[lit-ideas] Re: The 'Near-Eastern' influences on the Greek philosophy, sc...

  • From: Robert.Paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Robert Paul)
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: 12 Apr 2004 10:30:00 PDT

I wrote:

>The Scholastics trusted Averroes more than they did Avicenna (whom they 
rightly viewed as a pantheist).<

Mike in Paris wrote:

Would you care to elaborate on this claim, which I find surprising, if not
downright astonishing?
 
Mr. Paul, in Lake Oswego, replies:

Although this is certainly sloppy writing, I'm not certain Which part of it
astonishes Mike. That Avicenna was a pantheist was no secret, although
apparently his major writing on the subject wasn't available to 'the West' until
his other writings had been introduced and discussed. 

In the Summa Contra Gentiles Aquinas does battle with both Avicenna and
Averroes; with the latter especiallyand at length in Summa Contra Gentiles, II.
73,75 (Of God and His Creatures). Of course Thomas' writings do not exhaust
Scholasticism! nor are the arguments in this section merely refutations of a
suspected pantheism; yet the motive for not accepting the views of those outside
the Church--and no other opponents of the day were on an intellectual par with
educated Arabs--seems to have been ideology, not disinterested logic. I cannot
detail my general claim at the moment (gotta dash) but it's something I dimly
remember from some of Peter Geach and Alan Donagan's discussions of Aquinas over
40 years ago--at a time when the traditional history of Western philosophy did
not even mention Arabian contributions, except to thank them for preserving the
Greek texts (which one got the impression they never read but kept stored away
in a box of curiosities).

That this happened--the replacement of even the most sophisticated commentaries
by more politically correct ones--is mentioned a number of times in Catholic
sources, and that is what interested me, for it was the Church that won the
battle for authorship of the history of Western philosophy, and it's what the
Schoolmen thought their opponents thought that matters. Mike knows far more
about these issues than I, both in general and in detail, so I will await the
reasons for his astonishment, which are no doubt compelling. But the thesis I
suggested has considerable explanatory power--or would if it were true.

Robert Paul
Reed College
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