From a young age, we’re told not to do all sorts of things. “Don’t touch that! Don’t punch him! Wait for everyone else.” are sentences we’ve all heard several times during our upbringing. Lots of these rules your parents taught you, would be practical; to tell a kid not to touch something can be for security of the object (toddlers tend to be clumsy). Some of these lessons, however, concern virtue. When I was little my parents taught me the famous phrase “treat others how you want to be treated”. This shows that we’re already confronted with the morals of our society at a very young age. 

Medievalists had another look on virtue. Instead of virtuous rules based on agreement of the majority, it was either accessible through the gift of God or through your own rational thinking. They wanted to rid their philosophy of the irreligious influence Aristotle had had on ethics and reconcile it with the notions of Christianity. In short, if you were a good believer, God would reward you with a virtuous and happy afterlife, but if you were a pagan, your actions would never be virtuous, although Dun Scotus disagreed with this theory. We can see that it’s a very reciprocal relationship; if you act the way God intended you to, you will be rewarded. 

Aristotle, however, had another explanation for the immoral or even sometimes evil actions people could be capable of. If you refused to be virtuous at all, because acting morally seemed to you as of little value, you we’re pure evil. However, you weren’t always to blame. Aristotle thought that some people had internal disorders; they existed physically and psychologically within you. They would be counter rational, because of which your rational ethical and moral inclinations would be influenced and overthrown by emotions. 

When we look at this from a different perspective, actions that could seem counter rational could also be virtuous focused on another moral opinion, than the one that might be obvious. Imagine you take your puppy to the park. You throw him in a pond. The puppy is struggling, because it can’t swim and could drown any moment. From your experience as a dog trainer, you know that you have to let the animal save himself in order to learn how to swim. You’re thus actually thinking about his future and his self preservation, which would seem like the moral thing to do. Bystanders might, however, walk by and think of you as a cruel person with no clue about virtual actions. 

This example shows the importance of perspectives on the morality of actions, which I think should be incorporated in the less extensive medieval philosophy. 

In medieval times, philosophers developed political views. They weren’t the first to do this though; ancient Greek thinkers like Aristotle were already busying themselves with ideas on how to improve their current society. Medieval philosophers were however different in a methodical way. They read the Bible and investigated the teachings of the Fathers of the church, to interpret what God’s criteria for the best and virtuous society would be and what political ideas that involved. They formed Christian political opinions on pacifism, slavery, property and so on. However, when we try to apply those political perspectives on our current society and try to reconcile them with the morals we nowadays live by, we can bump into some difficulties. 

The Bible, for example, states on slavery that the relation between slaves and masters needs to be an equal one, where slaves can attain virtue and happiness in the same way as the masters can, while still acting obedient. Although this seems like a progressive and slightly more optimistic view towards slavery than was actually the case when practically applied at the time, slaves can still be considered property, whether their relation between them and their master is a good and equal one or not. 

Then, the Bible tells us that we have a right to private property. Christian philosophers wanted to add the term voluntary property, according to which you live as scarcely as possible and leave everything to others that you don’t necessarily need to survive. This way there would be no more poverty according to this radical communist perspective.

Now, imagine you have a handicap. If you had a handicap during the middle ages, you would be a liability most of the time, harshly said. Nowadays, there are way more institutional forms of care. From having all sorts of glasses and lenses to caring organisations where people are nurtured for the rest of their lives. Thus, if you had a handicap in the middle ages, you or your family needed to be wealthy to spare time earning money to take care of you. Not everyone had that option of course. 

But do the same rules of voluntary property apply to those with less physical abilities? Well then, lets say you have a handicap, but you’re very wealthy. According to Augustine, we shouldn’t be materialistic citizens only occupied with acquiring the most wealthy life for ourselves, but pious people in the pursuit of knowledge. Then I’m afraid we would have to tell you to give up most of your wealth and live only with what is necessary. But what if you necessarily need your money to survive, because you need other people to take care of you, or you need a slave at you every command? Would slavery then still be a necessary product to you, and therefore not part of the irrelevant property you would voluntarily have to give away? Would your inability to self provide enlarge the necessary property you have a right to?

We can see that the medieval political theories can lead to lots of inconsistencies. After all, interpretations will always remain interpretations; incredibly sensitive and weak in the ability to defend itself because of its subjective nature. 

