in subject territories. He held the post until 1512, having gained the confidence of Piero Soderini (1452–1522), the gonfalonier (chief magistrate) for life in Florence from 1502.

In 1512 the Florentine republic was overthrown and the gonfalonier deposed by a Spanish army that Julius II had enlisted into his Holy League. The Medici family returned to rule Florence, and Machiavelli, suspected of conspiracy, was imprisoned, tortured, and sent into exile in 1513 to his father’s small property in San Casciano, just south of Florence. There he wrote his two major works, The Prince and Discourses on Livy, both of which were published after his death.

Machiavelli was first employed in 1520 by Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici to resolve a case of bankruptcy in Lucca, where he took the occasion to write a sketch of its government and to compose his The Life of Castruccio Castracani of Lucca (1520; La vita di Castruccio Castracani da Lucca). Later that year the cardinal agreed to have Machiavelli elected official historian of the republic, a post to which he was appointed in November 1520.

In April 1526 Machiavelli was made chancellor of the Procuratori delle Mura to superintend Florence’s fortifi-cations. By this time Cardinal Giulio had become Pope Clement VII. The pope formed a Holy League at Cognac against Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (reigned 1519– 56), and Machiavelli went with the army to join his friend Francesco Guicciardini (1482–1540), the pope’s lieutenant, with whom he remained until the sack of Rome by the emperor’s forces brought the war to an end in May 1527. Now that Florence had cast off the Medici, Machiavelli hoped to be restored to his old post at the chancery. But the few favours that the Medici had doled out to him caused the supporters of the free republic to look upon him with suspicion. Denied the post, he fell ill and died within a month.

THE PRINCE 

The first and most persistent view of Machiavelli is that of a teacher of evil. The Prince is in the tradition of the “Mirror for Princes”—i.e., books of advice that enabled princes to see themselves as though reflected in a mirror—which began with the Cyropaedia by the Greek historian Xenophon (431–350 BCE) and continued into the Middle Ages. Prior to Machiavelli, works in this genre advised princes to adopt the best prince as their model, but Machiavelli’s version recommends that a prince go to the “effectual truth” of things and forgo the standard of “what should be done” lest he bring about his ruin. To maintain himself a prince must learn how not to be good and use or not use this knowledge “according to necessity.” A second “amoral” interpretation fastens on Machiavelli’s frequent resort to “necessity” in order to excuse actions that might otherwise be condemned as immoral.

Machiavelli divides principalities into those that are acquired and those that are inherited. In general, he argues that the more difficult it is to acquire control over a state, the easier it is to hold on to it. The reason for this is that the fear of a new prince is stronger than the love for a hereditary prince; hence, the new prince, who relies on “a dread of punishment that never forsakes you,” will succeed, but a prince who expects his subjects to keep their promises of support will be disappointed.

The new prince relies on his own virtue, but, if virtue is to enable him to acquire a state, it must have a new meaning distinct from the New Testament virtue of seeking peace. Machiavelli’s notion of virtù requires the prince to be concerned foremost with the art of war and to seek not merely security but also glory, for glory is included in necessity. Virtù for Machiavelli is virtue not for its own sake but rather for the sake of the reputation it enables princes to acquire. Virtue, according to Machiavelli, aims to reduce the power of fortune over human affairs because fortune keeps men from relying on themselves. At first Machiavelli admits that fortune rules half of men’s lives, but then, in an infamous metaphor, he compares fortune to a woman who lets herself be won more by the impetuous and the young. 

A prince who possesses the virtue of mastery can command fortune and manage people to a degree never before thought possible.In the last chapter of The Prince, Machiavelli writes a passionate “exhortation to seize Italy and to free her from the barbarians”—apparently France and Spain, which had been overrunning the disunited peninsula. He calls for a redeemer, mentioning the miracles that occurred as Moses led the Israelites to the promised land, and closes with a quotation from a patriotic poem by Petrarch (1304–74). The final chapter has led many to a third interpretation of Machiavelli as a patriot rather than as a disinterested scientist.

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WILLIAM OF OCKHAM

William of Ockham was a Franciscan philosopher, theologian, and political writer. He is regarded as the founder of a form of nominalism—the school of thought that denies that universal concepts such as “father” have any reality apart from the individual things signified by the universal or general term.

EARLY LIFE 

Little is known of Ockham’s childhood. It seems that he was still a youngster when he entered the Franciscan order. Ockham’s early schooling in a Franciscan convent concentrated on the study of logic; throughout his career, his interest in logic never waned, because he regarded the science of terms as fundamental and indispensable for practicing all the sciences of things, including God, the world, and ecclesiastical or civil institutions.After his early training, Ockham took the traditional course of theological studies at the University of Oxford and apparently between 1317 and 1319 lectured on the Sentences of Peter Lombard. His opinions aroused strong opposition from members of the theological faculty of Oxford, however, and he left the university without obtaining his master’s degree in theology. 

Ockham thus remained, academically speaking, an undergraduate.When he left his country for Avignon, Fr., in the autumn of 1324 at the pope’s request, he was acquainted with a university environment shaken not only by disputes but also by the challenging of authority: that of the bishops in doctrinal matters and that of the chancellor of the university, John Lutterell, who was dismissed from his post in 1322 at the demand of the teaching staff.

However abstract and impersonal the style of Ockham’s writings may be, they reveal at least two aspects of Ockham’s intellectual and spiritual attitude. On the one hand, with his passion for logic he insisted on evaluations that are severely rational, on distinctions between the necessary and the incidental and differentiation between evidence and degrees of probability. On the other hand, as a theologian he referred to the primary importance of the God of the creed whose omnipotence determines the gratuitous salvation of humans. 

The medieval rule of economy, that “plurality should not be assumed without necessity,” has come to be known as “Ockham’s razor”; the principle was used by Ockham to eliminate many entities that had been devised, especially by the scholastic philosophers, to explain reality.

TREATISE TO JOHN XXII 

Ockham met John Lutterell again at Avignon; in a treatise addressed to Pope John XXII, the former chancellor of Oxford denounced Ockham’s teaching on the Sentences, extracting from it 56 propositions that he showed to be in serious error. Ockham, however, presented to the pope another copy of the Ordinatio in which he had made some corrections. 

It appeared that he would be condemned for his teaching, but the condemnation never came.At the convent where he resided in Avignon, Ockham met Bonagratia of Bergamo, a doctor of civil and canon law who was being persecuted for his opposition to John XXII on the problem of Franciscan poverty. On Dec. 1, 1327, the Franciscan general Michael of Cesena arrived in Avignon and stayed at the same convent; he, too, had been summoned by the pope in connection with the dispute over the holding of property. They were at odds over the theoretical problem of whether Christ and his Apostles had owned the goods they used.Michael maintained that because Christ and his Apostles had renounced all ownership and all rights to property, the Franciscans were justified in attempting to do the same thing.

The relations between John and Michael grew steadily worse, to such an extent that, on May 26, 1328, Michael fled from Avignon accompanied by Bonagratia and William. They stayed in Pisa under the protection of Emperor Louis IV the Bavarian, who had been excommunicated in 1324 and proclaimed by John XXII to have forfeited all rights to the empire. They followed him to Munich in 1330, and thereafter Ockham wrote fervently against the papacy in defense of both the strict Franciscan notion of poverty and the empire.Instructed by his superior general in 1328 to study three papal bulls on poverty, Ockham found that they contained many errors that showed John XXII to be a heretic who had forfeited his mandate by reason of his heresy. 

