In last week’s lecture we talked about Boethius, who was born in 475 A.D. in Rome and died only 49 years later. He was a famous philosopher, although he would have called himself just a religious man and he was eventually even executed for his thoughts. Although Boethius is still read today and literally offered himself for the sake of his philosophy, many argue that he was not the most original writer and his ideas were not ground-breaking. The relevance and originality of Boethius as an author is an ongoing debate and I would like to share my own thought on this topic.
First of all, Boethius can be seen as a literal bridge between the Greek philosophy (eastern Europa) and the philosophical works written in latin (western Europa). Since Boethius was born in Italy, he was fluent in Latin and wrote most of his works in this language. However, he had a great interest in the Greek philosophy, so was he intrigued by the philosophy of Aristotle. Some people claim, he even went to the Alexandrian school of philosophy, known for its structured way of teaching philosophy. Boethius combined the Latin language, the inspiration from Aristotle and the structure of the Alexandrian school of philosophy and so combined the two different approaches to philosophy. This made him not only the link between Latin and Greek philosophy, but in some sense also the link between ancient and medieval philosophy.
Furthermore, Boethius added some famous arguments to ongoing debates within logic, these additions are still pretty relevant today. His most famous work is his addition to the discussion on ‘universals’ within logic. His conclusion was that ‘universals’ aren’t real, but only exist within human thought.
In conclusion, I think Boethius is definitely a relevant author that should be studied. Although he didn’t come up with the most ground-breaking ideas, he did add a lot to important discussion. For me it is maybe even more important that he combined different approaches to philosophy and so added some things to how we see philosophy today.
Medieval philosophy Lecture 1 