265. Time of the Signs: the Fourteenth Century

Thanks, as always, Peter, for these wonderful podcasts which so enhance my own readings in philosophy.  This latest one, introducing the 14th century, touched on the shift of learning away from Paris and Oxford toward other centers. It made me wonder if, among the many factors involved in this process, what role might have been played by Helen Waddell's "Wandering Scholars" of the previous century.    

Hi Peter,

some of this, though not the theological parts, will be formidably repeated in Thomes Hobbes's theoretical philosophy in the 17th century (whose relation to the scholastics will probably become a nice puzzle for you). He should really (and not only Descartes) be very thoroughly covered by you later on, as his enormous influence (e.g. on Hume) is not suffidiently recognized in all quarters. (See the British Hume scholar Paul Russell on this.)

Anyway, looking forward I wonder, where/when some of the favourite issues of the 17th century would already have shown up in the middle ages (if not before), e.g.



(a) qualities, primary vs. secondary (Galileo, Hobbes, Descartes, Locke + probably all of them)

(b) the ship of Theseus (Hobbes)

(c) persons + personal identity (Locke + surely Hobbes as well)

(d) essences, nominal vs. real

Maybe you`ll mention some other famous problems as well. But where did these 4 issues, in particular, already show up during the scholastic ages? Will you say anything somewhere in anticipation?



Ich freue mich auf die kommenden Episoden,

Michael

 

When it comes to the 14th century one shouldn't overlook Durandus of Saint-Pourcain. For one could argue that his rejection of the Aristotelian agent intellect was the seminal beginning of Modern Philosophy: once you accept this rejection, and are not a radical empiricist who rejects any kind of universal and necessary truths, there is no alternative to a turn to an apriori - be it in the manner of a Descartes, or a Malebranche, or, with an injection of the Humean critique of induction, of a Kant.  Certanly Durandus's  arguments against the Aristotelian agent intellect were taken over and copiously reproduced by such early-modern philosophers as Gassendi.

What is the musical piece playing during the intro?

I have been downloading your pod casts to listen to when I run.  Is there a zip file of the pod casts for this section?

Thank you for doing this!

Just two corrections on the history:

- The Hundred Yeard War wasn't about Gascony, that's the short War of Saint-Sardos that happened a decade earlier, in which the king of France took most of the remaining possessions of the king of England in France, and forced him to pay hommage to him as vassal for the rest. The Hundred Years War was about the throne of France, which the Plantagenets who ruled England thought they had a better claim to than the Valois branch which ruled France after the demise of the direct line of the Capetians.

- King John's son (the future Charles V) wasn't captured with his father at the battle of Poitiers in 1356. Instead he was left to rule the civil war torn country as a teenager while his father was gone. During that time however, he did have to deal with an uprising of the merchants of Paris led by Etienne Marcel, who at one point stormed the royal palace and murdered two marshalls before the his eyes, effectively taking him hostage and eventually forcing him to flee the city.