Argumentation on the Universals. Nominalists and realists
The conflict between matter and spirit was manifested most acutely in the mediaeval controversy between the realists (fr. L. realis “material”) and nominalists (fr. L. nomen “name”). The debate was concerned with the nature of universals, or general concepts. The realists (Johannes Scotus Erigena, and mostly Thomas Aquinas), relying on Aristotle’s proposition that the general exists as indivisibly linked with the individual, being its form, developed the theory of the three kinds of the existence of universals: “before things” —in divine reason; “in the things themselves”, of which universals are the essences or forms; and “after things” —in the human mind, as results of abstraction. This position is known in the history of philosophy as a”moderate realism”, distinct from an”extreme realism” insisting that the general exists only outside things. The extreme realism of the Platonian variety, despite all its apparent suitability to idealist scholasticism, could not be accepted by the Orthodox Church since matter was partially justified in Christianity as one of the two natures of Jesus Christ.
The nominalists, like Roscelin, were much more materialistically minded than even the moderate realists; they carried the idea of negation of the objective existence of the general to the logical end, believing that universals only exist in the human mind, in thought; in other words, they rejected not only the presence of the general in a concrete individual thing but also its existence “before the thing”, and that was tantamount to the materialist view of the primacy of matter. Universals, Roscelin said, are nothing but the names of things, and their existence is reducible to the vibrations of the vocal chords. Only the individual exists, and only the individual can be the object of knowledge.
It was only to be expected that the church accepted the moderate realism of Thomas Aquinas, while Roscelin’s nominalism was condemned already at the Council of Soissons in 1092.
Thus, despite the idealist character of the entire mediaeval philosophy, the confrontation of the lines of Plato and Democritus continued in it, although it was mostly expressed in logical terms. The mediaeval controversy on the nature of universals had a considerable impact on many philosophical doctrines, especially those of such major thinkers of the Modern Times as Hobbes and Locke. Elements of nominalism also occur in Spinoza, while the technique of the nominalist critique of the ontologism of universals was used by Berkeley and Hume in the shaping of the doctrine of subjective idealism. The realist proposition concerning the presence of general concepts in human consciousness later formed the basis of idealist rationalism of Leibniz and Descartes, while the idea of the ontological independence of universals was absorbed by classical German idealism.
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Mediaeval philosophy made a significant contribution to further development of epistemology by working out and clarifying all the logically possible versions of the relations between the rational, the empirical, and the “a priori”—the relations which later became not just the theme of scholastic arguments but the basis for natural-scientific and philosophical knowledge.
LECTURE 6.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE RENAISSANCE.
1. Humanism –the new worldview orientation of the
Renaissance.
2. The revival of Platonic tradition. Nicolas of Cusa.
3. Natural philosophy and new science.
4. Social theories of the Renaissance.
The growth of industry, commerce, navigation, and the military arts, the development of material production, conditioned the progress in the technical sciences, in natural science, mathematics, and mechanics. All this required the freeing of reason from scholasticism and a transition from purely logical problems to natural-scientific cognition of the world and man. This tendency was manifested in the views of the major thinkers of the Renaissance permeated with the idea of humanism.
The demolition of the medieval worldview was assisted too by the Reformation, which undermined the traditional authority of the Church, and ultimately drove authority back to individual interpretation and inner experience.
The fruitful rise of science in the West has been partly ascribed to the notion of God: because God is rational it is easy to think that the patterns underlying the functioning of the material world are rational. There may be something in this, especially with the revival of the mathematization of science, so that rationally describable processes could be looked on as mathematically describable. On the other hand, the large and admittedly fairly comfortable strait-jacket in which thought was held so long as Western Europe was dominated by a single and relatively unified Church was not perhaps so conducive to new critical thinking, such as was demanded by the growth of science. At any rate, with the Renaissance came new freedoms of thought. And this was due to a kind of inner dialectics in Western civilization.
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For the great revival of excitement about Hellenism and in general Classical civilization - the new humanism - was not placed against a background of prior ignorance about the ancient world. In its own way Classical values had been quite well served by Arab and Latin translators, commentators and philosophers. But the scale of the new concern with the Classics was great. It was as though pagan civilization had hit back from its grave, and in a new key. Classical philosophy had already made one synthesis with Christianity, and the result had been Neoplatonist and in due course Aristotelian forms of theism. But now another wave rolled into the West, inspiring the arts as well as philosophy. The old contradictions in Western civilization gained a new life. It was the very contradictoriness and relative anarchy of the new culture emerging from the fourteenth century onwards that help to account for its being a matrix of science. In turn the new science could not fail to stimulate philosophy and the construction of new worldviews. How could the Copernican revolution not leave thinkers feeling disoriented? How could Galileo’s telescope not leave the whole of Aristotelian physics in ruins? How could new paintings in perspective not begin to affect the whole of optics, and how could this not fail to throw a different light upon the whole .process of seeing?
