Aristotle's Journey to Europe

406 Pages·2007·3.49 MB·English

Aristotle’s Journey to Europe:
A Synthetic History of the Role Played
by the Islamic Empire in the Transmission of
Western Educational Philosophy Sources
from the Fall of Rome through the Medieval Period

By

Randall R. Cloud
B.A., Point Loma Nazarene University, 1977
M.A., Point Loma University, 1979
M. Div., Nazarene Theological Seminary, 1982

Submitted to the:
School of Education
Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies
Program: Educational Policy and Leadership
Concentration: Foundations of Education
and the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Kansas in partial
fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Dissertation Committee:

_______________________________________
Suzanne Rice, Chairperson

_______________________________________
Ray Hiner

_______________________________________
Jim Hillesheim

_______________________________________
Marc Mahlios

_______________________________________
Sally Roberts

Dissertation Defended: November 6, 2007
The Dissertation Committee for Randall R. Cloud certifies
that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:

Aristotle’s Journey to Europe:
A Synthetic History of the Role Played
by the Islamic Empire in the Transmission of
Western Educational Philosophy Sources
from the Fall of Rome through the Medieval Period

Dissertation Committee:

_______________________________________
Suzanne Rice, Chairperson

_______________________________________
Ray Hiner

_______________________________________
Jim Hillesheim

_______________________________________
Marc Mahlios

_______________________________________
Sally Roberts

Approved: _____________________________

ii
Table of Contents

Abstract vi

Chapter 1: Introduction 1
1.1 The Research Question 2
1.2 The Interplay between Philosophy and Education 10
1.3 Sources of Influence for this Dissertation 27
1.31 Philosophy of Education Textbooks 28
1.32 Ancient and Medieval History of the
Christian Church 31
1.33 Thomas Cahill’s “Hinges of History” 47
1.4 Research Methodology 52

Chapter 2: The Greek Foundation 62
2.1 The Context of Plato and Aristotle’s Work 66
2.2 Non-Western Influences on Greek Thought 73
2.21 Mesopotamian 79
2.22 Egyptian 80
2.23 Hebrew 82
2.3 The Philosophical Priorities of Platonic and
Aristotelian Thought 90
2.31 Plato 93
2.32 Aristotle 97
2.4 List of Works by Plato 108
2.5 List of Works by Aristotle 111
2.6 What Do We Mean by “Western” Tradition? 116
Chapter 3: Hellenism, the Roman Empire, and the Propagation
of Christianity 124
3.1 Definition of Hellenism 126
3.2 Competing Schools of Philosophy 131
3.3 The Roman Period 138
3.4 The Rise of Christianity 143
3.5 Plato and the Academy through the Later
Hellenistic Period 151
3.6 Aristotle and the Lyceum through the Later
Hellenistic Period 157
3.7 Ancient Textual Transmission and Early
Greek Commentators 161

iii
Chapter 4: The Fall of Rome and the Byzantine Era 170
4.1 The Roman Empire Divided 172
4.2 The Fall of Rome and the Barbarian Invasion
of the West 177
4.3 The Fate of Greek Philosophy after the Demise
of the Western Roman Empire 180
4.31 Augustine 186
4.32 Boethius 189
4.33 Western Monasteries 192
4.34 Irish Centers of Learning 194
4.35 The Carolingian Renaissance 196
4.4 The Fate of Greek Philosophy after the Rise
of the Eastern Byzantine Empire 200
4.41 The Effects of Christianity on
Philosophy in the Byzantine Empire 201
4.42 The East-West Schism 222

Chapter 5: The Connection between Greek Philosophy and the
Islamic Empire 229
5.1 The Origin and Expansion of Islam 229
5.2 Greek Philosophy: From Syriac to Arabic 238
5.3 The Abbasid Dynasty Translation Movement 243
5.4 Philosophical Genres used in Islam Culture 253
5.5 Arabic-Speaking Philosophers in the
Islamic Empire 258
5.51 Al-Kindi 262
5.52 The Peripatetics of Baghdad 265
5.53 Al-Rhazi 266
5.54 Al-Farabi 266
5.55 Ibn Sina (Avicenna) 268
5.56 Al-Ghazali 271
5.57 Islamic Philosophers in Andalusia 274
5.58 Ibn Rushd (Averroes) 275
5.59 Ibn Maimun (Maimonides) 281
5.6 The Fate of Philosophy within Islam 282

Chapter 6: Greek Philosophy Revived in Medieval Europe:
Aquinas and the Twelfth-Century Renaissance 291
6.1 Reconquista and Convivencia: Christians
and Muslims in Spain 292
6.2 Greek Philosophy: Arabic into Latin 298
6.3 The Twelfth-Century Renaissance 307
6.31 Scholasticism and the Rise
of Universities 314
iv
6.32 Averroism 323
6.4 Aquinas 329
6.5 Renaissance 337

Chapter 7: Conclusion 343
7.1 The Greek Path to Europe 343
7.2 The Myth of Westerness 347
7.3 Directions for Further Research 355
7.4 Hesperos is Phosphoros 358

Appendices
Appendix A The Philosophical/Educational “Hole in History” 360
Appendix B Averroes in “The School of Athens” 361
Appendix C Map: The Hellenistic World 362
Appendix D Map: The Extent of the Roman Empire 363
Appendix E Chart: Reason vs. Faith 364
Appendix F Map: The Extent of the Islamic Empire 365
Appendix G Map: The Reconquest of Spain 366
Appendix H Arabic-Latin Translations 367
Appendix I Map: Pre-Renaissance Europe 368
Appendix J Chart: The Journey of Greek Philosophy to the West 369

