1 - Peter Lombard and Jerome
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 January 2010
Summary
Conscience has been much neglected by philosophers. It is not directly treated in ancient philosophy, while, apart from Bishop Butler, who was primarily interested in the aspect of self-deception, there is scarcely a philosopher from Descartes to the present day who has touched upon it more than tangentially. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, however, a treatise upon conscience became a standard component of commentaries upon Peter Lombard's Judgements and from there found its way into university seminars (written up as Debated Questions) and textbooks (Summae). The history of this development up to Henry of Ghent has been ably documented by Lottin (1948). Lottin, though, was writing for specialists in medieval philosophy and from within the tradition of the ‘Gothic revival’ of clerical culture, with the result that his work is not easily accessible, psychologically, to contemporary philosophers who are the intellectual heirs of Hume, Kant and, now, of Frege. My purpose is therefore to draw upon Lottin's researches in order to interpret the later medieval discussion of conscience to philosophers more closely acquainted with the subsequent development of their discipline, in the belief that the medieval contribution opened up questions which are still worth pursuing. Indeed, there has been a tendency of late towards a gap between the philosophy of mind and ethics, even to the extent that one group of philosophers has concentrated upon philosophical logic and the philosophy of mind, while a different group has concentrated upon ethics and political and social philosophy.
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- Conscience in Medieval Philosophy , pp. 1 - 11Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1980