The Canon of Western Philosophy: Ancient and Medieval

I have a fair sense of the key works in Western philosophy. If a person wanted to read these key works, what would they be? This and two more posts are my attempt. What am I missing?

Ancient Greco-Roman Philosophy
The Pre-Socratic Philosophers (fragments, here is a possible source)

Plato
One can of course read all of Plato's surviving dialogs. However, here is a selection I might suggest:

• Start with the trio: Apology, Crito, Phaedo (the first is the account of Socrates' trial, the second about justice as he is in jail, the third speaks of the immortality of the soul as Socrates dies)
• Euthyphro
  (just prior to the Apology, Socrates addresses whether good is good because the gods say so or whether the gods say things are good because they are good independent of them)
• The Republic
  (perhaps his most important work, giving the myths of the cave and Gyges' ring)
• The Symposium
  (Plato's dialog on eros, love, giving insights into Greek banquets and sexuality)
• The Timaeus
  (Plato's best known dialog on cosmology)
• Meno
  (Plato's theory of knowledge as remembrance)
• Phaedrus
  (gives Plato's opinions of writing)

Aristotle
Here is the standard two volume collection of Aristotle's surviving writings: volume 1 and volume 2.

• I suppose for me the Nicomachean Ethics is the most important work, especially book X.
• A second work of interest are his Metaphysics, so named because they came after the Physics. It begins with Aristotle's sense of the pre-socratics.
• His Politics are of interest for me especially as background to the household codes of the New Testament. "Man is a political animal."
• His Rhetoric is important background for understanding ancient rhetoric. His Poetics is perhaps the oldest surviving work of literary criticism.
• Another work of interest to me are the Categories, in which he sets up a system for categorizing everything. His Prior Analytics presents the syllogism.
• De Anima gives Aristotle's view of the soul.

The Stoics and Middle Platonists
I suggest two secondary works to get a sense of these thinkers:

• F. H. Sandbach's, The Stoics
• John Dillon's The Middle Platonists

Other Stoics

• Cicero (Roman, mid-first century BC): On Friendship, On Old Age, On Duties, On the Nature of the Gods 
• Epictetus (Greek, late first, early second AD): Enchiridion 
• Marcus Aurelius (Roman, late 100s AD): Meditations

Lucretius (Roman Epicurean, first century BC) - On the Nature of Things
Plotinus (Neo-Platonist, 200s AD) - Enneads

Medieval Philosophy
Augustine (late 300s, early 400s)

• The Confessions (story of his conversion)
• On Christian Doctrine (gives his hermeneutic)
• City of God (his philosophy of history, political philosophy)

Boethius (late 400s, early 500s) - Consolation of Philosophy
Thomas Aquinas (1200s) - Summa Theologica
Duns Scotus (late 1200s) - Ordinatio
     (his commentary on Peter Lombard's Sentences, the standard theological work for four centuries)
William of Ockham (early 1300s, nominalism) - Summa Logicae

Three Ways of Thinking...

This is just one dimension...

Platonic
First, there are those for whom the world is really an entry point to talk about ideas. There is this thing called worldview and presupposition, and that is when you're really talking about what's important and real. The things around us are really just pointers toward that world of truth.

The Bible is all about this world of absolute truth. Its purpose is to tell us about God's worldview and the right presuppositions to have about the world. The Bible is a world of ideas, a window into God's mind. Individual words hold all kinds of secrets, as do the biblical texts if you have spiritual understanding.

If you've studied church history or philosophy, this should sound familiar. For Plato, the world of ideas is the true world, and the things around us are only shadows of the real world. If you look at the world around you, the world of senses, you are bound to be mislead. Only if you look on the heavenly ideals, will you know for sure how to interpret the world around you.

