Abstract

Recent writers in the historiography of philosophy have placed into question the paradigms that structure our historical writing. I continue this discussion with particular reference to medieval philosophy, the writing of whose history had its origins in certain nineteenth-century German reactions to the German idealism inspired by Kant. Joseph Kleutgen and Albert Stockl were the first to write a history of medieval philosophy presupposing such canonical categories as epistemology, metaphysics, natural philosophy, psychology, morality, and the problem of reason versus revelation. Their history was also the first to treat Aquinas as representing the apex of medieval philosophy. They present Aquinas as attaining the first rank on account of his "epistemology" and his reconciliation of revelation with reason. ;In the dissertation, I expose the German historical background to this writing of the history of medieval philosophy, with a view to explicating the model of the history of medieval philosophy that has come to dominate the twentieth century. Then, in light of recent work of Joseph Owens, Mark Jordan, and John Marenbon, I argue in detail that this model is deeply flawed, specifically, that Aquinas has no epistemology and that the reconciliation of revelation with reason is no part of his project. I conclude that if we read Aquinas in context and become aware of the specific nineteenth-century philosophical-political-theological grounds for this model of the history of medieval philosophy, we can then begin to construct a more accurate model of the history of medieval thought