His status of pseudo-pope was confirmed in Ockham’s view in 1330– 31 by his sermons proposing that the souls of the saved did not enjoy the vision of God immediately after death but only after they were rejoined with the body at the Last Judgment, an opinion that contradicted tradition and was ultimately rejected.Excommunicated after his flight from Avignon, Ockham maintained the same basic position on poverty after the death of John XXII in 1334, during the reign of Benedict XII (1334–42), and after the election of Clement VI. 

In these final years he found time to write two treatises on logic, which bear witness to the leading role that he consistently assigned to that discipline. Ockham was long thought to have died at a convent in Munich in 1349 during the Black Death, but he may actually have died there in 1347.

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JOHN DUNS SCOTUS

John Duns Scotus was an influential Franciscan realist philosopher and scholastic theologian.There is perhaps no other great medieval thinker whose life is as little known as that of Duns Scotus. He apparently spent 13 years (1288–1301) at the University of Oxford preparing for inception as master of theology. There is no record of where he took the eight years of preliminary philosophical training (four for a bachelor’s and four for the master’s degrees) required to enter such a program.

After studying theology for almost four years, John Duns was ordained priest at St. Andrew’s Church in Northampton on March 17, 1291. In view of the mini-mum age requirements for the priesthood, this suggests that Duns Scotus must have been born no later than March 1266. 

YEARS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF PARIS 

When the turn came for the English province to provide a talented candidate for the Franciscan chair of theology at the more prestigious University of Paris, Duns Scotus was appointed. One reportation of his Paris lectures indicates that he began commenting on the Sentences there in the autumn of 1302 and continued to June 1303. Before the term ended, however, the university was affected by the long-smouldering feud between King Philip IV and Pope Boniface VIII. The issue was taxation of church property to support the king’s wars with England. When Boniface excommunicated him, the monarch retaliated by calling for a general church council to depose the pope. He won over the French clergy and the university. On June 24, 1303, a great antipapal demonstration took place. 

Friars paraded in the Paris streets.On the following day royal commissioners examined each member of the Franciscan house to determine whether he was with or against the king. Some 70 friars, mostly French, sided with Philip, while the rest (some 80 odd) remained loyal to the pope, among them Duns Scotus and Master Gonsalvus Hispanus. As a result of his harassment and imprisonment by the king’s minister, however, Boniface died in October and was succeeded by Pope Benedict XI. In the interests of peace, Benedict lifted the ban against the university in April 1304, and shortly after-ward the king facilitated the return of students.Where Duns Scotus spent the exile is unclear. Possibly his Cambridge lectures stem from this period, although they may have been given during the academic year of 1301–02 before coming to Paris. 

At any rate, Duns Scotus was back before the summer of 1304, for he was the bachelor respondent in the disputatio in aula (“public disputation”) when his predecessor, Giles of Ligny, was promoted to master. On November 18 of that same year, Gonsalvus, who had been elected minister general of the Franciscan order at the Pentecost chapter, or meeting, assigned Duns Scotus as Giles’s successor.The period following Duns Scotus’s inception as master in 1305 was one of great literary activity. Aided by a staff of associates and secretaries, he set to work to complete his Ordinatio begun at Oxford, using not only the Oxford and Cambridge lectures but also those of Paris. A search of manuscripts reveals a magisterial dispute Duns Scotus conducted with the Dominican master, Guillaume Pierre Godin, against the thesis that matter is the principle of individuation (the metaphysical principle that makes an individual thing different from other things of the same species). 

Duns Scotus did conduct one solemn quodlibetal disputation, so called because the master accepted questions on any topic (de quodlibet) and from any bachelor or master present (a quodlibet). The 21 questions Duns Scotus treated were later revised, enlarged, and organized under two main topics, God and creatures.The short but important Tractatus de primo principio, a compendium of what reason can prove about God, draws heavily upon the Ordinatio. The remaining authentic works seem to represent questions discussed privately for the benefit of the Franciscan student philosophers or theo-logians. They include, in addition to the Collationes (from both Oxford and Paris), the Quaestiones in Metaphysicam Aristotelis and a series of logical questions occasioned by the Neoplatonist Porphyry’s Isagoge and Aristotle’s De praedicamentis, De interpretatione, and De sophisticis elenchis.

FINAL PERIOD AT COLOGNE 

In 1307 Duns Scotus was appointed professor at Cologne. Some have suggested that Gonsalvus sent him to Cologne for his own safety. Although Duns Scotus’s brilliant defense of the Immaculate Conception marked the turning point in the history of the doctrine, it was immediately challenged by secular and Dominican colleagues. When the question arose in a solemn quodlibetal disputation, the secular master Jean de Pouilly, for example, declared the Scotist thesis not only improbable but even heretical. At a time when Philip IV had initiated heresy trials against the wealthy Knights Templars, Pouilly’s words have an ominous ring. There seems to have been something hasty about Duns Scotus’s departure in any case. Duns Scotus lectured at Cologne until his death. His body at present lies in the nave of the Franciscan church near the Cologne cathedral, and in many places he is venerated as blessed.

Despite their imperfect form, Duns Scotus’s works were widely circulated. His claim that universal concepts are based on a “common nature” in individuals was one of the central issues in the 14th-century controversy between Realists and Nominalists concerning the question of whether general types are figments of the mind or are real.

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SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS

St. Thomas Aquinas was an Italian Dominican theologian and the foremost medieval Scholasticist. His doctrinal system and the explanations and developments made by his followers are known as Thomism. He is nevertheless recognized by the Roman Catholic Church as its foremost Western philosopher and theologian.

EARLY YEARS

Thomas was born to parents who were in possession of a modest feudal domain on a boundary constantly disputed by the emperor and the pope. Thomas was placed in the monastery of Monte Cassino near his home as an oblate (i.e., offered as a prospective monk) when he was still a young boy; his family doubtless hoped that he would someday become abbot to their advantage. In 1239, after nine years in this sanctuary of spiritual and cultural life, young Thomas was forced to return to his family when the emperor expelled the monks because they were too obedient to the pope. He was then sent to the University of Naples, recently founded by the emperor, where he first encountered the scientific and philosophical works that were being translated from the Greek and the Arabic.

In this setting Thomas decided to join the Friars Preachers, or Dominicans, a new religious order founded 30 years earlier, which departed from the traditional paternalistic form of government for monks to the more democratic form of the mendicant friars (i.e., religious orders whose corporate as well as personal poverty made it necessary for them to beg alms) and from the monastic life of prayer and manual labour to a more active life of preaching and teaching. A dramatic episode marked the full significance of his decision. His parents had him abducted on the road to Paris, where his shrewd superiors had immediately assigned him so that he would be out of the reach of his family but also so that he could pursue his studies in the most prestigious and tur-bulent university of the time.

STUDIES IN PARIS 

Thomas held out stubbornly against his family despite a year of captivity. He was finally liberated and in the autumn of 1245 went to Paris to the convent of Saint-Jacques, the great university centre of the Dominicans; there he studied under Albertus Magnus, a tremendous scholar with a wide range of intellectual interests.

When Thomas Aquinas arrived at the University of Paris, the influx of Arabian-Aristotelian science was arousing a sharp reaction among believers; and several times the church authorities tried to block the naturalism and rationalism that were emanating from this philosophy and, according to many ecclesiastics, seducing the younger generations. Thomas did not fear these new ideas, but, like Albertus Magnus (and Roger Bacon, also lecturing at Paris), he studied the works of Aristotle and eventually lectured publicly on them.