When people hear the word faith, a sceptic attitude is a common reaction for the secular part of our society, to which I too belong. Something I’ve recently read has however changed my perspective on this quick judgement. The medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas has written about this conflict between faith and scientifical reasoning in his book Summa Theologiae. The thing scientists and rational thinkers reject about believers is that they adopt everything the Bible and the pope says as truth, without questioning these statements and investigate for themselves. They do no kind of research but the source of information determines for them whether to immediately believe or not. Philosophy and other scientifical disciplines claim that they’re, because of this more, cogent and rational than theology. According to Aquinas however, this assertion is inconsistent. He states that secular people and all scientifical disciplines believe in a same way as the faith religious people do, considering their careless use of other people’s investigations and theories. They too believe and assume lots of theories without questioning and demanding evidence for everything. This seems quite logical, because how could we investigate everything for ourselves and assume nothing, considering our limited time span of life? How could we have a normal life when we need to investigate and understand éverything before assuming it to be true and get on with the next step? Well, we simply can’t. In this way, faith in the research and theory of a former scientist or philosopher is the same way of thinking as faith in the scriptures of God and the stories told to us by the pope. 

Someone could however ask the religious part of our society why they still investigate philosophical matters and bother to worry themselves with these problems, if truth is God-revealed? Why would you bother to think for yourself and do your own research if by revelation you can easily access this truth? Although truth is God revealed, that doesn’t mean all this knowledge and truth is easily accessible. Having true faith requires lots of work; you have to constantly remember yourself that you believe and need to suffice yourself with new arguments why to believe. Those arguments don’t need to be rational or a posteriori, but you obviously need to read the bible to have content in your faith and listen to scriptures of those who went before you.

Also, if you have faith in something, then the entire whole doesn’t yet have to be immediately revealed. When you assume gravity exists and take this into account for your own investigation, you could still check for yourself if this is real. Because it will be true, your faith will live up again and get stronger. 

You go to college to acquire knowledge. You want to learn about things you don’t already know and enhance your mental capabilities. You wonder how things work, in which teachers will enlighten you. You expect all your questions to have an answer you can learn about. Is this however the only reason we train our brains and keep reading day in day out? 

According to medieval philosophers it was. As well as Moses Maimonides,  an influential medieval philosopher, medievalists thought writers should provide answers and help their readers understand the content of their texts. To be truly smart and to truly understand something was to be able to explain something as simply as possible and make even the most stupid person understand the solution you provide for the stated problem. 

I, however, have to disagree with this view on the objective of scientifical texts. The importance indeed lies not in the attempt of the writer to try and impress his readers and show them how intelligent and special he is. But, it should not only provide readers with answers. People should still think about problems themselves and not always assume what important thinkers say to be true. A book should leave some questions to be unanswered and not only tell people what to believe and what is right. If we keep holding on to what all writers and scientifical researchers say, we get stuck in a controlling society where we lose the ability to think for ourselves. The strength of the development of our universal knowledge lies in the variety of our society. Because we have so many different people with so many different brains with so many different ways on how they work, we can come up with endless possibilities and perspectives. We shouldn’t neglect this ability and keep inspiring the public to think, instead of creating lazy, everything assuming people, which happens when we don’t excite them with questions that will keep them up at night. 

In our nowadays secularized community, religion is seen as sort of a hobby you do next to your necessary activities. The beliefs that are most important to our society are those of science, ethics, politics etc. Whether you believe in religion can have a place next to that and is completely and subjectively up to you. However, this hasn’t always be the case. Hundreds of years ago, religion played a much bigger part in the majority of people’s lives. If you did not conform to the religion prescribed by Latin emperors, you could be beheaded. Having polytheistic beliefs instead of monotheistic ones, could cause you to get into big trouble and so on. In medieval times religion was very important as well. They saw philosophy as a tool to understand their religion, whichever that was. Arabic thinkers had brought the tradition to the Jewish community of writing commentaries. When this habit continues for years and years you end up with loads of reports. These reports might have different opinions when considering the same subjects of the Jewish religion. Saadia Gaon al-Fayyumi was very concerned with this relation between reason and revelation. According to him, we needed to use our reason, because it’s the only tool that can protect us from making errors. With it, we can demonstrate and test these commentaries. Revelation then decides which interpretation is the best and consents with our idea of Jewish religion at that particular time. Revelation here is the jury to our rational judgement; the independent party to make the conclusion out of the information reason has provided us. 

