The many great across the world

news, and the two are of physical

and bless you all of physical.

He bless you, Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at Kings College, London and the LMU in Munich.

Online at www. History of Philosophy.net.

Today's episode, Stairway to Heaven, Bonaventure.

It would be so convenient if figures in the history of philosophy actually fell neatly into

the boxes we used to keep them straight in our heads.

You have your liberals and your conservatives, your idealists, and your materialists, your empiricists,

and your rationalists. But often is not, philosophers defy such easy categorization.

No contrast is older or more familiar to the historian of philosophy than the one between

Platonism and Aristotelianism, yet Aristotle borrowed

more than a few ideas from Plato, and I'm on record as saying that Plato was not a Platonist. So you should already have been suspicious when I said that in covering 13th century scholasticism,

I'd be looking in turn at the Franciscans and then the Dominicans.

Were these two orders really associated with opposing philosophical approaches or doctrines?

The traditional answer would be yes, and the traditional basis for that answer would be

the contrast between two of the era's greatest thinkers, Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas.

Bonaventure, a Franciscan, stands for a mystically tinged theology and skepticism concerning the secular offerings of philosophy.

He steers by the star of Augustine, about whom he wrote,

No question has been propounded by the masters, whose solution may not be found in the works of this doctor.

Aquinas, a Dominican, represents the Aristotelian side of the debate, aware that theology is needed to complete the teachings found in the philosophers, but eager

to make full use of those teachings nonetheless.

...