Early Medieval Philosophy (480–1150), An Introduction
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loginWhen I wrote Early Medieval Philosophy five years ago, I thoughtof philosophy as a single, identifiable subject. Although I tried inpassing to provide a definition of it (‘rational argument based onpremises self-evident from observation, experience and thought’), inpractice I assumed that any thinker who appeared to share themethods and interests of modern British philosophers was aphilosopher, and that all other thinkers were theologians, mystics,poets, scientists or whatever, but not philosophers. I knew that earlymedieval thinkers themselves did not make any such distinctionbetween philosophy and non-philosophy. Indeed, I prefaced the bookby noting that ‘philosophical speculation was one—often minor—part of their activity, which they rarely separated from other types ofthought, logical, grammatical, scientific or theological’. But it waspart of my duty as an historian of philosophy, I thought, to distinguishthe texts and passages of the period which were philosophical fromthose which were not. In this way I would show that ‘it is possible tospeak of early medieval philosophy, just as it is possible to speak ofantique, later medieval or modern philosophy’.
