Medieval Philosophy: History, Schools and Key Thinkers

Four centuries, four language traditions

In current historiographical use, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the label “medieval philosophy” is not limited to Latin thinkers: it also covers Byzantine authors writing in Greek, scholars of the Islamic world writing in Arabic, and Jewish philosophers who wrote in Arabic or Hebrew.

Most scholars place the start of this period in 500 and its close in 1500, though the exact boundaries stay open to debate: in Latin universities, on some readings, this kind of philosophy keeps going until around 1700, when the new science and Cartesian thought finally reshape the curriculum. A large part of this long stretch is built around a specific method, commentary on older and revered texts: the same root that grows into scholasticism, covered in full in the Recap on Scholasticism. The Middle Ages work, in this sense, as the setting for an ongoing conversation with antiquity, not a break from it.

Latin patristics and the commentary method

The Latin patristic tradition looks to Augustine of Hippo, born in 354 and dead in 430, as its starting point: some chronologies treat him as the single most influential thinker in that tradition. His thought takes shape inside the patristic world, the same setting the page on Augustine of Hippo explores more closely.

Much of the best medieval philosophy grew this way, in dialogue with earlier texts. A commentary would often end up far from a plain paraphrase of the source.

Worked example: a medieval scholar working through an ancient text would open it line by line and comment on it step by step, adding observations that stretched its meaning past a simple explanation.

Arabic philosophy, from Baghdad to Toledo

Between the 8th century and the early 10th, much of the Greek heritage of scientific and philosophical texts was translated into Arabic. Translations of works by al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Avicenna and Greek texts carried through Arabic gathered full momentum in Toledo in the second half of the 12th century, and within about a hundred years a large body of Arabic texts, 131 according to a recent publication, reached Latin.

Avicenna, whose Arabic name is Ibn Sina, was born around 970 and died in 1037; within his own culture, only Aristotle ranked above him in philosophy and medicine, and the title Preeminent Master reflected that standing. His main work, the Book of Healing, holds science and philosophy together in a single construction. Averroes (Ibn Rushd), born in Cordoba in 1126 and dead in Marrakesh in 1198, chose instead to put his energy into commentaries on Aristotle, convinced that no one had yet matched those results: by the 1230s, Latin Europe was already calling him simply the Commentator.

Latin translations of Averroes’s commentaries reached the newly founded European universities only some thirty years after his death. In 1255 a ruling by the University of Paris arts faculty required students to read the whole known body of Aristotle, a decision that did a great deal to turn Averroes’s commentaries into the standard secondary literature of Latin university culture.

Jewish philosophy, from Cordoba to Fustat

Moses ben Maimon, known as Maimonides, was born in Cordoba in 1138 into a prominent family: he is, for the medieval Jewish philosophical tradition, its most influential name. In 1148 the Almohads invaded the region and gave non-Muslims a choice between conversion, exile or death; the family had to leave Cordoba and, after a long and uncertain journey, reached Fez, in Morocco, by 1160, before settling in Egypt, in Fustat, in 1166, where Maimonides spent the rest of his life.

With the Mishneh Torah, his large-scale codification of Jewish law, Maimonides established himself as a thinker of historic scale. The Guide for the Perplexed, completed in 1190, gathers instead his broader philosophical arguments.

Maimonides’s thought was strongly shaped by the Neoplatonized Aristotelianism common in the Islamic circles of his time, the same legacy traced on the page about Neoplatonism, even as he set himself apart from the prevailing currents of that thought. After his death in 1204, Arabic-language Jewish philosophy died out in the Islamic world, then found new life in Hebrew: the Jewish communities of Christian Europe revived it through translation work from Arabic.