Education also had its role to play. The collection of texts proceeded apace during the Renaissance. The emergence of the printing press began to bring their price down, and to favor the swifter circulation of ideas. The examples of Cicero and Seneca could stimulate the ideal of the urbane and cultivated gentleman. Education was privatized and became an aristocratic pursuit, thus drifting away from the clerics who had previously been the prime educated class.
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Nor should we forget that the Renaissance period was also the beginning of that huge expansion of Europe into Asia and the New World. This was anthropologically suggestive, and the existence of diverse other cultures was gradually to make its impact upon Europe. But it also brought a period of new wealth, which was to help to transform European economics, and supply a new class, the bourgeoisie, more vigorous in developing education and ideas.
The influence of mystical and esoteric ideas upon the formation of the Renaissance may also be mentioned. The revived Platonism brought with it new interest in Neo-Platonism. Moreover, the rediscovery of the old Hermetic stimulated new forms of esotericism which came to be combined with a refreshed Kabbalah.
Anylizing the philosophy of the Renaissance we can see a number of philosophies which were born in Europe in the 15th-18th centuries. They all had antischolastic, antichurch character and they glorified man, they beleived into his physical and spiritual potential. These philosophies were optimistic and full of life.
The main peculiarities of the Revival philosophy are as follows:
1. Anthropocentricism and humanism;
2. Opposition to Church and schoolasticism (though they did not deny God and religion, but Church as an organization, which appeared to become an intermediary between God and the beleivers);
3. An increasing interest in nature. A new, rather materialistic conception of the world appeared;
4. Growing social and political incentive, the idea of social equality;
5.The formation of cultural individualism.
The main streams of the Renaissance philosophy:
1. Humanism.
2. Neoplatonism.
3. Philosophy of nature.
4. Social and political philosophy.
Humanism was born in Italy in the 14th century and later spread in Europe. In its genre it merged with literature, arts, it expressed its ideas in a methaphorical, figurative and artistic form. Humanism manifested the unity of both poetic and ideological creativity. It was characterized by antischolastic and antichurch tendency, it aimed at demolishing God’s power and proving man’s value. Humanism glorified man’s dignity and sublimity. It was rather optimistic and life-asserted.
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The vivid founders of Humanism was Dante Alyghery (1265-1321) who glorified Crtist in his works and at the same time he umnasked all the contradictions and ungraspable truths. He celebrated man in the harmony of his both devine and earthly nature. He believed in man’s innate kindness, his bright future. He showed a new understanding of man and the world relatioship, according to which man is double determined by God through his belief and by nature through his reason. Dante did not contradict these aspects of man, rather he insisted on their combination, unity. They both determined man’s way to blessings. Dante’s humanism is non-ascetic. Man himself is responsible for his happiness. Man is not valued for the inherited secure economic or social position but for his own properties, achievements and merits.
The Father of Humanism Petrarka( 1304-1374) proclaimed quite new ideas, which were contradictory to scholasticism. He affirmed the uniquness of human life, which was given to him only once, therefore man should live for himself but not for God. Man should be free both physicaly and spiritualy, he should have free choice for self-manifestation. He himself was responsible for his happiness. Man was beautiful both in appearance and in his spirituality. He should be happy and not to sacrifice himself to God. He did not insist on afterdeath life. Immortality could be achieved only in people’s memory. His anthropocentricism was opposed to Medieval Theocentrisism. Petrarka was mostly interested in man’s ethical, moral problems, which reflected individualism of the epoch.
Lorentzo Valla (1507-1557). Another philosopher of Italian Renaissance, who subverted the Church authority, critisyzed scholasticism for its untruthfulness, and artificial character. His philosophy was anthropocentrictic, he suggested a great value of human, though he rejected asketicism and renunciation. He challenged activeness in altering the world, equality of man and woman and he supposed that the highest blessing and enjoyment was to satisfy people’s moral and material needs.
