Medieval Philosophy Notes

The Ingredients of Medieval Philosophy

• Text and Commentary Traditions

  • Philosophy in the Middle Ages took various written forms, including encyclopedias, compendia, monographs, short essays, poetic, allegorical, novelistic presentations, and texts based on school and university practice (quodlibets).

  • The commentary was a central literary form used in the four traditions (Greek, Latin, Jewish, and Arabic) but has lost importance in modern times.

  • Medieval philosophizing was frequently based on old and venerated texts, with the aim of interpreting them, but the practice of interpretation often led to new thinking.

  • The central texts for commentary in the Greek, Latin, and Jewish branches, and among Arabic philosophers up to the twelfth century were Aristotle’s.

  • The Byzantine philosophers used Aristotle's texts in the original, Latin and Arabic philosophers in translation, and the Hebrew-writing Jewish philosophers usually indirectly, via epitomes and paraphrase commentaries translated from Arabic.

  • Various works of Boethius also received multiple commentaries in the Latin tradition.

  • Commentaries on the Bible and on the Quran sometimes included substantial philosophical discussions.

  • Direct commentary on Aristotle remained central to most higher education in the Latin tradition until late in the seventeenth century.

  • Arabic authors stopped commenting on Aristotle directly after the twelfth century, and earlier outside Spain, they began to comment on Avicenna’s rethinking of Aristotle.

  • Three medieval Latin texts were vehicles for many commentaries: the Bible, Peter Lombard's Sentences, and Peter of Spain’s popular logical Treatise.

  • Peter Lombard's Sentences, written circa 1155, systematically presents problematic questions in theology and proposed solutions, quoting extensively from Augustine. Much theological and philosophical work from 1250-1550 was done in commentaries on the Sentences.

  • Dante’s Commedia Divina also received commentaries.

  • Types of commentaries included:

    • Simple, literal glosses for beginners

    • Sophisticated literal commentaries explaining an author’s argument at a high level

    • Line by line commentary with discursive discussions and excursuses

    • Paraphrase-type abbreviations and rewritings of the original texts

    • Discursive rethinkings of a whole area of a past author’s work

    • Allegorical readings of a text

  • A distinctive form of commentary used in the Latin universities was the Question Commentary, where a book would be commented on by posing questions related to the content of its sections.

The Platonic Schools of Late Antiquity

• The main root of the four branches of medieval philosophy—Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Jewish—is in the two great so-called Platonic Schools of Athens and Alexandria.

• Plotinus's (d. 270) new version of Platonism had replaced the Hellenistic Schools (Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics etc.) as the dominant type of philosophy in the late Roman Empire.

• Porphyry (c. 232–305) gave his master’s teaching a decisive twist. While Plotinus considered Aristotle an opponent of Plato, Porphyry held that Aristotle’s thought harmonized with Plato’s.

• Following Porphyry’s lead, students at the “Platonic” Schools began by studying the whole Aristotelian corpus, logic first, and only then moved on to Plato’s dialogues.

• Medieval philosophy is, therefore, to some extent the history of Aristotelianism, but transmitted within a Platonist context, shaped by the different religious traditions and transformed both by individual thinkers and various, changing cultural circumstances.

Translation Movements

• Ancient texts were transmitted to medieval thinkers and the different branches of the medieval tradition influenced one another’s development through a series of translation movements.

Greek to Arabic

• The School of Alexandria was closed by the Muslim conquest in 641, but between the eighth and the early tenth century, much of the treasury of Greek scientific and philosophical texts it left was put into Arabic.

• Almost the whole of Aristotle was translated, along with commentaries from the Platonic schools and works by Alexander of Aphrodisias (working c. AD 200).

• Reworked versions of texts by Plotinus and the fifth-century Platonist Proclus were also made in Arabic, but Plato himself was hardly known except through translations of epitomes.

Greek to Latin

• Translation from Greek into Latin went on almost continuously.

• Writings by philosophically acute Greek Church Fathers were translated in antiquity.

• In the fourth century, Calcidius translated part of Plato’s Timaeus, with an extensive commentary.

• Boethius (476–c. 525) translated Aristotle’s logic and made available in Latin large amounts of the teachings on Aristotelian logic from the Platonic Schools.

• Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy was one of the most widely read and translated texts in the Middle Ages.

