Spheres of Philosophical Inquiry and the Historiography of Medieval Philosophy by John Inglis (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Spheres ofPhilosophical Inquiry and the Historiography ofMedieval Philosophy. By JOHN INGLIS. Leiden: Brill, 1998. Pp. 324. $99.50 (cloth). ISBN 9004 -10843-2. In a passage from the On Sophistical Refutations that St. Thomas likes to cite, Aristotle indicates that the beginner in a discipline must first accept as true the things his teacher tells him ("oportet addiscentem credere" [cf. Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 2. a. 3]). These "truths" that the learner receives are not necessarily per se nota, so at some point the learner, as he progresses in the discipline, will come to understand why these truths are true. Now, although in that passage (165b3) the Philosopher seems to have in mind the first principles of a given discipline, its dignitates, one can extend his logic to cover a discipline like the one covered by John Inglis in this marvelous book: the history of medieval philosophy. For a beginning historian, too, accepts as true certain claims about the subject to be investigated, whether the claims are about the documentary hypothesis in the Old Testament, the "dualism" of Descartes, or the conditions that led to the American Revolutionary war ("No taxation without representation"). The problem is that certain claims about a subject, assumed to be true at the outset, can prevent counterclaims from emerging that would paint a decidedly different picture about the subject under consideration. So, if the teacher of medieval philosophy provides its historical narrative in a way that is paradoxically antithetical, or at least indifferent, to the primary concerns of the schoolmen, then his hapless student is likely to receive a twisted view of this subject. The student, turned teacher, will repeat the story to his students. Chain these links together, and you have a skewed tradition of the historiography of medieval philosophy. The gist of John Inglis's thesis in the book is well-stated in the conclusion: "While significant Medieval Latin thinkers transformed philosophy into theology, philosophers in the modern period would transform medieval theology back into philosophy" (276). His book, however, is not an elaborate essay, replete with benign assertions about how important it is read medieval thought in its context. It is rather a carefully argued case that attempts to pinpoint just where the historiography of medieval philosophy got derailed. And Inglis has proof. The size of his bibliography (28 single-spaced, 11-point, pages) is only a provisional indication of how seriously he makes his case; much of the information provided in the book was garnered, not from published 301 302 BOOK REVIEWS material, but from archival work that he himself conducted in Europe. The sources of the evidence Inglis provides are not only the texts produced by writers, but also the institutions and the ecclesial politics of the men who produced those texts. Good history requires a range of evidence. The book has autobiographical origins for Inglis (6-10). As he undertook to study medieval philosophy he first came across the account of Etienne Gilson's The History ofChristian Philosophy in the Middle Ages, which made three main assertions: (1) the medievals contributed to the standard areas of philosophy and to the harmony between reason and revelation, (2) Aquinas represents the high point of medieval philosophy, and (3) Ockham's criticism of Aquinas's realism and harmony between reason and revelation brings about the dissolution of medieval philosophy. This particular story is well known to students of medieval thought, and, furthermore, it is well known that it diverged from the view earlier offered by Maurice de Wulf, for whom there was much more unity among the medievals than diversity, a "common philosophical patrimony of medieval philosophy" (9). But what struck Inglis was that beneath the obvious differences between Gilson and de Wulf there was a common assumption about the nature of philosophy and of medieval philosophy's relation to philosophy. For both Gilson and de Wulf before him had construed the contribution of medieval philosophy along the lines of how contemporary philosophy understood itself: a heavy, indeed primary, emphasis upon epistemology and an attempt clearly to demarcate intellectual accomplishments attained by reason alone from those that depended upon faith (i.e., the distinction between reason and revelation, with...