From the dawn of the Middle Ages to their end, moral theorists struggled to explain what makes a person good by human standards, what it takes to merit happiness in the afterlife, and what, if anything, the two have to do with each other. Some inveighed against the worldly ethics of ancient philosophers; others praised the ancients for important moral insights. Yet every leading medieval thinker worked to develop an account of the moral life far more comprehensive than most professors of philosophical ethics or moral theology today would attempt. The idea that a serious theologian could dismiss classical ethics as unworthy of study and debate was no more acceptable than the idea that a serious philosopher could dismiss questions about the immortality of the soul and the nature of God as irrelevant to moral life in human society.

I shall begin by sketching Augustine’s pioneering work in ethics, along with some of the puzzles it creates. After a look at respectful but significant revisions of Augustine by Anselm of Canterbury, I turn to the brave new world of universities, where the pagan Aristotle soon emerged as an authority to be reckoned with. Beginning in the mid-thirteenth century, efforts to weave together his insights with Augustine’s became at once highly complex and the occasion for passionate academic dispute.

Reflection upon human happiness was pursued by a number of the greatest thinkers of the Middle Ages, working sometimes as theologians, primarily at least, and sometimes as philosophers, though in more than one sense of the word. The most notable theories of what happiness is and how human beings may obtain it were formulated by three very great minds: Augustine of Hippo, Boethius, and Thomas Aquinas. I will explore the ideas of each of these and will also examine a short treatise on happiness and the philosophical life by Boethius of Dacia (fl. 1270), since it strikes a note of contrast with its most notable predecessors. Other significant writers and thematic developments will also be touched on.

Friendship belongs intimately to happiness. All ancient schools of philosophy would have maintained this, even though each one placed the emphases just as seemed appropriate in view of its own characteristic approach to philosophy. Thinkers of the medieval period would not have disagreed about the close connection between friendship and happiness. Sometimes that relationship was made explicit (in particular by Augustine and Aelred of Rievaulx), but sometimes it was left unthematized. The account given here will be led by the texts. I will discuss happiness and friendship together in examining the thought of Augustine, who interrelates the two themes on more than one notable occasion. In considering Boethius and Aquinas, I will for the most part treat each topic separately.

Both of the ideas presented in this chapter have roots in late Antique Neoplatonism, but their development is distinctively medieval. Boethius framed a fresh definition of eternity, and if Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite did not invent the term hierarchy, he put a stamp on the term that was to carry it through many centuries in many contexts. Eternity and hierarchy can be regarded as something like the temporal and ontological coordinates of medieval thought, with eternity embracing all time and hierarchy vertically grading all beings. The two ideas are at any rate both presuppositions and problems for much of what follows in this volume.

ETERNITY (JOHN MARENBON)

What did medieval thinkers mean when they called God “eternal”? We now give two main senses to “eternity”: perpetuity (“Peternity”) – when something lacks (Pi) a beginning or (Pii) end or (Piii) both; or (“O-eternity”) being altogether outside and unmeasurable by time. Philosophers usually explain O-eternity as “timelessness.” Something is timeless, they say, when it is without either extension or position in time, and so no sentences that contain time references of any sort are true of it. On this account, nothing can be both P-eternal and O-eternal, since a P-eternal thing exists at many times (all times in the case of Piii), whereas an O-eternal thing exists at no time.

The study of medieval philosophy is flourishing, as witness the selective bibliography for this book. And yet, from some philosophical viewpoints – analytic, continental, or science-oriented – the subject of this volume can still seem remote. Where ontology recapitulates philology, or Dasein replaces being and essence, or naturalism needs no arguing, the immersion of medieval thinkers in questions about eternity, God, and the immateriality of intellect can seem incomprehensible, if occasionally intriguing. This Companion seeks to enhance fascination while diminishing incomprehension. The contributors hope to bring readers into medieval discussions as directly as possible, enabling them to appreciate for themselves the philosophical motives instigating these discussions and the boldness, subtlety, and analytic rigor with which they were carried on. The aim is to exhibit the variety and freshness of medieval approaches to problems rather than to evaluate solutions. This is not to deny that timeless truth can be found in the material presented. Many students of medieval metaphysics would hold that the discipline had entered on “the sure path of a science,” in Kant’s phrase, several centuries before Kant restricted its scope to laying bare the conditions of possible experience (and would attribute Kant’s dismissal of earlier efforts as “random groping” to typical Enlightenment ignorance of medieval thought). We are convinced, however, that the insights of medieval philosophy appear most clearly in the midst of the discussions in which the medievals themselves sought them.

