Introduction

According to the Renaissance view of the development of Western philosophy there is a ‘breakdown of traditional thought’ around 1500. This approach leads to the paradoxical view that English and French, German and Italian, Spanish and Dutch, Scandinavian, Middle and Eastern European philosophy start only after 1500 and that modern European philosophy is not much older than American thought. Moreover, modern history of modern philosophy pays a great deal of attention to the great individual philosophers outside the universities. Hobbes and Descartes, Locke and Berkeley, Spinoza and Leibniz are those so privileged.

However, this approach begs some questions: can systematic thought of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries be understood without taking into account university thought? Can the thought of the universities be understood without interpreting it in the light of the thirteenth-, fourteenth- and fifteenth-century universities? Can a realistic approach to the history of Western philosophy ignore the continuity of thought from about 1200 to about 1800? The European university shows a remarkable continuity between its birth in around 1200 till around 1800. The six first centuries of the Western university (±1200–±1800), consisting of two sets of three centuries, form one specific whole.

The traditional view overlooks medieval thought and the philosophical contributions of its Augustinian main line. The separation of modern languages from Latin and the separation of modern philosophy from medieval philosophy are linked with the separation of philosophy from theology, but what we now call theology is the key to understanding the dynamics of Western and medieval thought in an alternative way.