The Conditions and Limits of Reason

The centrality of the relationship between faith and reason is certainly one of the key elements for the entire development of medieval philosophy, more general than the idea of ‘Christian philosophy’ insofar as it embraces all medieval cultures; but at the same time it is less generic insofar as it anticipates the explicit conceptualization of the problem, and permits us to trace the presence of philosophy even where it is expressed in a non-systematic form (for example, the debates of the Carolingian period or in Anselm of Canterbury). Bound to this idea are the most recent studies on the Scholastic method (cfr. Rolf Schönberger), as well as several syntheses that try to contextualize the developments of philosophy in medieval cultural history (cfr. Betsy Price and Marcia L. Colish). The practice of philosophy as a concrete manifestation of a new way of using reason has been analyzed by Kurt Flasch through the debates which concentrated on the major changes and discontinuities in medieval thought. His Introduction to Medieval Philosophy, offered as a ‘discourse on (historico-philosophical) method’, has in its turn engendered a broad intellectual discussion among historians of the Medieval philosophy.