Neoplatonismwas an idealistic philosophy which aimed the development of Plato’s teaching with its further systematization and delimination of contradictions. They suggested a new picture of the world which was less dependent on God, but the importance of the universals was stressed. They regarded man as an independent microcosm though they did not deny his devine nature. They aimed to work out an integral philosophical system which could combine all the existent philosophies.
Four thinkers who illustrate something of the freer atmosphere of the time were Marsilio Ficino, Pica della Mirandola Girolamo Cardano and Nicolas of Cusa.
Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) was more than a typical product of the Renaissance: he was a major symbol of it. Patronized by Cosimo de Medici, he with his help founded the Florentine Academy, which for many summed up the new spirit of the times. It was a kind of spiritual community of like-minded people interested in the revival of Platonism. There was banquets in honor of Plato, readings of dialogues, lectures by well-known visitors and so forth. Ficino himself was a clergyman and not at all disployal to the Church, but he had a wide-ranging and outward-reaching mind. He thought that philosophy was not a maid-servant of theology but rather its sister, that provided maturnity of theology, the latter depending on the level of philosophical theoretical analysis. He was well acquainted with many classical works, from Aristotle and Lucretius to Porphyry and Proclus. He also knew the Hermetic corpus, and had some nodding acquaintance with Zoroastrianism. He thought that the Hermetic tradition was ancient and going back to a similar period to that of the Hebrew Bible. So he saw Zoroaster and Hermes as parallel forebears to the Hebrew ancestors of the Christian faith. Thus Platonism and philosophy, on the one hand, and Christianity, on the other, were two parallel streams which could commingle. As one who translated all of Plato’s dialogues and issued the first complete edition of them, his Platonism was brighter and more well-informed than many earlier interpretations, and he placed especial emphasis upon Plato’s treatment of love and friendship. The love of friends is itself a prelude to the love of God. His most celebrated writing was his Platonic Theology on the Immortality of Souls which was printed in 1482. For him the issue of immortality was the central. This was in part because in his hierarchical vision of the cosmos, ranging down from God through angels to minerals and qualityless matter, the human soul stood at the midpoint. It is the center of the universe. And this universe is dynamic, being bonded by love, and the soul’s love is in the end to find its true expansion in union with God. For this ultimate satisfaction humans were created. Now for many the chance to ascend through the contemplative life to union with the divine is limited. We need immortality to realize our destinies. Ficino, with his generous view of other religions, his positive attitude to the philosophical tradition, his esotericism, his love of love, his integration of astrology into his thinking, and so forth, displayed himself to be a Renaissance figure par excellence. His Theologia Platonica continued to have influence even after scientific knowledge cut at the roots of the hierarchical cosmos he envisaged. He was one of the originators of the tradition of “perennial philosophy”, which sees a convergence between philosophy and religion largely through the mystical traditions.
Pico della Mirandola and Universalism. Count Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) was the younger son .in a princely family from Mirandola and Concordia in Northern Italy in the Po valley. He was remarkably fruitful in his writings and learning, considering that he died rather young. He studied not just the Classics, but Hebrew and Arabic as well. When he was 23 he rather boldly assembled 900 thesis which he offered publicly to defend in Rome. Some were ecclesiastically condemned and he was in due course arrested in France, where he had fled, but the intervention of Italian princes secured his release. His last days were spent in Florence. His most important work was his Oration on the Dignity of Man, which he had prepared as the start of his defense of the 900 theses.
In this work he most eloquently affirmed human freedom. Because of human liberty humankind does not exist in a fixed place in the cosmic hierarchy, but occupies a world which differs from the other orders (the divine, angelic and elementary levels of being). Man is exclusively responsible for creating his own personality, his destiny, his existence by making free choice on the base of his will. His being purpose is devine perfectness which he himself chooses and builds up. But more important than anything for Pico was his universalism or syncretism. He tried to bring together all the major traditions. He thought that Plato and Aristotle were essentially compatible. But more than that he wove Kabbalism, which he saw as being with Christian belief, into his scheme, and took great pains to interpret ancient mythology in allegorical and figurative senses. He was influenced in his interpretation of the scriptures by the esoteric number symbolism of the Hebrew Kabbalah. And so he perceived himself as a kind of universal philosopher and religious teacher, drawing on all traditions. Perhaps he never got his various ideas into a thorough system because of his early death, so that he is more syncretistic than a successful perennial philosopher or universalist. But universalism was what he strove for. He was thus an important figure in helping to create a Renaissance ideology, which would not be afraid to find truth and insight anywhere.
