Why and How to Study the "Middle Ages"

Abstract

����� The portrait Alasdair Maclntyre draws in After Virtue of the modern language of morality, and by extension ofmodern language in general, is largely true.1 It is not simply our moral vocabulary that has become disordered, but our language about virtually everything. I had a student looking for a sympathetic ear come into my office last semester to tell me that he had signed up for a course called Metaphysics, only to find diat the instructor had no notion of the history ofdiat word. The student, one leg up on die instructor in having readAristotle and noticing that his teacher used metaphysics in no consistent way, asked for a definition. What he received was some sentence fragments pointing in the direction ofHume and Leibnitz. He knew enough to know that Hume spelled more the end than the beginning ofmetaphysics as the word long had been understood, and dropped the class.2 Many of us have had some similar experience. The problem unfortunately is more complicated than philosophers not knowing the history of philosophy. 3 Everywhere in the West, but especially in the United States, we have built what we call a shared life in society from a series ofincommensurate traditions,