Platonism was an antecedent of Gnosticism, where the initiated gain insight into secret truths. Today, the Calvinist tradition tends toward the presuppositional. It talks a lot about worldview and "warranted philosophical beliefs" that do not need to be substantiated by evidence. I believe in order to understand. Post-liberalism, I think, has some tendencies in this direction

Aristotilean
The second approach is more evidentiary in nature. It infers absolute truths from looking at the world around us. It looks for "evidence that demands a verdict." It expects (or makes) the evidence of science, archaeology, etc. to add up to the absolute truth that is also in the Bible. That truth, however, is not detached from evidence. It is supported and pointed to by the evidence. The real world thus embodies absolute truth, rather than us needing Platonic presuppositions to come up with the right answers.

Evangelicalism has often been more of this sort, more concrete, more inductive Bible study oriented. To be sure, there has often been some "steering" of the evidence in the desired direction. But what everyone says they are doing is letting the text say what it says inductively. This is a more Aristotelian approach to putting the details together. It believes that absolute truths are embodied in all the particulars. You get to the universals by seeing them in every particular.

So God embodies certain truths in his person. This approach tends to be more concrete, with less dreamy abstractions. You look for the universal principles that are embodied in each particular text of Scripture.

Modified nominalism
I hate to call this approach nominalism, because then attacks of medieval nominalism may distract from the concept. I do not wish to deny the existence of universal truth. I do wish to say that our finitude makes it quite presumptuous for us to think we can accurately think in those terms. The worldviews and absolute truths you hear so many Christians talking about are bound to be a source of much embarrassment and joke telling in the kingdom. "And you actually thought you had it figured out," and the angels slap you on the back and start laughing uproariously.

There are universal truths that are a matter of definition. "A person who is single is unmarried" is true by definition. However, when you are talking inductively, about the world, from the standpoint of our finite, human perspective, universal truths are aggregates of particular truths. That is to say, unless you are talking about something that is true by definition, universal truths are things that are true in all particular situations. In our current, fallen, finite situation, we are more or less forced to start with each particular and to connect them to each other in more limited ways.

To put it another way, you build up to universal truth by counting particulars and eventually coming to the conclusion that those particulars all point the same way. This is, by the way, what those are saying who say that context isn't everything. They are saying that all particular contexts all point in the same direction. But the underlying principle still stands.

In many cases, particulars probably will not build up to universals. Rather, one particular will be similar to another in some ways but not others. We will look for the ways in which different things resemble each other, looking for points of continuity and discontinuity but without any certainty that there will be some common core overlap. Some Schencks have big noses. Some have big ears, but there are no universal Schencky characteristics, only a collection of general family resemblances.

This approach gives full embodiment to each particular revelation, and requires us to map all those particular revelations to each other if we want then to speak of universal truths in Scripture. It is more complicated to be sure, but it is as far superior to the other approaches as the heaven is higher than the earth. This is the approach that gives the fullest sense to incarnation, for each individual truth is given its full significance.

I frankly can't see any possible way to argue for the other approaches. I can account for the other two, but the other two will inevitably end up trying to force some disparate data into a foreign mould. That is to say, there will be no "naughty data" in this modified nominalist approach, but there will always be disparate data with the others. That is to say, the aggregate of all particular discussions of ideology will suggest that this modified nominalist approach is a universal truth.

I get very frustrated with the prevalence of the other two approaches, for they seem sophomorish and kindergartenish. To me, they make Christians look stupid and inevitably undersell the profundity of God.

The Flexibility of a Christian Worldview

I'm reading The Unintended Reformation with the Monday reading group and will probably post about it regularly for the next month or so.  I came across a good point today that I wanted to emphasize:

"Because the central claims of Christianity were not based or dependent on any philosophy but rather on God's putative actions in history, inherited assumptions and practices provided a framework for the testing, debate, and discriminating assimilation of philosophical ideas compatible with the faith" (39-40).

Brad Gregory is talking about the late Middle Ages here and about how Christian thinkers could appropriate elements from Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism, even Epicureanism without also adopting their clearly non-Christian elements.  It is also true that "inherited assumptions and practices" at that time would have included a good deal of Roman Catholic ritual and tradition.  One of the reasons the Anglican church can house such a diversity of belief (from charismatic to evangelical to Anglo-Catholic to Sea of Faith non-literalists) is because they all share the liturgy in common.