Because of his stress on freedom Pico attacked astrology, since it implied some kind of determinism; he showed himself very much aufait with a variety of astrological theories. He did believe in the interconnectedness of the cosmos; however, inside this unified structure human beings were free agents. And through the sacrifice of Christ they had access even to the highest level, to God himself. But here he went beyond philosophy, into mystical religion, beyond thought.
Like a number of other prominent thinkers of the period, Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576) was a medical man, being professor of medicine at Pavia. He had an interesting holistic philosophy, seeing the world as an organic system. Empty space comes to be filled with animated beings through the operation of the World Soul. All objects in the world have souls, and so have relationships of sympathy and antipathy. The mortal souls of various beings including human beings can be distinguished from the immortal soul with which God has endowed humanity. It is involved in the process of reincarnation.
Unlike Pico, Cardano believed in astrology and natural magic. The idea of the interconnectedness of things in his hylozoic organicism helped to produce a theory of why magic and indeed alchemy could work. So it was that Cardano illustrates another trend in the Renaissance; the acceptance of a range of ideas not destined to have much scientific future, and a fascination with some of the preoccupations with the occult, which came down from the ancient and the medieval world. But his restless search for an alternative to official Aristotelianism also illustrates a general uneasiness and critical attitude to the dominant scientific tradition which would soon burst forth in the new science.
Nicholas Cusanus (1401-1464) came from Kues on the Mosel River in Western Germany, and played a prominent role in negotiations aimed at healing the gap between the Eastern and Western Churches (which were temporarily at least successful). His writings covered the theory of knowledge, the nature of the Divine, cosmology, the relations between religious and other matters. His works had a wide circulation and a long vogue. They represented a revival of the Platonist tradition, but much more besides. Some of his ideas were startlingly original and urprisingly modern.
First of all, he held a theory of knowledge which underlined the finitude of the human intellect. We can approximate to the truth but not really get to it. Part of the reason lies in the fact that we are stuck with logic and the law of non-contradiction, and this inhibits us from recognizing that in God above all contradictories coexist. This is Cusa's famous idea of the coincidence of opposites. This was primarily applicable to God, who is simultaneously the absolute maximum and the minimum. Our logic resists this, but Cusanus used various similes to illustrate how the coincidence of opposites is realistic. As a circle expands so its circumference flattens: at the extreme the straight line and the circle will be identical. So, then, our knowledge is limited, and recognizing why is that learned ignorance which formed the title of one of his writings. Man can cognize things on the base of his sensations, reason and intellect, but ultimate understanding always cross the bounds of that man acknowledged and meet something unknown. In the depth of cognition there is a contradiction between ultimate and absolute knowledge, that is the truth which has devine character. This knowledge can be got only symbolically, mathematically in particular. Man is not a part of the whole. He himself is f new single whole, he is a personality. Nicholas of Cusa’s cosmology was highly original. He saw the universe of creatures as a kind of contraction of God who is mirrored in them. Indeed, every one thing mirrors everything else. Further he held that the universe, while not actually infinite, is without bounds and has therefore no circumference it follows from this that it has no center, or if you prefer, everywhere is the center. There are in the world no absolutes such as up and down, and Cusanus also denied the difference in substance, postulated by traditional Aristotelianism, between the heavenly bodies and the sublunary world.
The thought that the earth is not at the center and relatively is in motion might be thought of as a metaphor for his view of the religion. He prepared decay of Ptolemaic geocentristic picture of the world. He was modern in the sense of taking the comparative study of religions seriously. He considered that beneath the contradictions exhibited by various doctrines there could be discerned a basic harmony. In many ways he was remarkably unorthodox, seeing that he was created a cardinal. In part he was a reviver of the Platonic tradition. This was something which in any event had a new vogue during the Renaissance. With his critical and revolutionary views, then, Cusanus stood between two worlds. He worked out grounds for further development of the philosophy of nature.
Philosophy of nature was born in XVI-XVII centuries in Europe, in Italy in particular. It was mainly concerned with materialistic views. This philosophy proved a new kind of worldview free of religion. They proposed a new picture of world in which God and nature and cosmos were a single whole. The Earth was not the center of the Universe. They insisted the possibility of knowing the world by sensual perception and reasoning but not by the revelation. The most brilliant representatives of such trend were Nicolas Copernicus, Yiordano Bruno and Galileo.