During the summer of 1248, Aquinas left Paris with Albertus, who was to assume direction of the new faculty established by the Dominicans at the convent in Cologne. He remained there until 1252, when he returned to Paris to prepare for the degree of master of theology. After taking his bachelor’s degree, he received the licentia docendi (“license to teach”) at the beginning of 1256 and shortly afterward finished the training necessary for the title and privileges of master. Thus, in the year 1256 he began teaching theology in one of the two Dominican schools incorporated in the University of Paris. 

LATER YEARS 

In 1259 Thomas was appointed theological adviser and lecturer to the papal Curia, then the centre of Western humanism. He returned to Italy, where he spent two years at Anagni at the end of the reign of Alexander IV and four years at Orvieto with Urban IV. From 1265 to 1267 he taught at the convent of Santa Sabina in Rome and then, at the request of Clement IV, went to the papal Curia in Viterbo. Suddenly, in November 1268, he was sent to Paris, where he became involved in a sharp doctrinal polemic that had just been triggered off.The works of Averroës, the outstanding representative of Arabic philosophy in Spain, who was known as the great commentator and interpreter of Aristotle, were just becoming known to the Parisian masters. 

Averroës asserted that the structure of religious knowledge was entirely heterogeneous to rational knowledge: two truths—one of faith, the other of reason—can, in the final analysis, be contradictory. This dualism was denied by Muslim orthodoxy and was still less acceptable to Christians. With the appearance of Siger of Brabant, however, and from 1266 on, the quality of Averroës’s exegesis and the wholly rational bent of his thought began to attract disciples in the faculty of arts at the University of Paris. Thomas Aquinas rose in protest against his colleagues; nevertheless, the parties retained a mutual esteem.

In the course of this dispute, the very method of theology was called into question. According to Aquinas, reason is able to operate within faith and yet according to its own laws. The mystery of God is expressed and incarnate in human language; it is thus able to become the object of an active, conscious, and organized elaboration in which the rules and structures of rational activity are integrated in the light of faith. In the Aristotelian sense of the word, then (although not in the modern sense), theology is a “science”; it is knowledge that is rationally derived from propositions that are accepted as certain because they are revealed by God. The theologian accepts authority and faith as his starting point and then proceeds to conclusions using reason; the philosopher, on the other hand, relies solely on the natural light of reason. Thomas was the first to view theology expressly in this way or at least to present it systematically, and in doing so he raised a storm of opposition in various quarters.

The logic of Aquinas’s position regarding faith and reason required that the fundamental consistency of the realities of nature be recognized. A physis (“nature”) has necessary laws; recognition of this fact permits the construction of a science according to a logos (“rational structure”). Thomas thus avoided the temptation to sacralize the forces of nature through a naïve recourse to the miraculous or the Providence of God. For him, a whole “supernatural” world that cast its shadow over things and men, in Romanesque art as in social customs, had blurred men’s imaginations. Nature, discovered in its profane reality, should assume its proper religious value and lead to God by more rational ways, yet not simply as a shadow of the supernatural. 

This understanding is exemplified in the way that Francis of Assisi admired the birds, the plants, and the Sun.Although he was an Aristotelian, Thomas was certain that he could defend himself against a heterodox interpretation of “the Philosopher,” as Aristotle was known. Thomas held that human liberty could be defended as a rational thesis while admitting that determinations are found in nature. In his theology of Providence, he taught a continuous creation, in which the dependence of the created on the creative wisdom guarantees the reality of the order of nature. God moves sovereignly all that he creates, but the supreme government that he exercises over the universe is conformed to the laws of a creative Providence that wills each being to act according to its proper nature. This autonomy finds its highest realization in the rational creature: humans are literally self-moving in their intellectual, volitional, and physical existence. Their freedom, far from being destroyed by their relationship to God, finds its foundation in this very relationship.

In January 1274 Thomas was personally summoned by Gregory X to the second Council of Lyons, which was an attempt to repair the schism between the Latin and Greek churches. On his way he was stricken by illness; he stopped at the Cistercian abbey of Fossanova, where he died on March 7.

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SHINRAN

Shinran was a Buddhist teacher recognized as the founder of the Jōdo Shinshū (True Pure Land School), which advocates that faith, recitation of the name of the buddha Amida (Amitabha), and birth in the paradise of the Pure Land. For centuries Jōdo Shinshū has been one of the largest schools of Buddhism in Japan. During his lifetime Shinran was an insignificant figure, but in modern times he has been recognized as an eminent and sophisticated religious thinker.

The details of Shinran’s life are sketchy because few historical sources about him have survived. The most important of these, a hagiography (saint’s life) known pop-ularly as the Godenshō (“The Biography”), was written in 1295 by his great-grandson Kakunyo (1270–1351). Other works that offer insights into his life are Shinran’s own religious writings and the letters of his wife, Eshin Ni (1182–1268?), which were discovered in 1921.According to the Godenshō, Shinran was inducted into the Buddhist priesthood at age nine by Jien (1155–1225), an abbot of the Tendai school of Buddhist thought. 

Shinran’s entry into the order may have been the result of the declining fortunes of his extended family, who belonged to the low-level aristocratic Hino clan, or of the death of his parents. He served for 20 years at the Tendai monastery on Mt. Hiei, northeast of Kyōto, as a dōsō (“hall priest”), performing Pure Land Buddhist rituals and practices. In 1201 he left Mt. Hiei and secluded himself for 100 days in the Rokkaku Temple in Kyōto. During this retreat he had a dream in which Prince Shōtoku (574–622), the semilegendary promulgator of Buddhism in Japan, revealed that the bodhisattva Kannon would become Shinran’s conjugal partner for life and would lead him to the Pure Land paradise at death. Inspired by this vision, Shinran abandoned monastic life at Mt. Hiei and became a disciple of Hōnen (1133–1212), the renowned master of Pure Land Buddhism.

Subsequently, Shinran married and had children, thereby departing from Buddhism’s ancient tradition of clerical celibacy.As a fervent follower of Hōnen, Shinran adopted his teaching of the “exclusive nembutsu” (senju nembutsu): invoking the name of Amida Buddha is the sole practice assuring enlightenment in the Pure Land. Hōnen’s religious movement provoked controversy and was censured by several powerful temples, including the Tendai monastery on Mt. Hiei and the Kōfuku Temple in Nara. In 1207 the ruling authorities suppressed the movement, resulting in Shinran’s banishment to the remote province of Echigo.

It was about this time that he married Eshin Ni and began a family. During his banishment and subsequent 20-year residency in the Kantō region (the vicinity of present-day Tokyo), Shinran deepened his religious ideas and actively propagated Pure Land teachings. He attracted an enthusi-astic following of his own as a peripatetic preacher, emulating perhaps the itinerant priests of the Zenkō Temple, whose sacred Amida icon Shinran revered. During this period he also compiled an early draft of his magnum opus, Kyōgyōshinshō (“Teaching, Practice, Faith, and Attainment”), a collection of scriptural quotations on Pure Land teachings interspersed with Shinran’s interpretations or comments.In the early 1230s Shinran left the Kantō region and returned to Kyōto, where he spent the last three decades of his long life. 