The very existence of medieval political philosophy is sometimes questioned. The activities and problems that we think of as forming a distinctively political dimension of human life cannot, it is suggested, be isolated in the medieval period from other dimensions of human activity: centrally, that of religion. The regnum, the sphere of worldly administration, was only one half – and the lesser half at that – of the entire governance of humankind; the other being the sacerdotium, the priesthood, which is to direct us in our capacity to transcend this earthly existence. While worldly government was in the hands of the multifarious kingdoms, principalities, city-states, and feudal domains of medieval Europe, spiritual government was in the hands of the church and its head, the pope. In other words, what we call politics was then only a subordinate branch of religion: theology was the master-science of human life on earth, just as the church was its master-government – in theory at least.

I disagree with this way of thinking about the medieval attitude to the political. As I shall seek to show, medieval thinkers were quite capable of (and, moreover, deeply interested in) addressing the activities and problems of human beings relating to each other within a common public space as a distinctive sphere of human life. This was in part because they were heirs to an Antique discourse of the political which did just that. Medieval theologians certainly did not consider the rationale of politics in this sense separately from questions of the overall rationale of human life, which involved them immediately in questions of religion and the church.

If medieval philosophy is strange to the modern reader, medieval Jewish philosophy is even stranger. To the extent that medieval philosophy has been recognized as philosophy rather than dismissed as theology, its boundaries have been strictly drawn, geographically and doctrinally, around Christian western Europe. This excludes both Islamic and Jewish philosophy, so that even significant philosophical activity in southern France and Islamic Spain has remained invisible to the modern western tradition. When activity beyond the prescribed boundaries has been acknowledged at all, it has been by the few historians of medieval philosophy and then, as a rule, only to the extent that its influence on major Christian thinkers could not be ignored. The significance of work beyond the boundaries has thus been determined almost exclusively by relevance to the interests of Christian philosophers. Except for a few specialists, therefore, the general view of medieval philosophy remains unduly narrow. Whether one reads Hegel’s lectures on the history of philosophy, or Heidegger’s, or Russell’s, one could only conclude that there were no medieval Jewish philosophers – and this despite the fact that the period in question is esteemed by scholarly Jews as a golden age.

Ancient Greek philosophers have much to say about God or the gods; some of them also have much to say about being (whether being as predication or identity, expressed by “X is Y,” or being as existence, expressed by a bare “X is” or “there is an X”). They do not systematically connect the two topics, however, and neither do many modern philosophers. But many medieval philosophers did. Can thinking about being help us understand God? Can thinking about God help us understand being? I will explore some connections that medieval philosophers saw between the two topics, and also some difficulties that they encountered. I will focus not so much on particular philosophers as on central ideas that many different philosophers took up, illustrating these ideas from the work of philosophers who set them out in especially interesting or accessible ways, and noting challenges that different philosophers answered in different ways. Many of these ideas and challenges begin with Muslim authors and are then taken up by Christian authors from the thirteenth century on. I will go back and forth between Muslim and Christian sources.

PHYSICAL AND METAPHYSICAL PROOFS OF GOD

The proofs of the existence of God are an obvious place to begin. Thomas Aquinas, in Summa theologiae I, q. 2, a. 3, says that God’s existence can be proved in five ways. Thomas’s first way, arguing from causes of motion, and his second, from efficient causes, are physical arguments, taken from Aristotle; his fifth way, from teleology, is equally physical, derived ultimately from the Stoics.

Nothing in medieval philosophy was more fiercely contested than the topic of human nature. Among the many questions discussed were the nature of the soul, the relationship between the soul and the mind, the workings of sense and intellect, the role of the passions, the limits to human freedom, and the extent of our dependence on divine grace and illumination. Yet these disputes, though wide-ranging, were fought in the context of general agreement on a number of basic issues. There was general agreement that human beings have a soul but are not merely souls – that they are composites of soul and body. There was also agreement that the human soul is immaterial and created by God; it does not come into existence naturally, as the souls of other animals do. Likewise, almost all agreed that the soul does not preexist the body, that God brings it into existence once the fetus has sufficiently developed, and that, once created, the soul will exist forever – that it is incorruptible. The story of medieval thinking on human nature concerns how this general framework was developed in various and conflicting ways and how these various theses could be proved philosophically – if indeed they could be proved at all.

MIND AND BODY AND SOUL

It is hard to imagine a more impressive start to medieval thinking about human nature than the writings of Augustine. “Refuse to go outside,” he advised. “Return to yourself.