Nicolas Copernicus (1473-1543) studied in Cracow and in Italy, and was best known as a physician. But it was his new system in astronomy that brought him lasting fame. His heliocentric theory had many advantages, computationally, over the dominant Ptolemaic system. While some earlier thinkers had played with the idea that the earth went round the sun, Copernicus put the idea on a mathematical basis. His revolutionary view was not published till shortly before his death, but he had already expressed it widely, so that, at about the same time as the Protestant Reformation, here was another upheaval in thinking which was to have a profound impact spiritually, since it displaced humanity from the center of the cosmos. It was the symbolic and metaphysical effect of Copernicus that brought clashes between his worldview and that of the Churches.
The symbolic effects of Copernicus can be seen perhaps most plainly in the work of Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), burnt at the stake for heresy, and some of its metaphysical effects in the thinking of Galileo Galilei (1464-1542), who also ran into problems with the Inquisition. Bruno drew much of his inspiration from the Hermetic writings, and while he thought that this ancient alternative religion might flourish within the structures of Catholicism, his vision was not primarily a Christian one. He saw the cosmos as a boundless living thing, somewhat after the manner of Cusanus, and he considered that there were innumerable other worlds. The whole he saw was in motion. He was thus greatly attracted by Copernicus’ theory, though he rather despised Copernicus as being a mere mathematician who did not see the secret and mysterious significance of his theory. On his return to Italy in 1591, from extensive travels in England, Germany and other parts of Europe, he was arrested by the Inquisition. Though after his first trial in Venice he recanted he was transferred to prison in Rome and in due course tried again. This time he would not recant and was burnt.
Galileowas quite a different kind of person. He saw mathematics as a useful tool in astronomy and other sciences, and his various discoveries in mechanics led him to be highly critical of Aristotelianism. His use of the telescope revealed the mountainous character of the moon and four satellites around Jupiter. This destroyed the Aristotelian distinction between celestial and sublunary substances. He stressed the importance of empirical observation, and broke free from the opposition between Platonism and Aristotelianism: a true appraisal of the nature of physical nature could not be arrived at either by authority or by deductive metaphysics. He considered that religion and science should be kept apart - they had differing languages. He was thus critical of those who tried to settle questions in science by appeal to the Bible. In due course he was tried by the Roman Inquisition and was confined to house arrest. Even so he managed to complete and smuggle out his last work “Two New Sciences”, which was published in Holland (here, by the way, we see one of the positive consequences of the fragmentation of Europe: it was not possible, especially with the printing press, to keep anyone universally censored).
Social and political philosophy was concerned the problems of the state, the society, interaction of Church and state institutions. The main teaching were Reformation, Political philosophies and Utopism.
The Protestant Reformation, conventionally dated from 1517, had various effects relevant to philosophy and the formation of worldviews. First, it generally speaking lessened the influence of philosophy in the Church, because it sought a return as far as possible to the Bible, or, in the case of some Churches, such as the Church of England, the teaching of the Bible and of the Church Fathers. It tended, to cut away the accretions of Scholasticism.
Second, because it favored the use of the vernaculars, it tended to devolve cultures and therefore the philosophy growing out of them- in that sense it was indirectly encouraging to German, French, English and other forms of philosophy.
Third, the Radical Reformation, associated above all with the Anabaptists, prepared the way for non-conforming groups which, intentionally or not, contributed to the growth of individualism. The notion that infant baptism should be rejected, a prime element in the Radical Reformation, was based on the idea that the adult had to choose, or if you like, recognize that he or she been chosen. This in turn suggested that there should be a division between religion and the State. The Radicals were therefore looked upon as very threatening and subversive. In Europe for so long the right faith was seen as ideologically necessary. The Anabaptists and others subverted the idea of an official Christianity. Then, again, in the search for the truth merely in revelation, the Reformers often encouraged individualism of interpretation, even it they may not have willed this.
Fourth, the Reformation, in dividing Europe, weakened ecclesiastical authority, and this was helpful to the emergence of new philosophers and worldviews, which became increasingly difficult to prescribe. Generally speaking, the Reformers themselves shared a particular set of beliefs, however much they might have divided on certain issues. These were: the authority of the Word, interpreted to mean the biblical revelation but also extended to cover the Word as preached; the priesthood of all believers, which involved a kind of Church 'democracy', in that every faithful Christian partakes in the governance and the sacramental life of the community; and justification by faith alone- or to put it another way, by the grace of God, of which faith is a sign. Nothing you do gives you salvation; God alone is the true source of holiness and of salvation.