His many followers remained in contact with him through letters and visits and offered monetary gifts to sustain him in old age. Shinran dedicated considerable time in this period to writing. In addition to completing the Kyōgyōshinshō, he composed doctrinal treatises, commentaries, religious tracts, hymns of praise (wasan), and other works, both to confirm his own understanding of Pure Land Buddhism and to convey his views to others.In the last decade of his life, Shinran endured a particularly agonizing estrangement from his son Zenran (died 1292). 

Zenran had become embroiled in a dispute with Shinran’s followers in the Kantō region over provocative beliefs and behaviour, such as the assertion by some of license to commit wrongdoings. To counter them, Zenran made extravagant claims that Shinran had secretly imparted authority to him. Only by disowning him was Shinran able to quell the confusion among his followers and to reassure them of his true teachings.

According to the Godenshō, Shinran died in Kyōto at the age of 90. On his deathbed he chanted the nembutsu steadfastly, and at his side were his youngest daughter, Kakushin Ni (1224–83), and several other followers. After his cremation, Shinran’s ashes were interred in eastern Kyōto. In 1272 they were moved to a nearby site where a memorial chapel was constructed, which would be the precursor of the Hongan Temple, the headquarters of the Shinshū school.

In premodern times the Jodo Shinshū regarded Shinran as an earthly incarnation of the buddha Amida, appearing in the world to spread the Pure Land teachings. Such a characterization was common in medieval Buddhism and congruent with Shinran’s own veneration of Hōnen as an incarnation of Amida. The Hongan Temple preserved and promoted this image, especially during the Shinshū’s emergence as Japan’s largest and most powerful religious movement under the leadership of Shinran’s descendant Rennyo (1415–99). 

In modern times, however, Shinran has been depicted in a more humanistic fashion, as a visionary thinker and as the archetypal religious seeker.

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IBN AL-ARABI

Ibn al-‘Arabī was a celebrated Muslim mystic-philosopher who gave the esoteric, mystical dimension of Islamic thought its first full-fledged philosophic expression. His major works are the monumental Al-Futūh.āt al-Makkiyyah (“The Meccan Revelations”) and Fus.ū.s al-h.ikam (1229; “

TheBezels of Wisdom”).Ibn al-Arabī was born in the southeast of Spain, a man of pure Arab blood whose ancestry went back to the prominent Arabian tribe of T.ā’ī. It was in Sevilla (Seville), then an outstanding centre of Islamic culture and learning, that he received his early education. He stayed there for 30 years, studying traditional Islamic sciences; he studied with a number of mystic masters who found in him a young man of marked spiritual inclination and unusually keen intelligence. During those years he travelled a great deal and visited various cities of Spain and North Africa in search of masters of the Sufi (mystical) Path who had achieved great spiritual progress and thus renown.

It was during one of these trips that Ibn al-Arabī had a dramatic encounter with the great Aristotelian philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroës; 1126–98) in the city of Córdoba. Averroës, a close friend of the boy’s father, had asked that the interview be arranged because he had heard of the extraordinary nature of the young, still beardless lad. After the early exchange of only a few words, it is said, the mystical depth of the boy so overwhelmed the old philosopher that he became pale and, dumbfounded, began trembling.

In 1198, while in Murcia, Ibn al-Arabī had a vision in which he felt he had been ordered to leave Spain and set out for the East. Thus began his pilgrimage to the Orient, from which he never was to return to his homeland.The first notable place he visited on this journey was Mecca (1201), where he “received a divine commandment” to begin his major work Al-Futūh.āt al-Makkiyyah, which was to be completed much later in Damascus. In 560 chapters, it is a work of tremendous size, a personal encyclopaedia extending over all the esoteric sciences in Islam as Ibn al-Arabī understood and had experienced them, together with valuable information about his own inner life.

It was also in Mecca that Ibn al-Arabī became acquainted with a young girl of great beauty who, as a living embodiment of the eternal sophia (wisdom), was to play in his life a role much like that which Beatrice played for Dante. Her memories were eternalized by Ibn al-Arabī in a collection of love poems (Tarjumān al-ashwāq; “The Interpreter of Desires”), upon which he himself composed a mystical commentary. 

His daring “pantheistic” expressions drew down on him the wrath of Muslim orthodoxy, some of whom prohibited the reading of his works at the same time that others were elevating him to the rank of the prophets and saints.After Mecca, Ibn al-Arabī visited Egypt (also in 1201) and then Anatolia, where, in Qonya, he met S.adr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī, who was to become his most important fol-lower and successor in the East. From Qonya he went on to Baghdad and Aleppo (modern H.alab, Syria). By the time his long pilgrimage had come to an end at Damascus (1223), his fame had spread all over the Islamic world. Venerated as the greatest spiritual master, he spent the rest of his life in Damascus in peaceful contemplation, teaching, and writing. 

It was during his Damascus days that one of the most important works in mystical philosophy in Islam, Fus.ū.s al-h.ikam, was composed in 1229, about 10 years before his death. Consisting only of 27 chapters, the book is incomparably smaller than Al-Futūh.āt al-Makkiyyah, but its importance as an expression of Ibn al-Arabī’s mystical thought in its most mature form cannot be overemphasized.

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MOSES MAIMONIDES

Moses Maimonides was a Jewish philosopher, jurist, and physician and the foremost intellectual figure of medieval Judaism. His first major work, begun at age 23and completed 10 years later, was a commentary on the Mishna, the collected Jewish oral laws. A monumental code of Jewish law followed in Hebrew, The Guide for the Perplexed in Arabic, and numerous other works, many of major importance. His contributions in religion, philosophy, and medicine have influenced Jewish and non-Jewish scholars alike.

LIFE 

Maimonides was born into a distinguished family in Córdoba (Cordova), Spain. The young Moses studied with his learned father, Maimon, and other masters and at an early age astonished his teachers by his remarkable depth and versatility. Before Moses reached his 13th birthday, his peaceful world was suddenly disturbed by the ravages of war and persecution.As part of Islamic Spain, Córdoba had accorded its citizens full religious freedom. But now the Islamic Mediterranean world was shaken by a revolutionary and fanatical Islamic sect, the Almohads (Arabic: al-Muwah.h.idūn, “the Unitarians”), who captured Córdoba in 1148, leaving the Jewish community faced with the grim alternative of submitting to Islam or leaving the city. 

The Maimons temporized by practicing their Judaism in the privacy of their homes, while disguising their ways in public as far as possible to appear like Muslims. They remained in Córdoba for some 11 years, and Maimonides continued his education in Judaic studies as well as in the scientific disciplines in vogue at the time.When the double life proved too irksome to maintain in Córdoba, the Maimon family finally left the city about 1159 to settle in Fez, Morocco. Although it was also under Almohad rule, Fez was presumably more promising than Córdoba because there the Maimons would be strangers, and their disguise would be more likely to go undetected. Moses continued his studies in his favourite subjects, rabbinics and Greek philosophy, and added medicine to them. Fez proved to be no more than a short respite, how-ever. 

In 1165 Rabbi Judah ibn Shoshan, with whom Moses had studied, was arrested as a practicing Jew and was found guilty and then executed. This was a sign to the Maimon family to move again, this time to Palestine, which was in a depressed economic state and could not offer them the basis of a livelihood. After a few months they moved again, now to Egypt, settling in Fostat, near Cairo. There Jews were free to practice their faith openly, though any Jew who had once submitted to Islam courted death if he relapsed to Judaism. Moses himself was once accused of being a renegade Muslim, but he was able to prove that he had never really adopted the faith of Islam and so was exonerated.

