Blackwell Reference Online

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The intellectual heritage that the medieval faculties of arts and theology bequeathed to the modern age was rich but far from unambiguous. On the one hand, the medieval universities saw the creation of systems of philosophical theology whose comprehensiveness and methodological rigor have remained unrivaled. Yet it was also in the medieval universities that, for the first time in the history of Christian thought, philosophy emancipated itself from theology. This philosophy was no longer the handmaiden of theology, assisting it in its tasks of interpreting Scripture and distilling doctrine from the biblical narrative. For this new philosophy, language was not rooted in the divine Word as it had revealed itself in Scripture and the Incarnation; rather, language was to be analyzed as an autonomous phenomenon, by means of the tools of logic and semantics. Many scholars regard the so-called nominalism that championed this approach as a precursor of modern-day analytic philosophy, which still dominates the philosophy departments in the English-speaking world. This chapter will argue that these two seemingly so different tendencies in later medieval thought can be traced to a common cause: the advent of a new attitude toward text and authorship, and hence of a new conception of knowledge. This transformation possessed a crucial intercultural dimension, since it occurred in the encounter ... log in or subscribe to read full text