We can see here that he creates a hierarchical structure where he places revelation above reason. He however doesn’t point out very clearly how he came to this distribution. He claims our reason should be considered more vague than scriptures and revelation. But aren’t these scriptures in the end a mixture of our reason and our own rational ideas of the right type of religion? Then why would revelation be of higher hierarchical status than reason, when it’s that much significantly intertwined? A obviously can’t test B, when there’s already a certain aspect of B in A. It’s then no longer an independent organ forming the conclusion. The conclusion of revelation is already formed by the reason that affected it in the first place. 

The human race is a stubborn species. People often say the Dutch are even more direct than the average humans, but overall, we all want to show how smart we are and that we are definitely right. A good extensive discussion during a dinner among friends is part of the norm. Animals, thus also people, are a competitive species by nature; they need to get through natural selection and be among the fittest to survive. This we can translate into lots of human behaviour, among one is having a difference of opinion with someone. You want to show you’re smarter and more adapted than the other. One will claim his dog can fly and the other will refute his argument by saying he’s never empirically witnessed a dog do that before and hasn’t heard of any scientifical work that agrees with this statement. You could say the last party wins, due to his objectively stated argument. However, is an opinion not always subjective?

To elaborate, we look at the work “Incoherence of the philosophers” by a famous medievalist Al-Ghazali. He claimed that all philosophy that had been done before was bad philosophy. Years and years of ancient theories he refused to assume like everyone else had done. The whole foundation everyone used in their daily thinking and from which they tried to build to their own ideas, needed to be destroyed and replaced by the importance of revelation. Al-Ghazali said that because metaphysics, a part of philosophy that makes an excellent example, can’t be demonstrated and exists completely outside of the scientific realm. This causes it to be of no use to the understanding of religion. He doesn’t refute all the ideas and theories, but says that they’re technically bad, because they’re not scientific.

The fact that philosophy should be scientific, isn’t that however an opinion, therefore subjective? We can see Al-Ghazali and the philosophical studies before that as the two parties having a normal discussion that we talked about before. Therefore, when saying that a theory has to be objective and have the ability to be scientifically demonstrated, which concludes a subjective idea, he contradicts himself. His own theory isn’t proper philosophy, because it’s not objective and can’t be empirically demonstrated. 

When your kid turns seven years old and teachers come to tell you his reading skills are below average, the stroke for the parents of the 21st century starts to enter their minds. They involve every possible person or institution to make sure their child won’t fall behind. After that, they have to start selecting certain courses in school, or as you might say basically determine their intellectual future at the age of fifteen. And when they finally think the pressure’s over and they have their school diploma in their hands, they are expected to race off to college not trying to waste any more time. The study they eventually choose is not a big deal, everything will fall right into place if they just keep on learning, learning and learning.

Most people will find this look on the education of a child quite pessimistic, and I’m obviously not going to deny that. I’ve often had interesting conversations with people in college discussing topics their study covered. However, the intentions with which people educate themselves has certainly changed a lot over the years. 

In the middle ages, people didn’t study because they explicitly had to, but because they thought it would make them a better person. As Aristotle states; true evil and intended bad actions don’t exist. These actions are a result of the ignorance of a person, who hasn’t yet found the right truth. This polymathic habit however, of trying to gather as much knowledge in as much different disciplines of science a human being is physically capable of, has faded away. We study because society expects us to and because we want a good job in the future to sustain ourselves, with the addition of the occasional whim of interest here and there. 

This conclusion doesn’t only sound pessimistic, but it’s also not a very comforting image of our intentions and our nature. Have we stopped trying to be good human beings? No, of course not. I do think however that the ethical emphasis societies and their norms used to have and the way morality is determined, is starting to change.

The motive for studying has sort of remained the same; whether you study for yourself in order to become a better person or to avoid public disgust and grant yourself a comfortable future, a more practical motive but still for your own good. However, the moral aspect in this motive is different. Acquiring as much knowledge as possible for the development of your own character states a criterium within science and yourself. There is one truth and if we find it, we will have reached the most perfect version of life and ourselves, an idea of course also derived from Plato; the more knowledge, the more perfect version we create of ourselves and the closer we come to the omniscience of the perfect gods. It’s the life goal to perfect your character as much as possible. 