Among the main Reformers the most philosophical was John Calvin (1509-1564), with his doctrine of predestination. This arose from the notion that it is by God's grace alone that a person is saved, and not in any way by his or her good works. God's power is absolute, moreover: and so foresees and indeed predetermines, in an inscrutable way, who is to be saved and who is not.
In returning to the Bible and cutting away the growth of scholastic commentary, the Reformers were preparing for conflict, for the biblical cosmology, even when you remove the overlay of Aristotelian and other ideas, was not that of the new science. While the Reformers had some grasp of the difference between religion and science, they ultimately had no means of warding off the tensions which were bound up between biblical cosmology and that of the modem world. May be such tensions were fruitful. We have already noted a kind of dialectic in European civilization, in which the revival of Classical learning brought in new forces to challenge the various forms of medieval synthesis. So now with the Reformation another struggle in European culture emerged, which was sometimes stormy and bloody, but helped in the onward march of the critical mentality.
Political philosophy researched the problems of governing the actually existing states, methods of influence of people's life, methods of political struggle.
Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) was not a general philosopher, and dealt primarily with political arts and the theory of war. He was not quite a systematic political philosopher even. If his work has wider relevance it is because he was empirical about an important area of human experience. He was not as clear-sighted in his empiricism, but he did help prepare the way for the establishment of the modern study of politics.
The idea of constant circle rotation of Fortune, Fate as a natural way of being has a devine character. But people can use their abilities to change this oder according to their will. This differs Humanism from the former Providentialism.
He wanted to look at the State and the management of diplomacy and war from the point of view of the most efficient methods. He was not taken up with issues of right and wrong, though he had his private opinions, naturally enough. The reason was his lack of sentimentality. He also considered that it was natural that States should be concerned with growth and aggrandizement. Force was thus an integral part of what politics was about. Politics is not defined by God or dy morality, but rather by practical life, natural laws and human psychology. The motifs of politics are always actual human interests, selfishness, their striving for enrichening.
Machiavelli also stressed the importance of history. Any experience that individuals or groups may have is of necessity limited. One should look to the broader sources of history for lessons on how political organisms work. He thought the history of the Roman republic particularly instructive, for it was during that time that Rome succeeded in conquering so much of the known world.
In looking at politics and war with a cool eye Machiavelli showed his liberation from abstract theory or mere moralizing. The ruler is guided by real facts. He may be cruel, unmercial, ruthless in controlling people, but he should simalteniously demonstrate kindness, fairness, justice and equality. His empiricism could also be seen as cynicism and there is no doubt that his works for a long time excited hostility and the simplistic judgment that Machiavelli was simply amoral. It is of course the dark interpretation of his writings which has caused the word “Machiavellian” to enter the bullish language.
Philosophy of socialists-utopists developed the projection of ideal state where social justice was established instead of abolished contradictions and unequality. The founder of the theory was Thomas More (1478-1535).His famous work "Utopia" stated the liquidation of private in his ideal state. All the inhabitants had to work for common wealth and the products of their work were distributed equally among the citizens. Men and woman had equally rights. Those who achieved progress n science were set free from the work. All persons could be nominated to posts only through elections.
Tomaso Kampanela (1568-1639) was very close to More's ideas. In his work "The Sun City" he described an ideal state very similar to More's Utopia. He suggested that everybody should combine labor with education, in particular he took much consideration to educating children, which were to be taken from their parents and brought up in special schools. He appreciated the ideals of collectiveness greatly. He also supposed that the ruler could be a Metaphysician who possessed ultimate knowledge and all jobs of his time.
To conclude the summary of this period in the history of mankind it is necessary to state that men's views of the world and the position of man in it were changed, it has imposed a deep imprint on the character of all subsequent science and philosophy. In this epoch the philosophical ideas of antiquity were bom anew, as it were the old involvement with man and the old spontaneous materialist tendencies were revived on a new historic- cultural soil enriched by the influence of Mediaeval culture, by the emergence and strenthening of university science along with monastery schools. Another factor here was The needs of socio- historical practice were another factor which gave a powerful impulse to the development of the natural sciences and the humanities in which the foundations of the experimental natural science of the Modern Ages were laid.
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LECTURE 7.
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