• Translations of pseudo-Dionysius and Maximus the Confessor were made in the ninth century, and of John of Damascus (c. 660–c. 750) in the twelfth century.

• In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the rest of Aristotle untranslated by Boethius—his non-logical works and the Posterior Analytics—was put into Latin, sometimes first via Arabic.

• William of Moerbeke (1215–1286) made very accurate, extremely literal translations from the Greek of all Aristotle’s works, and texts by the late ancient Platonists Proclus, Ammonius and Simplicius.

• In the fifteenth century, there were many more translations from the Greek, such as those of Plato and Plotinus by Marsilio Ficino (1433–99).

Arabic to Latin

• In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, especially in Toledo and Sicily, a large variety of Arabic texts were translated into Latin.

• They included Arabic translations of some of Aristotle’s own texts and works by the Arabic thinkers who worked in the tradition of Aristotle and the ancient philosophers: al-Kindī, al-Fārābī and Solomon ibn Gabirol, and parts from Avicenna’s largest encyclopaedic reworking of Aristotle, and many of Averroes’s commentaries on Aristotle.

• These translations, along with the translations of Aristotle, transformed the university syllabuses in the thirteenth century.

Arabic to Hebrew

• When Jews living in Latin Europe began to engage in philosophy, using Hebrew, they turned primarily to works in Arabic.

• A central text was Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed, translated into Hebrew twice soon after it was written, and a few other Jewish philosophical texts were also translated.

• During the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, translators also provided an almost complete Aristotelian curriculum but, although there were some direct translations, it was mostly by way of Averroes’s short and middle paraphrase commentaries, and al-Fārābī’s short commentaries for the logic.

• Other translations include al-Ghazālī’s Intentions of the Philosophers and Ibn Tufayl’s philosophical novel.

Latin to Greek

• One group of Byzantine philosophers in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries was strongly interested by Latin thought.

• The texts its members translated into Greek included works by Augustine and Boethius, Thomas Aquinas, and Anselm, as well as part of Peter of Spain’s popular Treatise on logic.

Latin to Hebrew

• In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries some works by a variety of Latin university authors, among them Boethius, Aquinas, Albert the Great and William of Ockham were put into Hebrew, and also Peter of Spain’s Treatise.

• There was even a Hebrew translation of Averroes’s Great Commentary on On the Soul made in the fifteenth century from the Latin, because the Arabic original was lost.

Hebrew to Latin

• Maimonides’s Guide was translated into Latin in the thirteenth century from one of its Hebrew translations.

• In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, there was a spate of Latin translations of Hebrew versions of Averroes, but very little of Jewish philosophy in Hebrew was ever put into Latin.

Other Philosophical Sources

• As well as drawing on ancient Greek philosophy via the late ancient Platonic Schools, each of the four main branches of medieval philosophy had its own special sources.

• For Byzantine philosophy, there were philosophically educated Greek Christian authors, such as Origen (c. 184–c. 253) and from the fourth century Basil, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory Nazianzen.

• The greatest influence on medieval Latin philosophy was Augustine (354–430).

• Augustine’s thought was shaped in part by Plotinus and Porphyry, some of whose texts he read in Latin translation; in part by his personal experience of the competing faiths of his time—Christianity, Manichaeism, Graeco-Roman paganism; in part by a Latin philosophical and literary tradition; and in the greatest part by his own, relentless self-critical genius as a thinker.

• Latin philosophers also had direct access to eras of ancient philosophy earlier than the Platonism of Plotinus through Latin authors, such as Cicero (scepticism, stoicism), Seneca (stoicism).

• In Arabic, there was the tradition of kalām theology.

• Philosophical thought about language was sometimes linked to Arabic grammatical thought and both it and ethics to adab, the tradition of literary and historical studies needed to make a person cultivated. Sufism—an Islamic mystical tradition—also deeply influenced some philosophers.

• Jewish thinkers inherited, not just the written Law of the Torah, but oral law, recorded in the Mishna and the tradition of Talmudic commentary on it. The central Jewish philosopher, Maimonides is also the greatest of the Talmudic scholars.

Styles of Medieval Philosophy

Byzantine Philosophy (c. 450–c. 1450)

• Thinkers in the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantines) needed no translation movement to access the heritage of the ancient schools.

• This led to encyclopaedism but also made the Church authorities suspect that commentators who went beyond logic would be guilty of “hellenism”—putting loyalty to their Greek cultural tradition above Christian doctrine.