Nowadays however, the criterium for becoming a good person lies not within the perfection of your own character and within yourself, but with the public. There’s not one truth, but there are endless opinions on how to be good, which come with expectations. If you’re rich, like Bill gates, you’re expected to donate lots of money to charity, scientific research etc. The social community expects this of you, which causes you to act in that way. You act like this, not because you will then think of yourself as a better person, but because you will think of yourself as a better person, because théy think of you as a good person. Where morality in the medieval century was something individualistic and something you did on your own and because of yourself, it now depends on the moral opinion of others. 

Because of social media, everyone is so occupied with each other that they no longer see themselves as the main cause of their own moral lifestyle. We determine if we are a good person based on another’s opinion and have forgotten how to create our own on the matter. I’m not saying we should act as we like regardless of what others think, but I am of the opinion that when it comes down to our morals we should have a moment and try to think about how we think we’ll become a good person and what moral actions are and not always depend on other people’s judgements. 

Philosophers have always been a big fan of solving problems by thinking of even weirder ones. They try to come up with the craziest and most extreme thought experiments to try and simplify finding the answer to their questions. We see this in Gettier’s “Ten Coins Case” or Descartes wax experiment. They’re both situations in which we wouldn’t find ourselves everyday; relating someone qualified for a job to the amount of coins he has in his pocket or putting our hand in the fire to see if it’s hot, are circumstances we wouldn’t consider parts of our daily activities. 

In the medieval logic they came up with a thought experiment that was, and is till this day, a very famous one called “The Liar Paradox”. It consists of two propositions, one being “Everything I say is a lie” and the other “You are awful human beings”. The paradox hasn’t been solved yet, but people agreed there were two ways of interpreting the problem. 

Some people say, if everything I say is a lie, then according to logic it naturally follows that the other proposition in relation to the first, must also be a lie, because we assume the principle of bivalence to be true, that something has to be true or false and can’t be both at the same time. Obviously in this thought experiment, the word ‘everything’ includes every single thing you say afterwards, therefore also including the second proposition, causing the statement “You are awful human beings” to be false, or at least a lie. 

Others think you should not just apply the word ‘everything’ to the second proposition that follows afterwards, but use it in the first one already. If I am of the opinion that everything I say is a lie, then this sentence that I’ve just uttered, must also be a lie, it being a part of all the things I say therefore a part of ‘everything’ I say. 

The problem is that these two perspectives are obviously equally possible and that no one, yet, has come up with an argument to dismiss one or the other, causing the paradox to remain unsolved. I, however, would like to try and look at it from a completely different view. 

“The Liar Paradox” is considered to be a problem of medieval logic. Therefore, both attempts to solve the problem try this according to the rules of logic, such as necessary consequential relations and the principle of bivalence. But what if we try to dismiss these rules and take the problem out of it’s context? When we think of problems in logic and a number of propositions, we use the Principle of Deductive Closure to get to a conclusion. If A is the case and B is a logical deduction of A, then we assume B to also be the case. We use this principle everyday. For example, if I have to go outside and it’s raining, I make the logical deduction that this will necessarily end up in me getting soaked, which is among most people considered an uncomfortable event, and therefore why I will think to bring my umbrella or just renounce the whole idea of going outside. 

Entirely giving up on this principle would seem a little radical to me, probably causing you daily problems fulfilling the most normal actions, but deciding not to use it in all cases might help us with certain difficulties as “The Liar Paradox”. 

If we would for example rid ourselves in this case of the principle of deductive closure and we would look at the first interpretation of the problem, the necessary consequence of the second proposition to be included by the word ‘everything’, therefore causing the second proposition to be a lie, wouldn’t be the only rational possible outcome. Without the principle of deductive closure, the second proposition could exist separately and independently from the first proposition, which would make room for other interpretations. We could start looking at other relations between the two and not see them necessarily in the given order. Why would people be awful human beings? I wouldn’t say because of their nature, but because their actions made them that way. Obviously lying is regarded as a wrong action, which is why the association of awful human beings with lying would seem very logical. This way, both propositions could exist at the same time without one dismissing the other; “People that only tell lies are awful human beings” sounds correct and seems in line with our intuition.

