Recherche – Detailansicht
Ausgabe: | Oktober/2021 |
Spalte: | 957–959 |
Kategorie: | Philosophie, Religionsphilosophie |
Autor/Hrsg.: | Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie. Begr. v. F. Ueberweg. Völlig neu bearb. Ausgabe. Hgg. v. L. Cesalli u. G. Hartung. Die Philosophie des Mittelalters. Bd. 3/1–2 |
Titel/Untertitel: | 12. Jahrhundert. 2 Teilbde. Hgg. v. L. Cesalli, R. Imbach, A. de Libera u. Th. Ricklin (†) unter Mitarb. v. J. G. Heller. |
Verlag: | Basel u. a.: Schwabe Verlag 2020. L, 1318 S. Lw. EUR 420,00. ISBN 9783796526251. |
Rezensent: | Lydia Schumacher |
The two volumes on the 12th century in the Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie: Die Philosophie des Mittelalters comprise a monu-mental work that has been needed for a long time but was perhaps not possible to produce until now. Though there is an abundance of precious and highly erudite scholarship on 12th century topics and thinkers, including some valuable overviews, to my know-ledge, there is no work to date that offers such an up-to-date pic-ture of the state of research on this period which engages deeply with the key ideas, trends, figures, and schools of the time. To possess such a holistic picture, which nonetheless encompasses de-tailed research on specific topics, some of it quite recent, is invaluable for scholars of the middle ages, and we have to thank the editors and more than 30 authors for the long-term effort they put forth to make this work available.
At the outset of the text, the editors offer some reflections on its organising principles and indeed on the kind of resource they intend for it to be. In this regard, they mention a number of ways that historians of philosophy have approached the composition of such overviews in the past, whether from an ideological perspec-tive like that of Etienne Gilson, who attempted to outline a history of specifically Christian philosophy, or more recently, from the perspective of contemporary questions or methods in philosophy, which are sometimes rather anachronistically projected back onto medieval texts. While such approaches may have their uses, the Grundriss assumes a different one which is very welcome and much needed: it seeks to explain the main philosophical trends as well as specific doctrinal ideas of the 12th century as they developed in their own contexts and on their own terms. As such, it offers a history of philosophy in the truest sense of the term. While such a history can shed light on subsequent developments or current questions, the goal of the Grundriss itself is not to do so but to offer a faithful representation of 12th-century thinking.
To this end, the editors assume a historical-topographical approach to organizing the material. In the first instance, they assess 12th-century authors based on whether they belonged to a pan-European institution such as a religious order. This allows for dealing with the majority of key thinkers from the period who belonged to the Benedictine, Cistercian, Premonstratensian, Carthusian, and Augustinian orders. Those that remain are assessed in terms of their best-attested geographical centre of activity, such as France, England, Sicily, Iberia, or the Holy Roman Empire north or south of the alps. While the editors admit that this principle of organization might seem unusual and even irrelevant to philo-sophical considerations at first glance, the approach does ultimately achieve its intent of allowing for a clear presentation of the authors and their works with reference to the most relevant questions of historical context. Arguably, it does so more successfully than a history organised by topic would do, given that a thematic approach would inevitably result in missing out important details of particular thinkers’ lives and scholarly contributions.
By the same token, the topographical approach allows the authors to compensate for areas that were lacking in earlier histories of 12th-century thought such as Dronke’s edited volume from 1988. This work focussed on the ›big names‹ of the period to the exclusion of the minor and anonymous authors who were nonetheless significant in the period. While Dronke’s work also covered the historical context of the 12th century, new perspectives introduced during the period (natural philosophy, grammar, logic), as well as the new Arabic philosophical sources, the account of these issues was relatively brief and tailored to a generalist audience. The level of specificity and complexity achieved by the Grundriss has no comparison.