Aristotelian science seeks to define the essential nature of a thing and then to demonstrate the features the thing must have because of that nature. A philosophically inevitable question thus arises for Aristotelians: what is a nature? Is it a reality over and above (or perhaps “in”) the things whose nature it is? Is it a mental construction, existing only in our understanding of things; if so, on what basis is it constructed? This is the medieval problem of universals, or at least one way of thinking about the problem. In a classic formulation, Boethius states the problem in terms of the reality of genera and species, two main types of universals involved in an Aristotelian definition of essential nature (as in “a human being is a reasoning/ speaking animal,” which places us in the genus of animals and marks off our species by reference to our “difference”from other animals in reasoning or using language): “Plato thinks that genera and species and the rest are not only understood as universals, but also exist and subsist apart from bodies. Aristotle, however, thinks that they are understood as incorporeal and universal, but subsist in sensibles.” A rigorous tradition of, mainly Aristotelian, discussion originates from Boethius’s tentative exploration of the problem thus stated. But a more Platonic solution had been put into play about a century before Boethius by Augustine, and this, too, would have a rich development.

Why “Philosophy in Islam”? Why not “Islamic Philosophy” or “Arabic Philosophy”? The simple answers to these questions and the far from simple consequences of those answers provide an entry into the rich world of ideas briefly explored in this chapter. The simple answer to the question “Why not 'Islamic Philosophy'?” is that not all philosophers in lands under Islamic rule in the Middle Ages were Muslim. It is easy to forget how diverse the empire of Islam was and, in particular, that it included numerous lively religious minorities. Among philosophers there were:

• Muslims, such as al-Farabi,Avicenna (Ibn Sina), andAverroes (Ibn Rushd), some of whom were Sunni, others Shiites or Ismaili, as the Brethren of Purity

• Christians, for instance Yahya Ibn ’Ady, a leading disciple of al-Farabi and a well-known Jacobite theologian

• Sabians, such as the physician Thabit ibn Qurra, a translator

• Mazdaeans or Zoroastrians, such as Mani al-Majusi

• Pagans, such as Abu Bakr al-Razi, the famous Rhazes, who denied the very possibility of revelation or prophecy, on the ground that it would favor a particular people and would therefore be incompatible with God’s justice

• Jews, such as Ibn Suwar, Halevy, Maimonides, etc.

The great number and importance of Jewish philosophers, including those working in the Latin West after the Reconquista, call for a full chapter devoted to their thought (the chapter following this one), but they, as well as the other non-Muslims listed above, must be considered as participants in a single philosophical conversation carried on from the ninth through the thirteenth century and beyond.

It is impossible to overestimate the importance of the study of language and logic for the understanding of medieval philosophers and theologians. Many of the subjects discussed by grammarians and logicians are of interest in themselves and have an obvious relevance to theological and scientific problems, but at a deeper level, all the writing and thinking of the period is permeated by a technical vocabulary, techniques of analysis, and inferential strategies drawn from the basic training in the liberal arts that every medieval student received. The nature of this training reveals two important features of medieval education. On the one hand, thinkers focused on authoritative texts - the Bible, the works of Aristotle and Augustine, Priscian's Institutiones grammaticae, Peter Lombard's Sentences - and the attempt to reconcile and reinterpret these authorities lies behind many developments.On the other hand, the method of teaching was largely oral, and this influenced written expression in many ways, from the philosophical dialogues of Augustine and Anselm to the highly structured disputational presentation of Aquinas's Summa theologiae.

One cannot capture the richness and complexity of medieval theories of language and logic in a short chapter. In what follows I shall first give a brief overview and then focus on a few principal themes.

Cultural anthropology, social anthropology, ethnology, Volkskunde and Völkerkunde, anthropology tout court: It would be foolhardy to attempt a common definition for these terms, let alone to specify a shared program for what appears to be rather a series of loosely connected, geographically variable, and historically unstable projects. Indeed, a coherent history of the varieties of world anthropology is not a plausible enterprise.

My strategy here is to concentrate on the development of what came to be known in the early twentieth century as social anthropology (the usual term in Europe), or cultural anthropology (the American designation), the dominant traditions throughout this period. Second, I will identify common elements in the trajectories of these traditions, although much of the argument will necessarily concern various national schools. In tracing the modern history of this discourse, I have adopted the conventional, though certainly debatable, division into three stages: the evolutionist debates and the confrontations between evolutionists and diffusionists, roughly, 1860–1920; the social science or behaviorist phase, running from about 1920 to 1970, when the theoretical models were drawn from sociology and psychology or from structural linguistics; and the more recent period, during which the dominant project has been what Clifford Geertz termed “the interpretation of cultures” and the most potent theoretical influences have come from philosophy, semiotics, and literary theory. To be sure, some national schools developed along very different lines; and while this periodization is most apparent in the development of cultural anthropology in the United States, even there, all three orientations — roughly, evolutionist, functionalist or structuralist, and interpretivist — coexisted uneasily throughout the twentieth century.

