From the 6th to the 10th Centuries

The collapse of the ancient world which had its climax with the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 A.D., produced among its other consequences the disappearance of the teaching of philosophy. The Greek philosophic tradition was carried on in Byzantium, mostly consisting in the mere preservation of learning (in the library of Fotium and in the lexicon of Suda, in the 9th c.) after having offered its only original contributions in the Christian Neoplatonism of Pseudo-Dyonisius the Areopagite, an author probably from Syria, whose works were going to have a strong influence on the Latin Scholastics. In the Latin world Boethius and Scotus Eriugena were the only authors of the time that had a real philosophic import and could be considered (especially the former) in some ways the last representatives of classical philosophy. Christianity, a value shared both by the conquerors and the conquered populations, constituted now the basis of a common culture, even if it was internally lacerated by the many theological disputes between Latin and Greek factions; it is actually inside this western Christianity that the theological debates opened up a space for real philosophic thought, which was destined to reappear with real originality (with respect to the late-antique philosophy) only in the 11th c.

The space for free and original thinking in philosophy is at first apparent in the works of Boethius (480-524). The two following centuries, until the end of 8th c., can almost be regarded as a time without philosophy. In the western world the dominating cultural factor was the founding of monasticism (the rule of Caesarius of Arles dates back to 506, the one of Benedict of Norcia to 529) and its diffusion throughout all of central and southern Europe, and in the British Isles. The most relevant products of monastic pedagogy based on the liberal arts, (the Ethymologies of Isidore of Sevilla c. 560-633; the Historia ecclesiastica gentium Anglorum of the Venerable Bede 672-735), do not include any original contributions to philosophy, but basically transmit the essential contents of classical culture. In the 9th-10th c., the Carolingian age, the renewal of schools creates the institutional environment for the evolving debate on theological themes that would form the bases for philosophic discussion until the 12th c. The most relevant figures at that time were Alcuin of York (730/5-804), to whom we owe the reform of teaching; Gotescalc of Orbais (who died around 869) and Pascasius Radbertus (c. 790-870), the protagonists of the dispute on predestination; and especially John Scotus Eriugena (c. 810-870), to whom we owe the first systematic philosophical work of the Middle Ages, the De divisione naturae, and who, with his treaty De predestinatione, participated in an original and theoretically coherent way in one of the most relevant debates of his time. Scotus Eriugena had translated from Greek the Corpus Dionysianum, the Ambigua, the Quaestiones ad Thalassium of Maximus the Confessor, the De hominis opificio of Gregor of Nissa, and then used these sources to elaborate his own philosophy, grounded in the Neoplatonic cycle of processus and reditus (emanation and return) through the four differentiae of nature, considered the whole of reality. The works of Eriugena, suspected of pantheism and condemned some centuries later (1210), had few followers in his own time.

At the same time as the Carolingian schools were developing, in the Islamic world different forms of philosophic thought were emerging: in addition to Sufism and Kalam, the study of Greek thought was continued both by Christian authors such as John of Damascus (d. 754), and by Islamic writers such as Hunayn ibn Ishaq (808-873), who translated Galen and Aristotle and composed medical works (translated into Latin in the 12th c. under the name of Johannitius). The corpus of the works of Aristotle are not only translated into Arabic, but also enriched with texts of metaphysics, alchemy, physiognomics, astrology, and so on which were attributed to him. Some of these works (those which the Latin world will later know as the Theologia Aristotelis and Liber de causis) were produced in the intellectual environment around the House of Wisdom in Baghdad by Hellenistic philosophers (falasifa) belonging to the so-called ‘circle of al-Kindi’ (c. 800-870), the ‘philosopher of the Arabs,’ who developed an original ontology and gnoseology with his doctrines of rays and of the intellect. Other texts, such as the alchemical Liber quartarum attributed to Plato and the works of Thabit ibn Qurra (826-901: author of hermetic writings as well as of astrological and magic texts) contained Harranian themes. In the 10th c., the works of two exceptional figures appear: the physician Razes (Abu Bakr al-Razi: 864-925), who in his medical and alchemical writings presents an attitude of anti-religious rationalism; and the philosopher al-Farabi (870-950), who proposes an integration of Plato and Aristotle based on metaphysical doctrines (the distinction between essence and existence), physics (the cosmology of emanation), and gnoseology (the acquired intellect as a term which binds knowledge based on abstraction and knowledge based on illumination). The cultural heritage of the Kindian circle is present also in the work of the Jewish physician Ysaac Israel (c. 855-955). The Arabic philosophy in these centuries is not only inherited from the Latin world through translation: other important thinkers include Abu Bishr Matta (d. 940) and al-Ashari (874-935), exponent of one of the branches of Kalam (Asharism). To the 10th c. also belongs the composition at Bàssora of the Encyclopedia of the Brethren of Purity, a radical sect of the Shiites who proposed themselves as the purifier of religion through philosophy and who sustained a non-Greek origin of science. Gerbert of Aurillac (940-1003: Sylvester II after becoming pope), one of the most important men of science of the epoch and who had studied in Catalunia in direct contact with the Islamic scientific culture, introduced into western schools a particular attention to the arts of the Quadrivium, empirical observation, and the use of various instruments (e.g, the astrolabe).