Chapter 8 Goals

8.1 Between Ancient and Modern

• Understand the historical changes that led to the Middle Ages.
• Summarize the social and cultural conditions that obtained in the Dark Ages.
• Explain how philosophy and the Church were interdependent in the medieval era.

8.2 Augustine

• Recount the main events in Augustine’s life from his dissolute youth to his appointment as bishop of Hippo.
• Define Neoplatonism, necessary truth, and moral evil.
• Explain the significance to Augustine of the biblical quotation, “Unless you believe, you shall not understand.”
• Know Augustine’s response to skepticism and describe the kinds of knowledge that he thinks humans can attain.
• Summarize Augustine’s doctrine of the great chain of being.
• Understand how Augustine explains the presence of evil in the world.

8.3 Anselm and Aquinas

• Relate the premises and conclusion of Anselm’s ontological argument and summarize criticisms of it.
• Explain Gaunilo’s objection to Anselm’s argument.
• Define ontological argument, cosmological argument, natural law theory, and the doctrine of double effect.
• Explain and evaluate Aquinas’s first-cause argument.
• Explain Aquinas’s objection to an infinite chain of movers and summarize how critics have responded to it.
• Understand Aquinas’s natural law theory of ethics.
• Assess the proposition that nature is teleological.

8.4 Avicenna and Maimonides

• Summarize Avicenna’s contributions to philosophy and science.
• Explain and evaluate Avicenna’s argument for the existence of the soul.
• Understand Maimonides’s rational approach to biblical writings.

8.5 Hildegard of Bingen

• Define mysticism.
• Recount the main events in Hildegard’s biography.
• Summarize her theory of ethics.

8.6 William of Ockham

• Explain Ockham’s principle of parsimony.
• Describe the medieval debate between realism and nominalism and give one reason why the issue is important.