A Little Idealism Is Idealism Enough

Abstract

Given the evidence available today, we know that the later Middle Ages knew strong forms of idealism. However, Plato alone will not do to explain some of its features. Aristotle was the most important philosophical authority in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but until now no one dared explore in his thought the roots of this idealism because of the dogma of realism surrounding him. I challenge this dogma, showing that the Stagirite contained in his thought the roots of idealist aspects that will be developed, namely by Dietrich of Freiberg and Eckhart of Hochheim, into a fully idealist epistemology. I To approach the thought of Aristotle today is like penetrating a sacrosanct bulk of long- established views that ‗guide' one's interpretations of it. Because of the major influence of his thought in the whole of Western culture and of philosophical thinking in particular, studies on the history of philosophy are greatly constrained by those same views. Their weight is so overwhelming that neither the Aristotelian interpretation nor the study of the history of Western thought advance. Particularly two all-powerful dogmas guard the access to Western thought: (D1) Aristotle was an impenitent realist; and, undoubtedly connected with this, (D2) medieval epistemology was almost exclusively a realist one. 1 The problem with this, and namely with D2, is that we have a hard time explaining modern philosophy and one of its main—if not the most important—features: idealism. Looking for the sources of modern idealism solely in Plato will not do, and not even those who first opposed D2 realized that much of its source was to be found in Aristotle and in the late medieval reception of his thought. 2 The fact is that it is manifest that the Middle Ages knew strong forms of idealism (with Augustine, John Scottus Eriugena, and Anselm of Canterbury, for instance), and that the late medieval thought in particular, precisely the one which most absorbed from Aristotle, was greatly characterized by an epistemological idealism: even a superficial reading of some texts of Dietrich of Freiberg (ca. 1250-1310) and of Eckhart of Hochheim