The re-introduction of Greek thinking and the new ideas that led to Europe’s Renaissance in the late 15th century sparked a change of mood as people began to look more toward reason rather than faith to provide them with answers. There was dissent even within the Church, as humanists such as Erasmus provoked the Reformation. Philosophers themselves turned their attention away from questions of God and the immortal soul toward the problems posed by science and the natural world.
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Epistemology
APPROACH
Epistemology
BEFORE
c.400 BCE In Gorgias, Plato argues that evil is not a thing, but an absence of something.
3rd century CE Plotinus revives Plato’s view of good and evil.
AFTER
c.520 Boethius uses an Augustinian theory of evil in The Consolation of Philosophy.
c.1130 Pierre Abélard rejects the idea that there are not evil things.
1525 Martin Luther, the German priest who inspired the Protestant reformation, publishes On the Bondage of the Will, arguing that the human will is not free.
Augustine was especially interested in the problem of evil. If God is entirely good and all-powerful, why is there evil in the world? For Christians such as Augustine, as well as for adherents of Judaism and Islam, this was, and remains, a central question. This is because it makes an obvious fact about the world—that it contains evil—into an argument against the existence of God.
Augustine is able to answer one aspect of the problem quite easily. He believes that although God created everything that exists, he did not create evil, because evil is not a thing, but a lack or deficiency of something. For example, the evil suffered by a blind man is that he is without sight; the evil in a thief is that he lacks honesty. Augustine borrowed this way of thinking from Plato and his followers.
An essential freedom
But Augustine still needs to explain why God should have created the world in such a way as to allow there to be these natural and moral evils, or deficiencies. His answer revolves around the idea that humans are rational beings. He argues that in order for God to create rational creatures, such as human beings, he had to give them freedom of will. Having freedom of will means being able to choose, including choosing between good and evil. For this reason God had to leave open the possibility that the first man, Adam, would choose evil rather than good. According to the Bible this is exactly what happened, as Adam broke God’s command not to eat fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.
In fact, Augustine’s argument holds even without referring to the Bible. Rationality is the ability to evaluate choices through the process of reasoning. The process is only possible where there is freedom of choice, including the freedom to choose to do wrong.
Augustine also suggests a third solution to the problem, asking us to see the world as a thing of beauty. He says that although there is evil in the universe, it contributes to an overall good that is greater than it could be without evil—just as discords in music can make a harmony more lovely, or dark patches add to the beauty of a picture.
A world without evil, Augustine says, would be a world without us—rational beings able to choose their actions. Just as for Adam and Eve, our moral choices allow for the possibility of evil.
Explaining natural evils
Since Augustine’s time, most Christian philosophers have tackled the problem of evil using one of his approaches, while their opponents, such as David Hume, have pointed to their weaknesses as arguments against Christianity. Calling sickness, for instance, an absence of health seems to be just playing with words: illness may be due to a deficiency of something, but the suffering of the sick person is real enough. And how are natural evils, such as earthquakes and plagues, explained?
Someone without a prior belief in God might still argue that the presence of evil in the world proves that there is no all-powerful and benevolent God. But for those who do already believe in God, Augustine’s arguments might hold the answer.
"What made Adam capable of obeying God’s commands also made him able to sin."
St. Augustine of Hippo
ST. AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO
Aurelius Augustine was born in 354 CE in Thagaste, a small provincial town in North Africa, to a Christian mother and a pagan father. He was educated to be a rhetorician, and he went on to teach rhetoric in his home town, and at Carthage, Rome, and Milan, where he occupied a prestigious position.
For a while Augustine followed Manichaeism—a religion that sees good and evil as dual forces that rule the universe—but under the influence of Archbishop Ambrose of Milan, he became attracted to Christianity. In 386, he suffered a spiritual crisis and underwent a conversion. He abandoned his career and devoted himself to writing Christian works, many of a highly philosophical nature. In 395 he became Bishop of Hippo, in North Africa, and he held this post for the rest of his life. He died in Hippo, aged 75, when the town was beseiged and sacked by the Vandals.
Key works
c.388–95 On Free Will
c.397–401 Confessions
c.413–27 On the City of God
See also: Plato • Plotinus • Boethius • Pierre Abélard • David Hume
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Epistemology
APPROACH
Epistemology
BEFORE
c.350 BCE Aristotle outlines the problems of claiming as true any statement about the outcome of a future event.
c.300 BCE Syrian philosopher Iamblichus says that what can be known depends upon the knower’s capacity.
AFTER
c.1250–70 Thomas Aquinas agrees with Boethius that God exists outside of time, and so is transcendent and beyond human understanding.
c.1300 John Duns Scotus says that human freedom rests on God’s own freedom to act, and that God knows our future, free actions by knowing his own, unchanging—but free—will.
