PREFACE
"We are like dwarfs," wrote Bernard of Chartres, "seated on the shoulders of giants; we see more things than the ancients and things more distant, but this is due neither to the sharpness of our own sight, nor to the greatness of our stature, but because we are raised and borne aloft on that giant mass."
1 In the search for truth, modern Western philosophers stand on the shoulders of the "giant mass" of ancient and medieval thinkers whose ideas they have inherited.Western civilization lives by the ideas that animate it." This book is written for students making their first acquaintance with these ideas in the history of philosophy. The author’s chief purpose is to introduce students to the origin, development, and interconnection of philosophical ideas. To achieve this goal, emphasis has been placed upon making the major ideas of the medieval philosophers accessible to the reader in a direct, clear, and informative manner. This history of philosophy is intended, not as an end, but as a means of introducing the reader to a more extensive and intensive study of the philosophers’ writings and of their interpretations by specialists in various fields.
When the student is first acquainted with the myriad ideas of medieval thought, they may appear to him widely elusive, hopelessly incoherent, and even self-contradictory. It is the taunting, tantalizing challenge of the history of philosophy to discover the overall pattern of interrelated meaning. With this insight one can savor the distinctive contribution of each man or movement.
In understanding the meaning of philosophical ideas, one has not only factual information but an appreciation of what philosophizing meant for Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham. What better way is there to learn to philosophize than to observe the great philosophers of the past? This history of philosophy is intended as an introduction to the process of philosophizing itself. With adequate knowledge of the history of philosophy, one can share in the collective enterprise of philosophizing which has occupied the mind of Western man for twenty-five centuries.
To disclose effectively the pattern of meaning in the history of medieval philosophy, the historian of philosophy must keep in mind two aims. First, he must discover the spirit of an age by fathoming