• Of the three most adventurous Aristotelian commentators, Michael Psellus (1018–96), John Italos (1025–85) and Eustratius of Nicaea (c. 1050–c. 1120), only the first escaped condemnation.

• Gemistos Plethon (c. 1360–1454) gave substance to these fears through his devotion to Plato and pagan Platonism.

• Some historians restrict Byzantine philosophy to this tradition, based on the ancient texts of Aristotle and, occasionally, Plato and his followers.

• There were two other strands to philosophy in Byzantium: those thinkers after 1200 who looked to Latin thought, and those who looked back to the philosophically-inclined Greek Christian Fathers, and above all to the Pseudo-Dionysius.

• Pseudo-Dionysius substituted the Christian God for the One, and where Proclus accommodated the pagan pantheon on the elaborately triadic rungs of his pantheon, he placed the angels and the Church hierarchy.

• Maximus the Confessor, schooled in ancient philosophy though hostile to it, developed pseudo-Dionysius’s thinking, especially his negative theology.

• This line of Byzantine thinking has its most powerful later expression in the work of Gregory Palamas (1296–1359), who combined the theme of God’s unknowability with the idea that he does make himself manifest even in this life to some people who are helped by a special sort of “hesychastic” (still, silent) prayer.

The Rule and Two Exceptions: Latin Philosophy, 800–1100

• Philosophical thinking took place in the monasteries and, later, cathedral schools in Latin Europe in the ninth to eleventh centuries, and was stimulated at the end of the eighth century by Alcuin, Theodulf of Orleans and other scholars at the court of Charlemagne.

• Based on the seven Liberal Arts (the trivium: grammar, logic, rhetoric; the quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music), it was usually focused on the first two.

• Grammar ran from elementary language learning to complex semantic analysis.

• Logic, at first known from encyclopaedic accounts and Roman textbooks, was studied from the late tenth century on the basis of Boethius’s translations of and commentaries on Porphyry’s Isagoge and Aristotle’s Categories and On Interpretation and his own textbooks.

• Boethius’s Short Theological Treatises and Consolation of Philosophy were also used as school texts.

• Augustine’s works were not, but they were extensively read and so provided another source, and inspiration, for philosophers.

• In these centuries Latin philosophy acquired the emphasis on linguistic analysis and logic it would develop further in the twelfth century and retain in the universities, even when there were many more ancient sources available.

• The two outstanding Latin thinkers of the time shared to some extent this style of thinking and yet were in many respects complete exceptions to it: John Scottus Eriugena and Anselm.

• John Scottus Eriugena, an Irishman who worked at the court of Charles the Bald in northern France from c. 850–c. 870, learned Greek, translated pseudo-Dionysius and Maximus the Confessor and absorbed their ideas. His masterpiece, the Periphyseon, systematizes and takes to its rational conclusion the line of thought they drew from Proclus (and ultimately Plotinus and Plato).

• Anselm (1033–1109) became a monk at Bec in Northern France and, eventually, Archbishop of Canterbury. He wrote dialogues and monographs that scarcely mentioned an author. He is know for the Ontological Proof for god's existence.

Falsafa

• The abundant translations of Greek philosophical texts made it possible for some thinkers in the Islamicate world themselves to engage in the Greek-style philosophizing they called falsafa.

• Its exponents (falāsifa; sing. faylasuf) did not, however, fit into the educational system, based around Islamic law.

• The earliest faylasuf was al-Kindī (c. 801–66), who was especially attracted to Platonist material.

• In the next century, a circle of Peripatetics, Muslim and Christian, flourished in Baghdad, dedicated to the close study and exegesis of Aristotle’s texts. The most outstanding, al-Fārābī (c. 870–950/1), wrote shorter and longer commentaries on Aristotle, including a discursive exposition of On Interpretation full of original thought about both semantics and determinism.

• Al-Fārābī championed the view that in their discipline they provide demonstrative science (as described by Aristotle in the Posterior Analytics).

• His view of the ideal state is clearly influenced by knowledge of Plato (through epitomes) and is linked to his conception of the order of the universe, which melds Proclus’s theory of emanation from the One with Ptolemean cosmology.