Though Egypt was a haven from harassment and persecution, Moses was soon assailed by personal problems. His father died shortly after the family’s arrival in Egypt. His younger brother, David, a prosperous jewelry merchant on whom Moses leaned for support, died in a shipwreck, taking the entire family fortune with him, and Moses was left as the sole support of his family. He could not turn to the rabbinate because in those days the rabbinate was conceived of as a public service that did not offer its practitioners any remuneration. 

Pressed by economic necessity, Moses took advantage of his medical studies and became a practicing physician. His fame as a physician spread rapidly, and he soon became the court physician to the sultan Saladin, the famous Muslim military leader, and to his son al-Afd.al. He also continued a private practice and lectured before his fellow physicians at the state hospital. At the same time he became the leading member of the Jewish community, teaching in public and helping his people with various per-sonal and communal problems.

Maimonides married late in life and was the father of a son, Abraham, who was to make his mark in his own right in the world of Jewish scholarship.

WORKS

The writings of Maimonides were numerous and varied. His earliest work, composed in Arabic at the age of 16, was the Millot ha-Higgayon (“Treatise on Logical Termi­ nology”), a study of various technical terms that were employed in logic and metaphysics. Another of his early works, also in Arabic, was the Essay on the Calendar (Hebrew title: Ma’amar ha‘ibur).The first of Maimonides’ major works, begun at the age of 23, was his commentary on the Mishna, Kitāb al-Sirāj, also written in Arabic. 

The Mishna is a compendium of decisions in Jewish law that dates from earliest times to the 3rd century. Maimonides’ commentary clarified individual words and phrases, frequently citing relevant information in archaeology, theology, or science. Possibly the work’s most striking feature is a series of introductory essays dealing with general philosophic issues touched on in the Mishna. One of these essays summarizes the teachings of Judaism in a creed of Thirteen Articles of Faith.He completed the commentary on the Mishna at the age of 33, after which he began his magnum opus, the code of Jewish law, on which he also laboured for 10 years. 

Bearing the name of Mishne Torah (“The Torah Reviewed”) and written in a lucid Hebrew style, the code offers a brilliant systematization of all Jewish law and doctrine. He wrote two other works in Jewish law of lesser scope: the Sefer ha-mitzwot (Book of Precepts), a digest of law for the less sophisticated reader, written in Arabic; and the Hilkhot ha-Yerushalmi (“Laws of Jerusalem”), a digest of the laws in the Palestinian Talmud, written in Hebrew.

His next major work, which he began in 1176 and on which he laboured for 15 years, was his classic in religious philosophy, the Dalālat al-h.āh.irīn (The Guide for the Perplexed), later known under its Hebrew title as the Moreh nevukhim. A plea for what he called a more rational philosophy of Judaism, it constituted a major contribution to the accommodation between science, philosophy, and religion. It was written in Arabic and sent as a private communication to his favourite disciple, Joseph ibn Aknin. The work was translated into Hebrew in Maimonides’ lifetime and later into Latin and most European languages. It has exerted a marked influence on the history of religious thought.

Maimonides complained often that the pressures of his many duties robbed him of peace and undermined his health. He died in 1204 and was buried in Tiberias, in the Holy Land, where his grave continues to be a shrine drawing a constant stream of pious pilgrims.

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ZHU XI

Zhu Xi was a Chinese philosopher whose synthesis of neo-Confucian thought long dominated Chinese intellectual life. 

Zhu Xi was the son of a local official. He was educated in the Confucian tradition by his father and passed the highest civil service examination at the age of 18, when the average age for such an accomplishment was 35. Zhu Xi’s first official position (1151–58) was as a registrar in Tongan, Fujian. There he proceeded to reform the management of taxation and police, improve the library and the standards of the local school, and draw up a code of proper formal conduct and ritual, none being previously available.

Before proceeding to Tongan, Zhu Xi called on Li Tong, a thinker in the tradition of Song Confucianism who decisively influenced his future thinking. He visited Li again in 1158 and spent several months studying with him in 1160. Li was one of the ablest followers of the 11th-century neo-Confucians who had created a new metaphysical system to compete with Buddhist and Daoist philosophy and regain the Confucian intellectual ascendancy lost for nearly a millennium. Under his influence, Zhu’s allegiance turned definitely to Confucianism at this time.

After his assignment at Tongan ended, Zhu Xi did not accept another official appointment until 1179. He did, however, continue to express his political views in memorandums addressed to the emperor. Though Zhu Xi also remained involved in public affairs, his persistent refusal to accept a substantive public office reflected his dissatisfaction with the men in power and their policies, his spurning of factional politics, and his preference for the life of a teacher and scholar, which was made possible by his receipt of a series of government sinecures.

These years were productive in thought and scholarship as indicated both by his formal writings and by his correspondence with friends and scholars of diverse views. In 1175, for instance, Zhu Xi held a famous philosophical debate with the philosopher Lu Jiuyuan (Lu Xiangshan) at which neither man was able to prevail. In contrast to Lu’s insistence on the exclusive value of inwardness, Zhu Xi emphasized the value of inquiry and study, including book learning. Consistent with this view was Zhu Xi’s own prolific literary output. In a number of works, including a compilation of the works of the Cheng brothers and studies of Zhou Dunyi (1017–73) and Zhang Zai (1020–77), he expressed his esteem for these four philosophers, whose ideas he incorporated and synthesized into his own thought. 

According to Zhu Xi, these thinkers had restored the transmission of the Confucian Way (dao), a process that had been lost after the death of Mencius. In 1175 Zhu Xi and his friend Lu Ziqian (1137–81) compiled passages from the works of the four to form their famous anthology, Jinsi Lu (“Reflections on Things at Hand”). Zhu Xi’s philosophical ideas also found expression during this period in his enormously influential commentaries on the Lunyu (known in English as the Analects of Confucius) and on the Mencius, both completed in 1177.

Zhu Xi also took a keen interest in history and directed a reworking and condensation of Sima Guang’s history, the Zizhi tong jian (“Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government”), so that it would illustrate moral principles in government. The resulting work, known as the Tongjian gangmu (“Outline and Digest of the General Mirror”), basically completed in 1172, was not only widely read throughout eastern Asia but also served as the basis for the first comprehensive history of China published in Europe, J.-A.-M. Moyriac de Mailla’s Histoire générale de la Chine (1777–85).

On several occasions during his later career Zhu was invited to the imperial court and seemed destined for more influential positions, but his invariably frank and forceful opinions and his uncompromising attacks on corruption and political expediency each time brought his dismissal or his transfer to a new post conveniently distant from the capital. On the last of these occasions, near the end of his life, his enemies retaliated with virulent accusations concerning his views and conduct, and he was barred from political activity. 

He was still in political disgrace when he died in 1200. Zhu Xi’s reputation was rehabilitated soon after his death, however, and post­ humous honours for him followed in 1209 and 1230, culminating in the placement of his tablet in the Confucian Temple in 1241. In later centuries, rulers more authoritarian than those he had criticized, discreetly forgetting his political and intellectual nonconformity, made his philosophic system the sole orthodox creed, which it remained until the end of the 19th century.

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AVERROËS

Averroës was an influential Islamic religious philosopher who integrated Islamic traditions with ancient Greek thought. 