However, when dismissing the principle of deductive closure and other rules of logic, lot’s of the outcomes will probably feel wrong and everything but in line with your intuition, but discarding some principles of logic in certain situations might sometimes enlarge our perspectives. Something to think about.  

In the middle ages, medieval philosophers started to question Aristotle’s theory on predication. The substance plus the accident concludes the predication. According to Aristotle, the substance has an existence independent from the accident. The substance can be seen as a phenomenon with which we associate certain accidents, but these accidents can obviously vary and still represent the same substance. As an example we take the substance dog. A dog can have the accident long hair. However, it’s still a dog if you rid him of this long hair. Dogs can also have short hair or even be bald if you want to go all the way. This proves that the substance exists independent from the accident.

However, this started to become problematic when medieval philosophers applied this theory to God. In this situation, God is the substance and for example being merciful and being intrinsically good are one of his many accidents. According to Aristotle, these accidents are not necessarily connected to the substance. Therefore, God isn’t necessarily merciful or intrinsically good, which obviously caused lots of panic among strong believers. 

I agree with the medieval philosophers that the independent existence of substances isn’t possible. It reminds me of meditating. I was told that to meditate you need to clear your mind completely; first think of a red dot on a blank canvas and then slowly try to exclude the red dot and only be left with a blank mind. I’ve tried this many times and am of the opinion that this is impossible. You’re always thinking of something, especially when you think of a concept like the substance Aristotle discusses; when you take away all the qualities of something, the concept disappears with those excluded qualities. Thinking of a tree without it’s leaves, wooden trunk and roots, is thinking of something completely separate from the phenomenon of a tree how we know it. Therefore, it’s absolutely justified for the medieval philosophers to reconsider Aristotle’s theory.

When you hear the term ‘evil’, most people nowadays think about serial killers, women trafficking, torture and other utter malicious things. Augustine in the middle ages had other thoughts on the subject. Augustine was a Christian and was inspired by the Neoplatonists and their dualism. This dualism prescribes that there would be two worlds; an immaterial and material one. The nous, the name they give to our intellect and reason, exists eternally and therefore in the immaterial world. Something that exists eternally undergoes no change and is not corrupted by any decay. Because everything we witness in our material world has a beginning and an ending, the nous can’t possibly exists in this world if it’s constant, therefore it must be immaterial.  

All material beings experience causation. We as material beings witness causation by watching others give birth to new life and we ourselves are also a product of this causation. All physical things have causal dependence. However, immaterial things aren’t dependent on causation. The nous is the most perfect being with the most perfect and extensive properties anyone could imagine. In this we can clearly see how Augustine could swiftly dismiss the thought that Christianity and philosophy we’re contradictory to one another by creating an immaterial world with a perfect unitary and single entity that people could easily recognize as God. Our own soul then is an imperfect copy of the nous; the perfect being enters the material and instantly becomes corrupted. To retrieve it’s perfection, according to Augustine, we must practice philosophy and return to the nous. 

But where then exists the ‘evil’ within Augustine’s philosophy? Because the immaterial world lacks nothing and is itself perfection, evil can only exist in te material world. It’s not a substance however, but a negative term we use to describe a shortage of perfection. Evil therefore is a human construct which has nothing to do with God and the perfect nous. 

I, however, have to disagree with Augustine’s theory. Firstly, defining evil as a lack of something doesn’t seem right. When we experience a lack of something, we solve this by adding the thing it misses. However, in the case of evil we try to rid ourselves of it. We don’t solve evil by adding more evil to it. Some might dismiss this argument by saying Augustine sees evil as a lack of good. But how can evil be a human construct to a shortage of good when we don’t always know what good is? According to Augustine and neoplatonism, good is immaterial but accessible by retrieving it with philosophy after our soul lost the perfection of the nous due to the corruption of the material world it landed in. A toddler, however, doesn’t practice philosophy, but knows he’s not supposed to pull his moms hair. He starts to learn his first minimal morals that form the beginning of his conception of good and evil. If that’s true, can’t we then conclude that the conception of good is also a human construct? And that by learning what is good we can only learn the shortage of it, evil?