Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
June 29 - October 3, 2018
The first is the achievement and sustaining of high levels of professional skill in the elaboration and use of logical and conceptual techniques.
Secondly, ascribed achievement is through the exercise of these acknowledged and licensed types of professional skill on particular problems, treated piecemeal.
Thirdly and correlatively, certain types of basic disagreement are recurrent and ineliminable.
Those who engage in it characteristically, although not always, come to it bringing with them commitments to some
extra-philosophical standpoint.
These ideological weltanschauungen cannot be provided with support by this type of philosophy and they are permitted to enter into it only insofar as theses abstracted from them can be brought to bear in a piecemeal way on the acknowledged problems of philosophy.
whether medieval or modern, except in skill, method, and technique in the formulation of problems.
Hence not even retrospectively is it possible to give a teleological account of its history, for no telos emerges.
I remarked in the first lecture upon how the inability of twentieth-century Gifford lecturers to make discernible progress in the enquiries with which Adam Gifford entrusted them was rooted in part in the resourcelessness of this type of academic philosophy. And just why and how this is so may now be a little clearer.
Consider in this respect The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy
It is the mark of encyclopaedia that the present stands in judgment upon the past, assigning to itself a sovereignty which allows it to approve that in the past which can be represented as a precursor of its own standards of judgment.
No one’s thought is treated as a whole and therefore the relationship of individual theses and arguments as parts to wholes never appears.
Enquiry itself became irreducibly multiple and heterogeneous in a way that excluded any genuine architectonic of the sciences. Thus
provides evidence for the strong similarity, if not quite identity, of standpoint of modern analytic philosophy and late medieval philosophy.
began to write the Summa Theologiae “for the instruction of beginners”
But the subsequent history of such commentary, no matter how distinguished, is quite independent of the mainstream of late medieval philosophy. Even in the Dominican priory schools the Summa never became part of the curriculum.
Thus was the Summa dismembered as medieval copyists, responding to consumer demand in the academic marketplace, anticipated the editors of the Cambridge History.
What his commentary does exemplify, however, is a growing divorce between philosophy as concerned with practice and philosophy as theoretical enquiry.
Such theories exemplify the way in which the multiplication and growing diversity of standpoints within moral philosophy are partially rooted in the changing form
of the conflicts of the political and social world.
Both Aquinas and Dante, as Augustinians and Aristotelians, made the test of good and legitimate government the degree to which it secures justice.
By the very early fourteenth century ius has become understood by some at least as a facultas whereby every creature is entitled to exert its abilities in certain ways. Human rights thus understood are characteristically claimed against someone else.
Cicero
provided an alternative way of thinking about the virtues and about the politics of their embodiment in practical life.
It is then the case, so I have argued, that the thirteenth-century university confrontation between Averroist Aristotelianism and Augustiniansim had two distinct and contrasting outcomes:
dialectical synthesis
a development which excluded for the most part engagement with Aquinas’s thought understood systematically and not just as a set of discrete theses.
Meister Eckhart.
Eckhart may well have believed that he was only carrying certain strands of Aquinas’s thought further.
Heidegger rejects this whole theoretical
whose conceptualization of being, on his view, debars it from understanding that which evades all conceptualization.
But that in Heidegger’s thought which involved that rejection was precisely that in which Heidegger was most akin to Eckhart, a kinship fully and gladly acknowledged by Heidegger.
it is not true that we use language in
speaking of being, but that instead being speaks to us in language,
So Eckhart himself carries language to the point at which conceptualization is evaded because sense is violated.
Obedience to God involves not conformity of the human will to the divine will, but loss of human will altogether–
but to do this would be to deprive utterances in that order of the possibility either of truth or of falsity, so rendering Eckhart, in his preaching at least, no sort of Thomist. So
For what Eckhart resorted to in his preaching was
a mode of speech unconstrained by logic, by the structures of rational theory and practice, and by analogical ordering in his predications, a mode which he took to express a power higher than those exhibited in sense experience and in rationality, “a noble power of the soul, which is so high and noble that it grasps God in His own naked being,” as he calls it in one place, “a power of the soul which touches neither time nor flesh”
one of the claims rightly condemned by Pope
His sermons represent a radical separation of preaching not only from philosophy but also from rational theology insofar as it is informed by philosophy.
J. Huizinga in The Waning of the Middle Ages (London, 1924) long ago provided a classic account of the various forms, disciplined and undisciplined, of the devotio moderna, of the cults centered around images and relics, and of the enthusiasm which provided the climate for such preachers.
But when professionalized academic philosophy makes the rational discussion of questions of fundamental import the prerogative of an academic elite with certified technical skills, using a vocabulary and writing in genres which are unavailable to those outside that elite, the excluded are apt to respond by repudiating the rationality of the philosophers.
That function is to prevent any challenge to the effective rhetorical performer
which might make him or her, or seem to make him or her, rationally accountable by appeal to some public standard.
Modern evangelical fundamentalist doctrines of Scripture–
fetishism.
“emphatic” language aimed at making an impression upon his hearers;
effectiveness as a preacher being prized above rationality of discourse.
homily was to be the end-product of an education in philosophy and theology.