• Ibn Sīnā (before 980–1037; known in Latin as “Avicenna”) was unquestionably the most important faylasuf—fundamental to the subsequent Arabic Islamic tradition, but highly influential too on Jewish and Latin philosophy.

• Avicenna believed his genius allowed him to present the underlying truth in Aristotle’s thought, by rearranging, rethinking and systematizing it.

• For Avicenna, as for al-Fārābī, God moves the universe not just as final cause, but as that from which emanate the series of Intelligences and celestial spheres, down to the Agent Intellect, giver of forms to our sublunar world and so assurer of the continued regularity of nature. His innovation was to identify this first cause as the one necessary being, that which is necessary through itself: its nature is to exist and so it cannot but exist. All other things are merely possible in themselves, but necessary through another—that is, through God, the necessary being.

Kalām

• A century before al-Kindī, a different style of philosophizing had grown up in the Islamic world: kalām.

• Kalām was based on problems suggested by the Quran, but it was also inspired by the need to defend Islamic doctrine against philosophically based attacks by Christians and may have been informed by some ideas from the ancient Greek tradition.

• The dominant school of kalām in the ninth century were the Muʿtazilites. They were very confident in the ability of human reason to reach moral truth, to which, they held, God’s justice must correspond.

• They strongly emphasized God’s unity and developed an atomistic, materialistic physics, very different from Aristotle’s picture of a stable world of substances belonging to natural kinds.

• A Jewish version of kalām is found in the work of Saadya (882–942).

• Al-Ash‘arī (d. 935/6) stressed the absolute omnipotence of God, who, he said, from instant to instant is responsible for the arrangement of the atoms, and for human will and action.

• Al-Ghazālī (1058–1111) studied kalām theology, Avicennian philosophy and Sufism, a type of Islamic mysticism, and he wrote about them all, as well as being one of the greatest Muslim legal theorists.

• Among these writings are not just The Intentions of the Philosophers, based on Avicenna’s shortest philosophical encyclopaedia (in Persian), but The Incoherence of the Philosophers, directed against falsafa as presented by Avicenna.

• Al-Ghazālī used to be thought of as a diehard enemy of philosophy, who helped to bring about the end of philosophizing in the Islamic world. In fact, however, there are just three doctrines on which al-Ghazālī convicts Avicenna and his followers of heresy: the eternity of the world, the restriction of God’s knowledge to universals and the denial of the bodily resurrection.

• Like the theologians, their reasoning is dialectical (Griffel 2009).

The Twelfth-Century Parisian Schools

• Paris became the centre of philosophy in Latin Europe in the twelfth century, in part because the cathedral authorities, rather than just running one school, allowed many, competing ones: masters flocked there, and students began to head to Paris from all over Europe.

• Many of these masters concentrated on the logical curriculum, little changed since the late tenth century, but now its texts had been thoroughly absorbed.

• This curriculum gave them the opportunity, not just to make advances in what is still considered logic, but also to develop a whole metaphysics, starting not from Aristotle’s Metaphysics—which they did not know—but his Categories.

• The boldest of all these metaphysicians was Peter Abelard (1079–1142).

• Aristotle’s Categories seems to imply that, as well as particular substances (this man, that dog) and particular forms (this rationality, that whiteness), there are also universal substances and forms. Abelard did not agree, and he tried to construct the world and interpret Aristotle without admitting that any universals exist. He also attended to the ontological status of what sentences say—their dicta. Dicta play a central role in his understanding of truth and of the basis of logical consequence, but, he insists, they are not things at all.

• Gilbert of Poitiers (c. 1085–90–1154) constructed an even more complex metaphysical system, based on the distinction between types of discourse (natural, “mathematical”, theological, ethical).

• Abelard’s method of trying to reconcile apparently contradictory authoritative texts through conceptual analysis was widely adopted by his contemporaries and would form the basis for later medieval theology.

• William of Conches (d. after 1155) concentrated on expounding texts such as Boethius’s Consolation and Plato’s Timaeus, and on physical science, in which he regarded Plato as an authority.

Islamic Spain, c. 1050–c. 1200

• Islamic Spain was marked out by its own distinctive style of thinking, which for the most part placed great emphasis on the importance of science and philosophy in the Greek tradition.

• The earliest important thinker was the Jew, Solomon ibn Gabirol (1021/2(?)–1057/8(?)), heavily influenced by Platonism, but insistent that the universe was produced at God’s will, not by necessary emanation, and that matter is present at every level of creation, even in intellectual creatures.

