The main peculiarities of the Mediaeval Philosophy:

1. Theocentricism, meaning that any problem in philosophy including the problem of man is solved via God.

2. Theodicy solves the contradiction between the idea of God as Absolute Good and the existence of Evil in the world.

3. Providentialism (from Geek “foresigh”) means that everything is developing according to God’s purport and is supposed to achieve it at last.

4 Personalism, meaning that God is the Absolute Personality and derivative from him is the personality of man, who is able to cognise God only through deep and mystic communication of persolalities, by means of prayer, confession and penance.

Man should not justify himself to anybody but God. Only God knows all his deeds, thoughts and actions and is responsible to jurge him.

Middle Ages: general characteristics, basic ideas, schools, philosophers.

Medieval philosophy is the philosophy in the era now known as medieval or the Middle Ages, the period roughly extending from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century AD to the Ren aissance in the sixteenth century.

Medieval philosophy is characteristically theological: With the possible exceptions of Avicenna and Averroes, medieval thinkers did not consider themselves philosophers at all.

The three principles that underlie all their work are the use of logic, dialectic, and analysis to discover the truth, known as ratio, respect for the insights of ancient philosophers, in particular Aristotle, and deference to their authority (auctoritas), and the obligation to co-ordinate the insights of philosophy with theological teaching and revelation.

One of the most heavily debated topics of the period was that of faith versus reason. Avicenna and Averroes both leaned more on the side of reason

Білет 10.Argumentation on the Universals. Nominalists and realists.

The conflict between matter and spirit was manifested most acutely in the mediaeval controversy between the realists (fr. L. realis “material”) and nominalists (fr. L. nomen “name”). The debate was concerned with the nature of universals, or general concepts. The realists (Johannes Scotus Erigena, and mostly Thomas Aquinas), relying on Aristotle’s proposition that the general exists as indivisibly linked with the individual, being its form, developed the theory of the three kinds of the existence of universals: “before things” —in divine reason; “in the things themselves”, of which universals are the essences or forms; and “after things” —in the human mind, as results of abstraction. This position is known in the history of philosophy as a”moderate realism”, distinct from an”extreme realism” insisting that the general exists only outside things. The extreme realism of the Platonian variety, despite all its apparent suita­bility to idealist scholasticism, could not be accepted by the Orthodox Church since matter was partially justified in Christianity as one of the two natures of Jesus Christ.

The nominalists, like Roscelin, were much more materialistically minded than even the moderate realists; they carried the idea of negation of the objective existence of the general to the logical end, believing that universals only exist in the human mind, in thought; in other words, they rejected not only the presence of the general in a concrete individual thing but also its existence “before the thing”, and that was tantamount to the materialist view of the primacy of matter. Universals, Roscelin said, are nothing but the names of things, and their existence is reducible to the vibrations of the vocal chords. Only the individual exists, and only the individual can be the object of knowledge.