All of that is introduction. What I want to jump on is the "because" part.  The central claims of Christianity are based in God's actions in history, not on a philosophical system.  This fact has historically made it possible--and I believe continues to make it possible--for there to be some flexibility in the philosophical framework within which Christian faith is housed.

Are there some basics to a Christian worldview?  Yes, I believe there are.  For example, a Christian worldview believes in a God that literally exists, created the world, and acts in the world.  But the basics are event-focused and a relatively short list.

What this means is that those who talk extensively in terms of biblical or Christian worldview are really doing what Augustine did with Platonism or Thomas did with Aristotelianism or Luther or Calvin or Van Til have done.  They are not presenting the biblical or Christian worldview but presenting a Christian worldview that places the core events into some philosophical framework that is not actually part of the core.

Bertrand Russell on Aristotle

Not a long note here but just my observation that as much as Russell liked Spinoza, he really can't stand Aristotle. On the one hand, he recognizes Aristotle's greatness: "... after his death it was two thousand years before the world produced any philosopher who could be regarded as approximately his equal" (159).

With regard to his predecessors too, "Aristotle's merits are enormous."

Then we get a hint of Russell's frustration: "almost every serious intellectual advance has had to begin with an attack on some Aristotelian doctrine; in logic, this is still true at the present day" (160). Since logic and such were Russell's babies, this was his battle at the time.

But he has some interesting "snide" remarks throughout several chapters on Aristotle:

With regard to Aristotle tutoring Alexander the Great: "I cannot imagine his pupil regarding him as anything but a prosy old pedant, set over him by his father to keep him out of mischief" (161).

"Aristotle's metaphysics, roughly speaking, may be described as Plato diluted by common sense" (162).

"If, therefore, I have failed to make Aristotle's theory of universals clear, that is (I maintain) because it is not clear" (164).

After Russell has quoted at length Aristotle's sense of the best individual, he writes (perhaps correctly), "One shudders to think what a vain man would be like" given how Aristotle portrays a magnanimous one (176).

Again perhaps rightly, Russell writes, "When we come to compare Aristotle's ethical tastes with our own ... we find ... an acceptance of inequality which is repugnant to much modern sentiment. Not only is there no objection to slavery, or to the superiority of husbands and fathers over wives and children, but it is held that what is best is essentially only for the few--proud men and philosophers" (183).

"There is in Aristotle an almost complete absence of what may be called benevolence or philanthropy."

Then Russell gets to Aristotle's logic and the gloves come off.

"Even at the present day, all Catholic teachers of philosophy and many others still obstinately reject the discoveries of modern logic, and adhere with a strange tenacity to a system which is as definitely antiquated as Ptolemaic astronomy. This makes it difficult to do historical justice to Aristotle. His present-day influence is so inimical to clear thinking that it is hard to remember how great an advance he made upon all his predecessors... Aristotle ... is still especially in logic, a battle-ground, and cannot be treated in a purely historical spirit" (195).

"I conclude that the Aristotelian doctrines with which we have been concerned in this chapter are wholly false, with the exception of the formal theory of the syllogism, which is unimportant. Any person in the present day who wishes to learn logic will be wasting his time if he reads Aristotle or any of his disciples" (202, italics mine!).

Finally, with regard to Aristotle's physics, Russell concludes with a number of observations:

"This theory provided many difficulties for later ages... Galileo's discovery that a projectile moves in a parabola shocked his Aristotelian colleagues. Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo had to combat Aristotle as well as the Bible in establishing the view that the earth is not the centre of the universe, but rotates once a day and goes round the sun once a year" (207).

"Aristotelian physics is incompatible with Newton's "First Law of Motion," originally enunciated by Galileo."

"Finally: The view that the heavenly bodies are eternal and incorruptible has had to be abandoned. The sun and stars have long lives, but do not live forever. They are born from nebula, and in the end they either explode or die of cold... the Aristotelian belief to the contrary, though accepted by medieval Christians, is a product of the pagan worship of sun and moon and planets."