We have come to the end of the course medieval philosophy, and a fitting end it is. We end with political philosophy and ethics, just like Al-Farabi would have done through his enumeration of the sciences. But in this blogpost, I want to shortly reflect on what this course has meant to me.
In general, I think this course has really broadened my mind about the medieval period. Very alas ‘the medieval period as given during high school’, I had been somewhat guilty of believing it to be a very backward time when all that was happening were serfs being exploited and crusades being undertaken. Well, this course has shown me how wrong I was. We have encountered ingenious thinkers and arguments, who have created the foundation for all thinking afterwards. Medieval scholars already talked about the extent to which should citizens should obey to rulers, centuries before Hobbes for example wrote about this. We can see signs of modern communism in the bible and writings of medieval thinkers on voluntary communism. Marx can say religion is the opium of the people all he wants, but his solidarity looks an awful lot the act of charity to me. We see what it means to be virtuous, long before Wollstonecraft based her vindication of the rights of women on achieving virtue. We do well to acknowledge that many of the principles which underly our modern society can be found in medieval thinking.
The course has also introduced me to knowledge about Jewish and Arabic philosophy/theology, things I had little knowledge about. These have also influenced our Eurocentric thinking in a way I think many people have forgotten, so I am glad to have been thought about them during this course.
Furthermore, I am a devout atheist, but this course has made me wonder about the existence of God. We have come across many different arguments about the existence of God, theodicy and other religious doctrines, and sometimes they did stop me in their track and think, ‘hey, maybe they’ve got a point here’. I was especially taken aback by Thomas Aquinas’ argument on philosophy and theology, this indeed made me wonder where my own knowledge comes from. How much does me accepting knowledge from a textbook differ from somebody else accepting knowledge from the bible? What I find very special about this course (and philosophy in general), is that I catch myself looking around at all the beauty we can find here on earth and indeed wonder, isn’t there something who must have created all of this? This is not something I used to do before. Though I am still an atheist through and through, the course has given me a more respect and insight towards the three Abrahamic faiths.
An Introduction to Medieval Philosophy 