Another unique feature of the volumes concerns the account they offer of the texts and translations that were in principle avail-able to 12th-century readers, in what can be described as an ›ideal library‹. Any researcher of medieval texts will be acutely aware of how important it is to identify the sources an author had to hand in order to understand the work of the authors themselves. This however is a difficult and laborious task, namely, to determine on the basis of research into the relevant manuscript traditions what those sources would have been, and to address questions about their authenticity, chronology, circulation, and popularity. The authors of the Grundriss have done a great service or scholarship in making a great deal of this kind of information available.
Equally important are the comprehensive bibliographies of primary literature, which include brief descriptions of both edited and unedited primary works, as well as the long lists of secondary litera-ture which have been taken into account in the composition of the project. In some cases, this literature has been known for a while but simply not integrated into a larger picture like that offered by the Grundriss. In others, the research is more recent and changes our perception of the field. Either way, the bibliographical re-sources codified in the Grundriss ensure that it will serve for a long time as the point of departure for any new research in the field.
The general strategy of the volumes is to provide a brief introduction to the life and works of a thinker, followed by a more de-tailed account of their intellectual achievements and ultimately their influence. This allows for relaying not only the most pertinent facts of their existence and for offering readers an account of the state of research on the subject which otherwise in many cases is not available but also for conducting in some cases genuinely new research or at least for presenting new insights and themes in the works of different authors, nevertheless without distracting from the overall goal of providing a coherent and well-rounded overview. In the process, the volume helps to overcome a longstanding but quite outdated tendency to relegate the 12th century to a time of ›preparation‹ for the great discoveries of the 13th century which in turn supposedly preceded the decline of scholasticism in the 14th. It complicates this picture by highlighting the extent to which the so-called renaissance of the 12th century forms more of a continuum than a mere immature precursor to the following period.
An important factor in this regard involved the translation into Latin during this period not only of Greek works, both the philo-sophical works of Aristotle and theological works by major Greek fathers, but also Arabic works by Jewish and Islamic scholars. Although the purpose of the Grundriss is not to deal with Greek or Arabic philosophy or theology in its own right, readers should be pleased at the amount of attention that is devoted to the importance of both traditions in the Latin world in the second half of the 12th century especially. In this reader’s opinion, the volumes provide a coherent and highly specified account of the way that the prior Latin tradition, which entailed training in the liberal arts (trivium: grammar, logic, dialectic; quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy), eventually merged with and was supplemented by Greco-Arabic writings on natural philosophy (metaphysics, physics, psychology), and theology.
As the editors state in their introduction, their concern was precisely to deal with the whole range of disciplines that were of inter-est to medieval thinkers who engaged with philosophical ques-tions, and especially to reckon with theology, which is the subject or at least a subject in many sections of the work. The engagement with theological material is certainly welcome and even essential, though the Church Historian would likely wish for rather more sophisticated rationale behind its inclusion, perhaps in the form of some reflections on the relationship that existed in this period be-tween philosophical thinking and questions of faith. The latter were in fact prime in the minds of virtually all 12th-century thinkers, many of whom, as the volumes acknowledge, were members of religious orders, or if not, members of the priesthood. This therefore is the one slight blind-spot one might identify in the project: even though it deals extensively with theological questions, it does not give or seem to have an account of the role theology played and indeed its primacy over philosophy in 12th-century Latin culture.
In this regard, those working from a theological point of view might also have wished for a more focussed section on the forerunners of the university – the generation that bridged the gap between the schools at Paris, which was the leading center for theological and philosophical studies at this time, and the first chartered university at Paris. Many members of this generation are indeed mentioned in the volume, including Langton, Praepositinus, Peter the Chanter, Peter Comestor, and so on. However, more might have been done to highlight the role they played in laying the groundwork for the university in which many of them eventually did become prominent members, and thus to set the stage for the Grundriss volume on the 13th century. This however is a minor quibble given the rich mater-ial the volume does in fact include on these transitional figures, and it does not detract in the least from the overall coherence and value of what I would consider to be one of the greatest overviews of a medieval period to be produced in a generation.