• Ibn Tufayl (before 1110–1185) is known through a single work, Hayy ibn Yaqzān, a philosophical novel, which tells how Hayy, spontaneously generated on a desert island, teaches himself, through observation and rational thought, a system of philosophy that corresponds not only perfectly to Avicenna’s, but also to the inner, spiritual meaning of Islamic teaching.

• Ibn Rushd (“Averroes” in Latin; 1126–98) was an Islamic judge and legal theorist, servant of the harshly anti-Jewish and anti-Christian Almohad regime, and also perhaps the most devoted Aristotelian of the Middle Ages. Whereas scholars in the Islamic East used Avicenna for studying falsafa, Averroes commented the letter of Aristotle’s text, as the Baghdad Peripatetics had done.

• Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides in Latin; in Jewish scholarship “Rambam”; 1138–1204) was educated in Spain but was forced to flee by Almohad policy and settled in Egypt. Like Averroes, Maimonides looked back to Aristotle himself and al-Fārābī, and believed that Aristotle had achieved as perfect a science as possible.

• In the Guide of the Perplexed, written late in his life, Maimonides undertakes a profound investigation of this question of (in)compatibility, ostensibly arguing against Aristotle’s central contention that the world is eternal, which, he says, destroys Jewish law.

University Philosophy

• By about 1200, the Paris schools had become a university, and at much the same time a university developed at Oxford. Universities were split into Arts Faculties and the higher Faculties of Theology, Law and Medicine.

• Arts Faculties had by far the most students, and those who studied the higher disciplines were older and had usually been trained in the Arts Faculty or its equivalent. Grammar and logic were studied there from the beginning, but, as translations of the complete Aristotle gradually became available in the course of the thirteenth century, after some decades of ecclesiastical opposition, Arts Faculties became in effect Aristotelian Faculties, with the curriculum divided up according to his texts.

• Although universities were under the aegis of the Church, study in the Arts Faculties was supposed to be limited to natural knowledge, of which Aristotle, a pagan, was considered by almost all to be the supreme representative. Discussion of revealed truth—in a highly argumentative manner, with many purely philosophical digressions—took place in the Theology Faculties, which quickly came to be dominated by Franciscan and Dominican friars.

• In the mid-thirteenth century, university philosophers were enthused by the newly available Aristotelian material, complimented by Avicenna’s presentations and understood with the aid of Averroes’s commentaries.

• The two most famous Parisian Arts masters, Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia, tried to develop Aristotelianism within its own terms, not merely independently of revealed doctrine (as they were required to do in the Faculty of Arts), but also irrespective of whether it contradicted Christian teaching.

• The Dominican theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) was no less enthusiastic an Aristotelian, but he had an almost unlimited confidence that Aristotle had reached demonstrative conclusions which must, therefore, be true and, equally, because true, not be in contradiction with Christian doctrine (though Christian doctrine also included elements that could not be known except through revelation).

• Siger and Boethius of Dacia were among the targets of a condemnation directed by the Bishop of Paris in 1277 against thinkers in the university. Aquinas, recently dead, did not escape completely, and he remained a controversial figure, though an authority for Dominicans.

• In the next generation, Henry of Ghent (d. 1293), a member of the commission that drew up the condemnations, was the most influential Paris theologian. But it was John Duns Scotus (1265/5–1308), an Oxford Franciscan who was then sent to teach at Paris, who transformed the subject. He thoroughly absorbed Aristotelianism, but held that Aristotle’s conception of God was wrong, because it did not allow for divine choices.

• William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347), a Franciscan theologian who worked at Oxford and London before joining the Emperor, Ludwig of Bavaria, in order to flee a papal investigation, followed Scotus’s line on God’s will, but substituted for his metaphysics a very sparse ontology in which the distinctions Scotus had thrust on reality are made through a mental language. Ockham was also a dedicated logician, and he and his brilliant Oxford generation made great use of logical and linguistic analysis, not unlike Abelard and the twelfth- century Paris thinkers.

• In Paris, John Buridan (d. 1360), the leading Arts Master for decades, and an outstanding logician, followed a similar programme, and, as an Aristotelian commentator, strove to be at once faithful to the pagan texts and yet respect the ultimate truth of Christian doctrine.

