180138 VO History of philosophy II : Middle Ages and early modern period (2016W)

Objectives:
The lecture aims at providing a basic understanding of central positions of medieval thought, its intellectual historical background and its relevance for the development of modern thinking up to the present.

Content:
The lecture will offer fundamental insights into central positions of medieval philosophy. By way of introduction it will enfold the antique background of medieval thought. Complementary, it will discuss the influences of medieval thought on modern and particularly contemporary philosophy (20th/21st century).
In order to make the necessary intellectual means available, the lecture will start with an overview of the philosophical theologies of Plato and Aristotle. It will relate them to thinkers such as Augustine, Boethius, and Pseudo-Dionysius who provided the basic framework of medieval thinking.
In what follows selected exponents of medieval philosophy will be discussed. One focus will be on Anselm of Canterbury, the so-called Father of Scholasticism, another on Arab Aristotelianism (Avicenna, Averroes) and its specific challenges to Christian theology, a third on ontological approaches that, inter alia, reflected these challenges, namely the approaches of Thomas Aquinas and, subsequently, Duns Scotus. Afterwards the lecture will take a look on the discussion that, again, arose in the context of Thomism resp. Scotism about an analog resp. univocal concept of Being. This will allow, first, to reconstruct how the Scotist answer to this discussion led to modern nominalism. Secondly it will set a light on the wider theoretical background of the later critique of this development (for example in Adorno, Husserl, Whitehead).
In a further section, the lecture will deal with Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa. Here again their reception up until the 20th century will be of importance. Thus Meister Eckhart did not only have strong influence on Cusanus himself, but also on 20th century intellectuals and thinkers such as Martin Buber, Gustav Landauer, Martin Heidegger, or the Nazi chief ideologist Alfred Rosenberg. Cusanus, in turn, was an important reference point, first, for Renaissance thought (Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Giordano Bruno), but also for later Neo-Kantians such as Ernst Cassirer.

Method:
The lecture is divided in a 75-minute presentation and 15 minutes for questions.