<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; URL=noscript.html"> METU | Course Syllabus

Course Objectives

The aim of this course is to provide a history of medieval philosophy which will serve as an introduction to the subject. Generally speaking, medieval philosophy is taken to run from around the fifth through fifteenth centuries CE, roughly corresponding to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the beginning of the Renaissance, which itself is taken as running from the mid-fourteenth through mid-seventeenth centuries. Although this course is intended to have a wide chronological (approximately 1200 years of philosophy) and geographical range,  we need set the limits of this course more narrowly. The objective of the course is to provide survey the philosophical problems as they are depicted in the pivotal original texts of the main figures of the medieval period. This course will make it start with raising the question of transition from Greco-Roman philosophical outlooks. For this purpose, we shall first focus on neo-Platonism and the philosophy of Plotinus (204-270), and then start reading the original texts from Augustine (354-430), Boethius (480-52?), St. Anselm (1033-1109), Abelard (1079-1142), Avicenna (980-1037), Averroes (1126-1198), Maimonides (1135-1204), St. Bonaventure (1217-1274), Aquinas (1224/5-1274), John Duns Scotus (1266-1308), Ockham (1280-1347), Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464).