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W.B.C.S. Examination Notes On – Medieval Skepticism – Philosophy Notes.
Pyrrhonism ended as a philosophical movement in the late Roman Empire, as religious concerns became paramount.Continue Reading W.B.C.S. Examination Notes On – Medieval Skepticism – Philosophy Notes.
In the Christian Middle Ages the main surviving form of skepticism was the Academic, as described in St. Augustine’s Contra academicos.
Augustine, before his conversion from paganism to Christianity, had found Cicero’s views attractive. But having overcome them through revelation, he characterized his subsequent philosophy as faith seeking understanding. Augustine’s account of skepticism and his answer to it provided the basis of medieval discussions.
In Islamic Spain, where there was more contact with ancient learning, a form of antirational skepticism developed among Muslim and Jewish theologians. Al-Ghazāli, an Arab theologian of the 11th and early 12th centuries, and his Jewish contemporary Judah ha-Levi, who was a poet and physician as well as a philosopher, offered skeptical challenges against contemporary Aristotelians in order to lead people to accept religious truths on the basis of mystical faith.
The view that truth in religion is ultimately based on faith rather than on reasoning or evidence—a doctrine known as fideism—was adopted by the late medieval German cardinal and philosopher Nicolaus of Cusa, who advocated learned ignorance as a path to religious knowledge. Another line of thinking that included skeptical elements was that of the followers of William of Ockham (1285–1347), who explored the logical consequences of the belief that God is the origin of all knowledge.
They examined puzzles about whether God could deceive humankind, regardless of the evidence, and about whether he could render all human reasoning open to doubt.
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