• Although most accounts of Latin university philosophy tail off in the mid-fourteenth century, this style of philosophizing continued vigorously for at least three centuries, and in this period universities were established all over Europe.

• Late in the fourteenth century, John Wyclif (d. 1384), trained at Oxford, elaborated a sophisticated and idiosyncratic system of philosophy and theology, aspects of which were taken up by Paul of Venice (d. 1429), the greatest logician of his time.

• The Arts Faculties of Italian universities flourished especially in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1525) was the most famous of these teachers, and the most audacious in defending the prerogative of Arts Masters to expound the genuine thought of Aristotle, whatever its differences from Christian doctrine.

• This tradition of university philosophy continued for nearly two more centuries, with thinkers like Giacomo Zabarella (d. 1589) in Italy and a host of important figures in Spain and Portugal.

Latin Philosophy Outside the Universities (c. 1200–c. 1500)

• Philosophy was also done in the medieval Latin world outside the universities, although historians are only just beginning to recognize it.

• Indeed, some of the most famous and widely studied vernacular literary masterpieces of the period are also works of philosophy. The most obvious example is Dante’s Divina Commedia, a study in Italian verse of love and moral conduct through an allegory of humans’ post mortem destiny.

• The Consolation was translated into almost every European vernacular; its influence mixed with that of twelfth-century Latin works that looked back to it, such as Bernardus Silvestris’s Cosmographia (based also on the Timaeus) and Alain of Lille’s Complaint of Nature.

• The first of the vernacular philosophical poems to draw on this heritage was the continuation in the 1270s of the Roman de la Rose by Jean de Meun, a lawyer who had close connections with the University of Paris.

• With both the Roman and the Commedia in mind, the late fourteenth-century English writers Chaucer and Langland wrote philosophical poetry (Troilus and Criseyde, Piers Plowman).

• Moreover, some highly educated philosophers writing mainly in Latin worked outside the universities. Ramon Llull (1232–1315/16) wrote prolifically in Catalan as well as Latin and reportedly also in Arabic, devising his own logical system, unrelated to university logic, for thinking about God and his attributes and demonstrating the truth of Christianity.

• In the fifteenth century, non-university philosophers included the Cardinal and papal diplomat Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64), courtier and papal secretary Lorenzo Valla (1407–57), Marsilio Ficino (1433–99), protégé of the Medici in Florence, and the nobleman Pico della Mirandola (1463–94). They all developed their ideas in forms different from those common in the universities and held classical antiquity in high regard; Ficino was a noted Platonist, Pico aimed to find wisdom in every available source, from the Kabbala to … university theology.

Women in Medieval Philosophy

• Women were excluded from the universities and, indeed, from most forms of higher education in the Latin Middle Ages.

• With the recognition that medieval philosophy also took place outside these settings arises the question of whether there were any women philosophers in the period.

• The medieval female philosopher candidates in the Latin tradition are all, by contrast, well- known writers with an accepted body of work, but who have not, until recently, been recognized as philosophers or included in Histories of philosophy.

• Some have traditionally been described as ‘mystics’. They include Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), Hadjewich (mid- thirteenth-century), Mechthild of Magdeburg (c.1207–82), Margaret Porete (d. 1310), Catherine of Siena (1347–80) and Julian of Norwich (1342/3–c.1416).

• Hildegard was an aristocratic abbess who, as well as producing works on medicine and natural science, wrote visions, along with their interpretations, in a vivid, poetic Latin, drawing on the Platonic tradition that went back to pseudo-Dionysius.

• The others also lived the lives of religious, but were not in enclosed communities.
  Porete was burnt at the stake by the Inquisition, for her refusal to cooperate in the process against her book, The Mirror of the Simple Souls Who Are Annihilated and Remain Only in Will and Desire of Love, but the book itself circulated anonymously quite widely.

• Most of these other women thinkers shared Hildegard’s poetic gifts, but they all wrote in their vernaculars.

• They treat central philosophical topics, including self-knowledge, reason and its limits, love, the will and immortality, in ways of interest to philosophers, who can learn from them to extend their thinking into often neglected areas (Van Dyke 2022).

• Porete, however, stands out for her argumentative manner. Although the language and atmosphere of her book is reminiscent of courtly romance, her text filled with reasoning, though reasoning in which the soul’s union with God is presented as utterly transcending the categories of thought.