Averroës was born into a distinguished family of jurists at Córdoba.Thoroughly versed in the traditional Muslim sciences (especially exegesis of the Qur’ān—Islamic scripture—and H.adīth, or Traditions, and fiqh, or Law), trained in medicine, and accomplished in philosophy, Averroës rose to be chief qādī (judge) of Córdoba, an office also held by his grandfather (of the same name) under the Almoravids. After the death of the philosopher Ibn T.ufayl, Averroës succeeded him as personal physician to the caliphs Abū Ya‘qūb Yūsuf in 1182 and his son Abū Yūsuf Ya‘qūb in 1184.At some point between 1153 and 1169, Ibn T.ufayl had introduced Averroës to Abū Ya‘qūb, himself a keen student of philosophy. 

Soon afterward Averroës received the ruler’s request to provide a badly needed correct interpretation of the philosophy of the Greek philosopher Aristotle, a task to which he devoted many years of his busy life as judge, beginning at Sevilla (Seville) and continuing at Córdoba. The exact year of his appointment as chief qādī of Córdoba, one of the key posts in the government, is not known.

AVERROËS’ DEFENSE OF PHILOSOPHY 

Averroës’ own first work is General Medicine (Kulliyāt, Latin Colliget), written between 1162 and 1169. Only a few of his legal writings and none of his theological writings are pre-served. Undoubtedly his most important writings are three closely connected religious-philosophical polemical treatises, composed in the years 1179 and 1180: the Fas.l al-Mak.āl, with its appendix; the Kashf al-Manāhij; and the Tahāfut al-Tahāfut in defense of philosophy. In the two first named, Averroës stakes a bold claim: Only the metaphysician employing certain proof (syllogism) is capable and competent (as well as obliged) to interpret the doctrines contained in the prophetically revealed law (Shar‘ or Sharī‘ah), and not the Muslim mutakallimūn (dialectic theologians), who rely on dialectical arguments. 

To establish the true, inner meaning of religious beliefs and convictions is the aim of philosophy in its quest for truth. This inner meaning must not be divulged to the masses, who must accept the plain, external meaning of Scripture contained in stories, similes, and metaphors. Averroës applied Aristotle’s three arguments (demonstrative, dia-lectical, and persuasive—i.e., rhetorical and poetical) to the philosophers, the theologians, and the masses. The third work is devoted to a defense of philosophy against his predecessor al-Ghazālī’s telling attack directed against Avicenna and al-Qārābī in particular.

Averroës acknowledged the support of Abū Ya‘qūb, to whom he dedicated his Commentary on Plato’s Republic. Yet Averroës pursued his philosophical quest in the face of strong opposition from the mutakallimūn, who, together with the jurists, occupied a position of eminence and of great influence over the fanatical masses. This may explain why he suddenly fell from grace when Abū Yūsuf —on the occasion of a jihad (holy war) against Christian Spain— dismissed him from high office and banished him to Lucena in 1195. 

But Averroës’ disgrace was only short-lived, since the caliph recalled Averroës to his presence after his return to Marrakech. After his death, Averroës was first buried at Marrakech, and later his body was transferred to the family tomb at Córdoba.

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PETER ABELARD

Peter Abelard, a French theologian and philosopher, is best known for his solution of the problem of universals and for his original use of dialectics. He is also known for his poetry and for his celebrated love affair with Héloïse.

Abelard was born the son of a knight in Brittany south of the Loire River. He sacrificed his inheritance and the prospect of a military career in order to study philosophy, particularly logic, in France. He provoked bitter quarrels with two of his masters, Roscelin of Compiègne and Guillaume de Champeaux, who represented opposite poles of philosophy in regard to the question of the existence of universals. (A universal is a quality or property that each individual member of a class of things must possess if the same general word is to apply to all the things in that class. Redness, for example, is a universal possessed by all red objects.) Roscelin was a nominalist who asserted that universals are nothing more than mere words; Guillaume in Paris upheld a form of Platonic realism according to which universals exist. 

Abelard in his own logical writings brilliantly elaborated an independent philosophy of language. While showing how words could be used significantly, he stressed that language itself is not able to demonstrate the truth of things (res) that lie in the domain of physics.In 1113 or 1114, Abelard went north to Laon to study theology under Anselm of Laon, the leading biblical scholar of the day. He quickly developed a strong contempt for Anselm’s teaching, which he found vacuous, and returned to Paris. 

There he taught openly but was also given as a private pupil the young Héloïse, niece of one of the clergy of the cathedral of Paris, Canon Fulbert. Abelard and Héloïse fell in love and had a son whom they called Astrolabe. They then married secretly. To escape her uncle’s wrath Héloïse withdrew into the convent of Argenteuil outside Paris. Abelard suffered castration at Fulbert’s instigation. In shame he embraced the monastic life at the royal abbey of Saint-Denis near Paris and made the unwilling Héloïse become a nun at Argenteuil.

CAREER AS A MONK

At Saint-Denis Abelard extended his reading in theology and tirelessly criticized the way of life followed by his fel-low monks. His reading of the Bible and of the Fathers of the Church led him to make a collection of quotations that seemed to represent inconsistencies of teaching by the Christian church. He arranged his findings in a compilation entitled Sic et non (“Yes and No”). For it he wrote a preface in which, as a logician and as a keen student of language, he formulated basic rules with which students might reconcile apparent contradictions of meaning and distinguish the various senses in which words had been used over the course of many centuries. 

He also wrote the first version of his book called Theologia, which was formally condemned as heretical and burned by a council held at Soissons in 1121. Abelard’s dialectical analysis of the mystery of God and the Trinity was held to be erroneous, and he himself was placed for a while in the abbey of Saint-Médard under house arrest.In 1125 he accepted election as abbot of the remote Breton monastery of Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys. 

His relations with the community deteriorated, and, after attempts had been made upon his life, he returned to France. Héloïse had meanwhile become the head of a new foundation of nuns called the Paraclete. Abelard became the abbot of the new community and provided it with a rule and with a justification of the nun’s way of life. He also provided books of hymns he had composed, and in the early 1130s he and Héloïse composed a collection of their own love letters and religious correspondence.

FINAL YEARS

About 1135 Abelard went to the Mont-Sainte-Geneviève outside Paris to teach, and he wrote in a blaze of energy and of celebrity. He produced further drafts of his Theologia in which he analyzed the sources of belief in the Trinity and praised the pagan philosophers of classical antiquity for their virtues and for their discovery by the use of reason of many fundamental aspects of Christian revelation.At a council held at Sens in 1140, Abelard underwent a resounding condemnation, which was soon confirmed by Pope Innocent II. He withdrew to the great monastery of Cluny in Burgundy and retired from teaching. After his death, his body was first sent to the Paraclete; it now lies alongside that of Héloïse in the cemetery of Père-Lachaise in Paris.

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AL-GHAZALI

Al-Ghazālī was a Muslim theologian and mystic whose great work, Ih.yā‘ ’ulūm ad-dīn (“The Revival of the Religious Sciences”), made S.ūfism (Islamic mysticism) anacceptable part of orthodox Islam.Al-Ghazāl ī was educated at T.ūs (near Meshed in eastern Iran), then in Jorjān, and finally at Nishapur (Neyshābūr), where his teacher was al-Juwaynī. After the latter’s death in 1085, al-Ghazāl ī was invited to go to the court of Niz.ām al-Mulk, the powerful vizier of the Seljuq sultans. The vizier was so impressed by al-Ghazālī’s scholarship that in 1091 he appointed him chief professor in the Niz.āmīyah college in Baghdad.