The Roman philosopher Boethius was trained in the Platonist tradition of philosophy, and was also a Christian. He is famous for his solution to a problem that predates Aristotle: if God already knows what we are going to do in the future, how can we be said to have free will?
The best way to understand the dilemma is to imagine a situation in everyday life. For instance, this afternoon I might go to the cinema, or I might spend time writing. As it turns out, I go to the cinema. That being the case, it is true now (before the event) that I will go the cinema this afternoon. But if it is true now, then it seems that I do not really have the choice of spending the afternoon writing. Aristotle was the first to define this problem, but his answer to it is not very clear; he seems to have thought that a sentence such as “I shall go to the cinema this afternoon” is neither true nor false, or at least not in the same way as “I went to the cinema yesterday.”
A God beyond time
Boethius faced a harder version of the same problem. He believed that God knows everything; not only the past and the present, but also the future. So if I am going to go to the cinema this afternoon, God knows it now. It seems, therefore, that I am not really free to choose to spend the afternoon writing, since that would conflict with what God already knows.
Boethius solves the problem by arguing that the same thing can be known in different ways, depending on the nature of the knower. My dog, for instance, knows the sun only as something with qualities he can sense—by sight and touch. A person, however, can also reason about the category of thing the sun is, and may know which elements it is made of, its distance from Earth, and so on.
Boethius considers time in a similar kind of
way. As we live in the flow of time, we can only know events as past (if they have occurred), present (if they are happening now), or future (if they will come to pass). We cannot know the outcome of uncertain future events. God, by contrast, is not in the flow of time. He lives in an eternal present, and knows what to us are past, present, and future in the same way that we know the present. And just as my knowledge that you are sitting now does not interfere with your freedom to stop, so too God’s knowledge of our future actions, as if they were present, does not stop them from being free.
Some thinkers today argue that since I have not yet decided whether I shall go to the cinema this afternoon, there is simply nothing to be known about it, so even a God who is all-knowing does not, and cannot, know if I shall go or not.
"Everything is known, not according to itself, but according to the capacity of the knower."
Boethius
Lady Philosophy and Boethius discuss free will, determinism, and God’s vision of the eternal present in his influential book, The Consolation of Philosophy.
BOETHIUS
Anicius Boethius was a Christian Roman aristocrat, born at a time when the Roman Empire was disintegrating and the Ostrogoths ruled Italy. He became an orphan at the age of seven and was brought up by an aristocratic family in Rome. He was extremely well educated, speaking fluent Greek and having an extensive knowledge of Latin and Greek literature and philosophy. He devoted his life to translating and commenting on Greek texts, especially Aristotle’s works on logic, until he was made chief adviser to the Ostrogothic king Theoderic. Some five years later he became a victim of court intrigue, was wrongly accused of treason, and sentenced to death. He wrote his most famous work, The Consolation of Philosophy, while in prison awaiting execution.
Key works
c.510 Commentaries on Aristotle’s “Categories”
c.513–16 Commentaries on Aristotle’s “On Interpretation”
c.523–26 The Consolation of Philosophy
See also: Aristotle • Thomas Aquinas • John Duns Scotus • Benedictus Spinoza • Immanuel Kant
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Metaphysics
APPROACH
Epistemology
BEFORE
c.400 BCE Plato argues that mind and body are distinct substances.
4th century BCE Aristotle argues that mind is the “form” of the body.
c.800–950 CE Aristotle’s works are translated into Arabic for the first time.
AFTER
1250s–60s Thomas Aquinas adapts Aristotle’s account of the mind and body.
1640 René Descartes argues for dualism in his Meditations.
1949 Gilbert Ryle describes dualism as a “category mistake” in The Concept of Mind.
Avicenna, also known as Ibn Sînâ, is the most important philosopher in the Arabic tradition, and one of the world’s greatest thinkers. Like his predecessors, al-Kindî and al-Fârâbî, and his successor, Averroes, Avicenna self-consciously marked himself out as a philosopher rather than an Islamic theologian, choosing to follow Greek wisdom and the path of reasoning and proof. In particular, he saw himself as a follower of Aristotle, and his main writings are encyclopedias of Aristotelian philosophy.
However, these works explain Aristotle’s philosophy as re-thought and synthesized by Avicenna. On some doctrines, such as the idea that the universe has always existed, Avicenna kept to the Aristotelian view despite the fact that it clashed with Islamic orthodoxy, but in other areas he felt free to depart radically from Aristotle. One striking example is his explanation of the relationship between mind (self or soul) and body.