Jesus Christ was born while Mary and Joseph were on their way to be counted in an imperial census, in order to be taxed. From antiquity onward, the state has played an active part in social survey work. By the sixteenth century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “survey” meant a state-conducted inventory of property, provisions, or people in order to raise revenue or a military force. However, starting in the seventeenth century, and well entrenched by the nineteenth, a different set of purposes for studying populations had also evolved, and the process of taking surveys began to pass into the hands of other social groups as well. Now voluntary enthusiasts as well as state bureaucrats were becoming concerned with statistics, in the sense not only of facts useful to the state but also of tabulated facts that would depict “the present state of a country,” often “with a view to its future improvement.”

This chapter will explore some key developments and discontinuities in the history of large-scale quantitative social surveys, mainly in Britain and France. Others have told this story in terms of conceptual and methodological discoveries leading toward truly scientific modern surveys. I will instead examine the historical practices of social inquiry considered scientific in their own times, and argue that these investigations were also shaped by social imperatives, even in ostensibly neutral areas like statistical method. The chapter begins with the introduction of the census around the time of the French Revolution, and ends with the move to professionalization around the time of the First World War.

Over the past two centuries, the concept of human mental ability has undergone three important transformations: from a concept referring to a general faculty to one primarily referring to an individual attribute; from a focus on talents in the plural to one on intelligence in the singular; and from a position of relatively limited cultural significance to one of considerable weight within the United States and, to a lesser extent, within various European countries. These shifts in meaning and emphasis have rendered intelligence a tool available to government, business, and the “helping professions” for the purpose of sorting, classifying, diagnosing, and justifying. Starting in the early part of the twentieth century, determinations of degree of intelligence have been used as aids in the placement of army recruits, in determing the kind of schooling a child will receive, in the hiring of job applicants, and in the decision to allow a person legal immigration. This chapter explores how intelligence has come to play these various social roles. It focuses especially on how experts in the human sciences have both created new meanings for the concept of intelligence and developed technologies that could make those meanings available and useful to a wider public.

FROM TALENTS TO INTELLIGENCE

During much of the nineteenth century, two distinct languages flourished in scientific and intellectual circles to describe the operations of the human mind. Mental philosophers and others interested primarily in what would later be called the “normal” employed a language of character and talents, emphasizing the diversity of the mental faculties and the operation of the individual mind.

Human beings have probably always cultivated knowledge about their own cognitive and affective processes, knowledge that might be called, in the broadest sense of the term, “psychological.” Over the longue durée, such knowledge has been stored, accumulated, and reworked within a variety of discursive pigeonholes, among them philosophy, religion, and literature. But only with the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did Western Europeans begin to specify the foundations of their hitherto multiform knowledge of the psyche and to codify it with the special kind of rigor called science. Only later still would they attempt to create for it a new, exclusive pigeonhole bearing the name “psychology.” This chapter treats the early phase of the endeavor to bring cognitive and affective processes into scientific focus; it leaves off around 1850, before the advent of concerted efforts to create and institutionalize the unitary academic discipline of “psychology.”

The history narrated here is necessarily a heterogeneous one, a kind of patchwork. This is true not only because of the predisciplinary and hence somewhat inchoate condition of the particular bodies of knowledge that constitute its subject matter, but also because of the approach that the chapter takes to the category of science. A positivist approach would assume that the criteria of scientific knowledge are clear and universal and hence that the history of psychology can and should be narrated as a teleological progress leading from faulty, methodologically unsound propositions to verifiable scientific ones. Such a history would, in other words, possess a distinctive and forceful plot line.

History, Marc Bloch said, is the “science of men in time … [which is] a concrete and living reality with an irreversible onward rush … the very plasma in which events are immersed, and the field in which they become intelligible.” Social science, by analogy, is the science of modernity, “an enterprise of the modern world. Its roots lie in the attempt, full-blown since the sixteenth century, and part and parcel of the construction of our modern world, to develop systematic, secular knowledge about reality that is somehow validated empirically.” Modernity, in short, stands in the same “plasmic” relation to social science that time does to history.

Perhaps until the end of the 1960s, common sense might have maintained that modern equaled Western, that Westernization equaled modernization. In the wake of worldwide events since 1989, it has again pleased some segments of public opinion to reassert this commonsense view, particularly in the name of neoliberal economic reform. The chapters that follow, notwithstanding their differences in approach, focus, and argument, suggest that the equation of modern with Western is (whether for or against) more an ideological than a historical position. For no single, universal modernity lies waiting at the end of all particular histories. Though powerful (and destructive, according to Serge Latouche), the Western-oriented “drive toward global uniformity” cannot succeed. The paths to modernity are many, and those paths lead to different modernities.