He passed through a spiritual crisis that rendered him physically incapable of lecturing for a time. In November 1095 he abandoned his career and left Baghdad on the pretext of going on pilgrimage to Mecca. After some time in Damascus and Jerusalem, with a visit to Mecca in November 1096, al-Ghazālī settled in T.ūs, where S.ūfī disciples joined him in a virtually monastic communal life. In 1106 he was persuaded to return to teaching at the Niz.āmīyah college at Nishapur. He continued lecturing in Nishapur at least until 1110, when he returned to T.ūs, where he died the following year.Al-Ghazālī’s greatest work is Ih.yā‘ ’ulūm ad-dīn. In40 “books” he explained the doctrines and practices of Islam and showed how these can be made the basis of a profound devotional life, leading to the higher stages of S.ūfism, or mysticism. 

The relation of mystical experience to other forms of cognition is discussed in Mishkāt al-anwār (The Niche for Lights). Al-Ghazālī’s abandonment of his career and adoption of a mystical, monastic life is defended in the autobiographical work al-Munqidh min ad.-d.alāl (The Deliverer from Error).His philosophical studies began with treatises on logic and culminated in the Tahāfut (The Inconsistency—or Incoherence—of the Philosophers), in which he defended Islam against such philosophers as Avicenna who sought to demonstrate certain speculative views contrary to accepted Islamic teaching.

Most of his activity was in the field of jurisprudence and theology. Toward the end of his life he completed a work on general legal principles, al-Mustas.fā (Choice Part, or Essentials). His compendium of standard theological doctrine (translated into Spanish), al-Iqtis.ād fī al-l‘tiqād (The Just Mean in Belief ), was probably written before he became a mystic, but there is nothing in the authentic writings to show that he rejected these doctrines, even though he came to hold that theology—the rational, systematic presentation of religious truths—was inferior to mystical experience. 

From a similar standpoint he wrote a polemical work against the militant sect of the Assassins (Ismā‘īlīyah), and he also wrote (if it is authentic) a criticism of Christianity, as well as a book of Counsel for Kings (Nas.īh.at al-mulūk).

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SAINT ANSELM OF CANTERBURY

St. Anselm was the founder of Scholasticism, a philosophical school of thought that dominated the Middle Ages. He was recognized in modern times as the originator of the ontological argument for the existence of God (based on the idea of an absolutely perfect being, the fact of the idea being in itself a demonstration of existence).

Anselm’s mother, Ermenberga, belonged to a noble Burgundian family and possessed considerable property. His father, Gondolfo, was a Lombard nobleman who intended that Anselm would make a career of politics and did not approve of his early decision to enter the monastic life. Anselm received an excellent Classical education and was considered one of the better Latinists of his day. In 1057 Anselm left Aosta to enter the Benedictine monastery at Bec. In 1060 or 1061 he took his monastic vows. He was elected prior of the monastery after Lanfranc became abbot of Caen in 1063. In 1078 he became abbot of Bec.

Under Anselm, Bec became a centre of monasic learning and some  heological questioning. Anselm continued his efforts to satisfactorily answer questions concerning the nature and existence of God. His Proslogium (“Address,” or  Allocution”), originally itled Fides quaerens intelectum (“Faith Seeking Understanding”), estabished the ontological argument for the exisence of God. In it he argued that even a fool has an idea of a being greater than which no other being can be conceived to exist; that such a being must really exist, for the very idea of such a being implies its existence.

Anselm was named archbishop of Canterbury by William II Rufus, the son and successor of William the Conqueror, in March 1093. Anselm accepted the position somewhat reluctantly but with an intention of reforming the English Church. Anselm later became a major figure in the investiture controversy; i.e., over the question as to whether a secular ruler (e.g., emperor or king) or the pope had the primary right to invest an ecclesiastical authority, such as a bishop, with the symbols of his office.Anselm spent the last two years of his life in peace. In 1163, with new canons requiring approvals for canonization (official recognition of persons as saints), Archbishop Thomas Becket of Canterbury (1118?–1170) referred Anselm’s cause to Rome. 

Anselm was probably canonized at this time, for the Canterbury records for 1170 make frequent mention of the pilgrimages to his new shrine in the cathedral. For several centuries he was venerated locally. Clement XI (pope from 1700 to 1721) declared Anselm a doctor (teacher) of the church in 1720.

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IBN GABIROL

Ibn Gabirol (in full Solomon ben Yehuda Ibn Gabirol) was an important Neoplatonic philosopher and one of the outstanding figures of the Hebrew school of religious and secular poetry during the Jewish Golden Age inMoorish Spain.

Born in Málaga about 1022, Ibn Gabirol received his higher education in Saragossa, where he joined the learned circle of other Cordoban refugees established there around famed scholars and the influential courtier Yekutiel ibn H.asan. Protected by this patron, whom Ibn Gabirol immortalized in poems of loving praise, the 16-year-old poet became famous for his religious hymns in masterly Hebrew.  

Against all warnings by his patron Yekutiel, Ibn Gabirol concentrated on Neoplatonic philosophy.  In need of a new patron after the execution of Yekutiel in 1039 by those who had murdered his king and taken over power, Ibn Gabirol secured a position as a court poet with Samuel ha-Nagid, who, becoming the leading statesman of Granada, was in need of the poet’s prestige. Ibn Gabirol composed widely resounding poems with a messianic tinge for Samuel and for Jehoseph (Yūsuf), his son and later successor in the vizierate of Granada. All other biographical data about Ibn Gabirol except his place of death, Valencia, must be extrapolated from his writing.

PHILOSOPHY 

Ibn Gabriol’s Fountain of Life, in five treatises, is preserved in toto only in the Latin translation, Fons vitae, with the author’s name appearing as Avicebron or Avencebrol; it was re-identified as Ibn Gabirol’s work in 1846. The work had little influence upon Jewish philosophy other than on León Hebreo (Judah Abrabanel) and Benedict de Spinoza, but it inspired the Kabbalists, the adherents of Jewish esoteric mysticism. Its influence upon Christian Scholasticism was marked, although it was attacked by St. Thomas Aquinas for equating concepts with realities.Grounded in Plotinus and other Neoplatonic writers yet also in Aristotelian logic and metaphysics, Ibn Gabirol developed a system in which he introduced the conception of a divine will, like the Logos (or divine “word”) of Philo. 

It is an essential unity of creativity of and with God, mutually related like sun and sunlight, which mediates actively between the transcendent deity and the cosmos that God created out of nothingness (to be understood as the potentiality for cre-ation). Matter emanates directly from the deity as a prime matter that supports all substances and even the “intelligent” substances, the sphere-moving powers and angels.This concept was accepted by the Franciscan school of Scholastics but rejected by the Dominicans, including St. Thomas, for whom form (and only one, not many) and not matter is the creative principle. 

Since matter, according to Aristotle and Plotinus, “yearns for formation” and, thus, moving toward the nearness of God, causes the rotation of the spheres, the finest matter of the highest spheres is propelled by the strongest “yearning,” which issues from God and returns to him and is active in man.

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RAMANUJA

Rāmānuja, a South Indian Brahman theologian and philosopher, was the single most influential thinkerof devotional Hinduism.Information on the life of Rāmānuja consists only of the accounts given in the legendary biographies about him, in which a pious imagination has embroidered historical details. According to tradition, he was born in southern India, in what is now Tamil Nadu (formerly Madras) state. He became a temple priest at the Varadarāja temple at Kāñcī, where he began to expound the doctrine that the goal of those who aspire to final release from transmigration is not the impersonal Brahman but rather Brahman as identified with the personal god Vishnu.

