I hope that this volume may help to create interest in medieval philosophy, not just as an object of purely historical study, but as an aid to thought about contemporary philosophical problems. On the face of it, medieval philosophy has been unduly neglected, accounting, as it does, for some twelve hundred years, i.e. about half, of the history of the subject. It certainly does not receive the attention which medieval history now secures from historians and there must still be many who graduate in philosophy from our universities under the impression that philosophy died with Aristotle and only came to life again when Descartes began to meditate.

The middle decades of this century were lean years for the history of philosophy in general, when it was widely thought that philosophy had made a decisive break with its past and no longer had anything worthwhile to learn from it: that medieval philosophical texts, for example, were as obsolete as medieval medical text-books such as ibn-Sina's Canon, In addition, there has long been a certain parochialism – nationalism, even – about European philosophy; university courses still bear witness to an emphasis upon British philosophers in Britain, French philosophers in France and German philosophers in German-speaking countries which the intellectual stature of the authors concerned does not wholly explain. The mobility of medieval philosophers and the uniformity of their cultural background makes it more difficult to claim them as products of the country in which they happened to be born.

Paradoxically, though, the greatest obstacle to widespread study of medieval philosophy has probably been the neo-Scholastic movement inaugurated by Pope Leo XIlI's encyclical Aeterni Patris of 1879.