Mind and body are distinct
Aristotle claims that the body and mind of humans (and other animals) are not two different things (or “substances”), but one unit, and that the mind is the “form” of the human body. As such, it is responsible for all the activities a human being can perform, including thinking. For this reason Aristotle does not seem to think it possible for anything to survive the death of the body.
By contrast, Avicenna is one of the most famous “dualists” in the history of philosophy—he thinks that the body and the mind are two distinct substances. His great predecessor in this view was Plato, who thought of the mind as a distinct thing that was imprisoned in the body. Plato believed that at the point of death, the mind would be released from its prison, to be later reincarnated in another body.
In seeking to prove the divided nature of mind and body, Avicenna devised a thought-experiment known as the “Flying Man.” This appears as a treatise, On the Soul, within his Book of Healing, and it aims to strip away any knowledge that can possibly be disproved, and leave us only with absolute truths. It remarkably anticipates the much later work of Descartes, the famous dualist of the 17th century, who also decided to believe nothing at all except that which he himself could know for certain. Both Avicenna and Descartes want to demonstrate that the mind or self exists because it knows it exists; and that it is distinct from the human body.
The Flying Man
In the Flying Man experiment, Avicenna wants to examine what we can know if we are effectively robbed of our senses, and cannot depend on them for information. He asks us each to imagine this: suppose I have just come into existence, but I have all my normal intelligence. Suppose, too, that I am blindfolded and that I am floating in the air, and my limbs are separated from each other, so I can touch nothing. Suppose I am entirely without any sensations. None the less, I will be sure that I myself exist. But what is this self, which is me? It cannot be any of the parts of my body, because I do not know that I have any. The self that I affirm as existing does not have length or breadth or depth. It has no extension, or physicality. And, if I were able to imagine, for instance, a hand, I would not think that it belonged to this self which I know exists.
It follows from this that the human self—what I am—is distinct from my body, or anything physical. The Flying Man experiment, says Avicenna, is a way of alerting and reminding oneself of the existence of the mind as something other than, and distinct from, the body.
Avicenna also has other ways to show that the mind cannot be something material. Most are based on the fact that the type of intellectual knowledge the mind can grasp cannot not be contained by anything material. It is easy to see how the parts of physical, shaped things fit with the parts of a physical, shaped sense organ: the image of the wall that I see is stretched over the lens of my eye, each of its parts corresponding to a part of the lens. But the mind is not a sense organ; what it grasps are definitions, such as “Man is a rational, mortal animal.” The parts of this phrase need to be grasped at once, together. The mind therefore cannot be in any way like or part of the body.
Avicenna’s medical knowledge was so vast that it won him royal patronage. His Canon of Medicine influenced European schools of medicine until the mid-17th century.
"The secret conversation is a direct encounter between God and the soul, abstracted from all material constraints."
Avicenna
The immortal soul
Avicenna goes on to draw the conclusion that the mind is not destroyed when the body dies, and that it is immortal. This did not help to make his thinking more palatable to orthodox Muslims, who believe that the whole person, body and mind, is resurrected and enjoys the afterlife. Consequently, Avicenna was attacked in the 12th century by the great Islamic theologian al-Ghazâlî, who called him a heretic for abandoning the central Islamic tenet of the resurrection of the dead. But in the same century Avicenna’s work was also translated into Latin, and his dualism
became popular among Christian philosophers and theologians. They liked the way his interpretations of Aristotle’s texts made them easily compatible with the idea of an immortal soul.
"But what is it that I am? A thinking thing."
René Descartes
The indubitable self
Some 200 years later, in the 1250s, Thomas Aquinas championed a more faithful interpretation of Aristotle, in which the mind and body are much more closely tied together, and his views were widely accepted by the theologians of the 16th and 17th centuries. But in 1640 Descartes returned to a dualism that was nearer to Plato’s than Aristotle’s, and his argument for it was very like Avicenna’s.
Descartes imagines that there is a demon who is trying to deceive him about everything on which he might possibly be deceived. The one thing that he cannot be deceived about, he realizes, is that he exists. This self is exactly the self which Avicenna’s Flying Man is sure of, when he has no other knowledge. Like Avicenna, Descartes can then conclude that the “I”, or self, is completely distinct from the body, and that it must be immortal.
The ghost in the machine
One very strong objection to the dualism of Avicenna or Descartes is the argument used by Aquinas. He says that the self which thinks is the same as the self which feels sensations in the body. For instance, I do not just observe that there is a pain in my leg, in the way that a sailor might notice a hole in his ship. The pain belongs to me as much as my thoughts about philosophy, or what I might have for lunch.
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