Like many Hindu thinkers, he made an extended pilgrimage, circumambulating India from Rāmeswaram (part of Adams Bridge), along the west coast to Badrīnāth, the source of the holy river Ganges, and returning along the east coast. He returned after 20 years to Śrīran.gam, where he organized the temple worship, and, reputedly, he founded 74 centres to disseminate his doctrine. After a life of 120 years, according to the tradition, he passed away in 1137. 

PHILOSOPHY AND INFLUENCE 

Rāmānuja’s chief contribution to philosophy was his emphasis that discursive thought is necessary in man’s search for the ultimate verities, that the phenomenal world is real and provides real knowledge, and that the exigencies of daily life are not detrimental or even contrary to the life of the spirit. In this emphasis he is the antithesis of Śan.kara, of whom he was sharply critical and whose interpretation of the scriptures he disputed. Like other adherents of the Vedānta system, Rāmānuja accepted that any Vedānta system must base itself on the three “points of departure,” namely, the Upanis.ads, the Brahma-sūtras (brief exposition of the major tenets of the Upanis.ads), and the Bhagavadgītā, the colloquy of the god Kr.s.n.a and his friend Arjuna. 

He wrote no commentary on any single Upanis.ad but explained in detail the method of understanding the Upanis.ads in his first major work, the Vedārtha-sam.graha (“Summary of the Meaning of the Veda”). Much of this was incorporated in his commentary on the Brahma-sūtras, the Śrī-bhā.sya, which presents his fully developed views. His commentary on the Bhagavadgītā, the Bhagavadgītā-bhā.sya, dates from a later age.Although Rāmānuja’s contribution to Vedānta thought was highly significant, his influence on the course of Hinduism as a religion has been even greater. By allowing the urge for devotional worship (bhakti) into his doctrine of salvation, he aligned the popular religion with the pursuits of philosophy and gave bhakti an intellectual basis. 

Ever since, bhakti has remained the major force in the religions of Hinduism. His emphasis on the necessity of religious worship as a means of salvation continued in a more systematic context the devotional effusions of the Āl.vārs, the 7th–10th century poet-mystics of southern India, whose verse became incorporated into temple worship. This bhakti devotionalism, guided by Rāmānuja, made its way into northern India, where its influence on religious thought and practice has been profound.Rāmānuja’s world view accepts the ontological reality of three distinct orders: matter, soul, and God. Like Śan.kara and earlier Vedānta, he admits that there is nonduality (advaita), an ultimate identity of the three orders, but this nonduality for him is asserted of God, who is modified (viśis..ta) by the orders of matter and soul; hence his doctrine is known as Viśis.t.ādvaita (“modified non­ duality”) as opposed to the unqualified nonduality of Śan.kara.

Central to his organic conception of the universe is the analogy of body and soul: just as the body modifies the soul, has no separate existence from it, and yet is different from it, just so the orders of matter and soul constitute God’s “body,” modifying it, yet having no separate existence from it. The goal of the human soul, therefore, is to serve God just as the body serves the soul. Anything different from God is but a śes.a of him, a spilling from the plenitude of his being. All the phenomenal world is a manifestation of the glory of God (vibhūti), and to detract from its reality is to detract from his glory.Rāmānuja transformed the practice of ritual action into the practice of divine worship and the way of meditation into a continuous loving pondering of God’s qualities; both, in turn, a subservient to bhakti, the fully realized devotion that finds God. 

Thus, release is not merely a shedding of the bonds of transmigration but a positive quest for the contemplation of God, who is pictured as enthroned in his heaven, called Vaikun.t.ha, with his con-sort and attendants.

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AVICENNA

Avicenna was an Islamic philosopher and scientist. Avicenna’s  versatility,  imagination, inventiveness, and prudence shaped philosophy into a powerful force that gradually penetrated Islamic theology and mysticism and Persian poetry in eastern Islam and gave them universality and theoretical depth. His own personal philosophic views, he said, were those of the ancient sages of Greece (including the genuine views of Plato and Aristotle), which he had set forth in the Oriental Philosophy, a book that has not survived and probably was not written or meant to be written. 

They were not identical with the common Peripatetic (Aristotelian) doctrines and were to be distinguished from the learning of his contemporaries, the Christian “Aristotelians” of Baghdad, which he attacked as vulgar, distorted, and falsified. His most voluminous writing, Kitāb ash-shifā’ (“The Book of Healing”), was meant to accommodate the doctrines of other philosophers as well as hint at his own personal views, which are elaborated elsewhere in more imaginative and allegorical forms.

THE DOCTRINE OF CREATION 

Avicenna had learned from certain hints in al-Fārābī that the exoteric teachings of Plato regarding “forms,” “creation,” and the immortality of individual souls were closer to revealed doctrines than the genuine views of Aristotle, that the doctrines of Plotinus and later Neoplatonic commentators were useful in harmonizing Aristotle’s views with revealed doctrines, and that philosophy must accommodate itself to the divine law on the issue of creation and of reward and punishment in the hereafter, which presupposes some form of individual immortality. 

Following al-Fārābī’s lead, Avicenna initiated a full-fledged inquiry into the question of being, in which he distinguished between essence and existence. He argued that the fact of existence cannot be inferred from or accounted for by the essence of existing things and that form and matter by themselves cannot interact and originate the movement of the universe or the progressive actualization of existing things. Existence must, therefore, be due to an agent-cause that necessitates, imparts, gives, or adds existence to an essence.

To do so, the cause must be an existing thing and coexist with its effect. The universe consists of a chain of actual beings, each giving existence to the one below it and responsible for the existence of the rest of the chain below. Because an actual infinite is deemed impossible by Avicenna, this chain as a whole must terminate in a being that is wholly simple and one, whose essence is its very existence, and therefore is self-sufficient and not in need of something else to give it existence. Because its existence is not contingent on or necessitated by something else but is necessary and eternal in itself, it satisfies the condition of being the necessitating cause of the entire chain that constitutes the eternal world of contingent existing things.

All creation is necessarily and eternally dependent upon God. It consists of the intelligences, souls, and bodies of the heavenly spheres, each of which is eternal, and the sublunary sphere, which is also eternal, under-going a perpetual process of generation and corruption, of the succession of form over matter, very much in the manner described by Aristotle.

THE IMMORTALITY OF INDIVIDUAL SOULS 

There is, however, a significant exception to this general rule—the human rational soul. The individual can affirm the existence of his soul from direct consciousness of his self (what he means when he says “I”) and imagine this happening even in the absence of external objects and bodily organs. This proves, according to Avicenna, that the soul is indivisible, immaterial, and incorruptible substance, not imprinted in matter, but created with the body, which it uses as an instrument. Unlike other immaterial substances (the intelligences and souls of the spheres), it is not preeternal but is generated, or made to exist, at the same time as the individual body, which can receive it, is formed.

The composition, shape, and disposition of its body and the soul’s success or failure in managing and controlling it, the formation of moral habits, and the acquisition of knowledge all contribute to its individuality and difference from other souls. Though the body is not resurrected after its corruption, the soul survives and retains all the individual characteristics, perfections or imperfections, that it achieved in its earthly existence and in this sense is rewarded or punished for its past deeds. Avicenna’s claim that he has presented a philosophic proof for the immortality of generated (“created”) individual souls no doubt constitutes the high point of his effort to harmonize philosophy and religious beliefs.

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