Bibliography 371
v
Abstract

After the fall of Rome, how did the work and words of the ancient Greek
philosophers make their way, textually and intellectually, into later European
thought? There were two primary and obvious paths that this Greek literature could
have taken to reach medieval Europe after the split of the Roman Empire into east
and west sectors, but these two potential paths functionally became, instead, dual
roadblocks to its transmission. In the western portion of the former Roman Empire,
there was an overwhelming passive indifference to Greek philosophy coupled with a
decline of culture generally in Western Europe during the so-called Dark Ages. In the
eastern portion of the former Roman Empire, the attitude toward Greek philosophy
was tempered by the imperial authority of Constantinople and eastern Christianity,
and ranged from cautious acceptance to occasionally active censorship.
In response to the research question, here is my thesis: The Islamic Empire of
the Middle Ages was the primary and indispensable force behind the preservation,
transmission and acceptance of the Greek philosophical tradition to later European
thinking. I will contend that without the influence of Muslim scholars during the
medieval period, the foundational impact of Greek philosophy on later Western
philosophy (including specifically, Western sources of educational philosophy) may
have been greatly reduced (or potentially lost), used differently, and/or forced to find
other sources of transmittal.
vi
My research will pursue the historical connections between classical Greece
and pre-Renaissance Europe on three interrelated levels—textual, philosophical, and
cultural. First, I will examine the textual transmission of specific works by Plato and
Aristotle, looking at the translation and transmission work done over time and
through several language and cultural groups. Second, I will seek to find how the
ideas of Plato and Aristotle were used and transmitted, moving from text to
philosophical patterns of thinking. Third, I will look more broadly at the acceptance
of philosophical inquiry and the development of critical thinking within culture itself,
in Greek, Arabic, and Latin settings, to see how the often competing ideas of faith and
reason play out over the course of our historical framework.
vii
Chapter 1

Introduction

This research project begins with an important philosophical and educational
assertion: We who claim lineage in the Western philosophical tradition have one
common and indisputable foundation from which we view ourselves and our ideas,
namely, that of the early Greek thinkers. Alfred North Whitehead, the noted
twentieth-century philosopher, made the now famous comment, “The safest general
characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series
of footnotes to Plato.”1 Certainly, Whitehead is not proposing that everyone in the
West agrees with Plato’s scheme of thought, or that we all are in some fashion
idealists. But he does mean to say that Western philosophy and education are
indebted to the ancient Greeks for their wealth of ideas and for their disciplined
inquiry into these ideas, particularly Plato and his able student Aristotle. Charles
Freeman restates Whitehead’s basic thesis by asserting that, “the Greeks provided the
chromosomes of Western civilization.”2 He goes on to state that “Greek ways of
exploring the cosmos, defining the problems of knowledge . . . creating the language
in which such problems are explored, representing the physical world and human
society in the arts, defining the nature of value, describing the past, still underlie the

1 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of
Edinburgh During the Session 1927-28, Corrected Edition ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W.
Sherburne (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 39.

2 Charles Freeman, The Greek Achievement: The Foundation of the Western World (New York:
Penguin Books, 1999), 435.

1
Western cultural tradition.”3 More to the point of this dissertation, Sheila Dunn
observes, “It was during this early period . . . that Western educational thought and
theory had its beginnings . . . Fundamental issues between these two Greek
philosophers have continued to shape contemporary education throughout the
centuries.”4 From this shared starting point of the ancient Greeks, Western thought,
along with its most common mode of transmission—education—has evolved into the
many modern philosophical branches that are known and studied today. Indeed,
Bernard Williams clearly states, “the legacy of Greece to Western philosophy is
Western philosophy.”5

1.1 The Research Question
To simply state that the Greeks supply the cornerstone to Western thinking is
certainly to state the obvious. So I will move on to state what is not obvious: The path
that the early Greek writings and ideas took in finding their way into later European
thought is far more complicated and far less direct than many sources on the history
of philosophy describe. Carol Thomas makes a similar point when she states, “The
extent of our debt to ancient Greece is clear, but specific links between past and
present are more indistinct; the line of transmission has not been straight and single.”6

3 Ibid.

4 Sheila Dunn, Philosophical Foundations of Education: Connecting Philosophy to Theory and
Practice (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc. and Merrill/Prentice-Hall, 2005), 14.

5 Bernard Williams, “Philosophy,” in The Legacy of Greece: A New Appraisal, ed. M. I. Finley
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 202.

6 Carol G. Thomas, ed., Paths from Ancient Greece (Leiden, The Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1988), 1.
2
To take for granted and without reflection that the philosophical giants, Plato and
Aristotle (and Greek modes of thinking in general), are part of the West’s intellectual
background is to miss an important and equally fundamental part of our historical
development. What I will attempt to show in this dissertation is that the transmission
of the Greek philosophers to Western Europe happened in a rather haphazard way and
that this transmission was aided by a most unlikely source, the Islamic Empire of the
Middle Ages. What I want to do is objectively unpack the history of Western
philosophy in such a way that those of us who depend on its foundation will
understand how and why that foundation exists in the first place.
Here, then, is my research question: After the fall of Rome, how did the work
and words of the ancient Greek philosophers make their way, textually and
intellectually, into later European thought? The Roman Empire was the first post-
Greek culture to inherit the wisdom of the Greek philosophers. But when the Roman
Empire collapsed in the West due to the invasion of barbarian armies, the status of
Greek philosophy was at the mercy of the Mediterranean basin’s complex and chaotic
next chapter in history. There were two primary and obvious paths that this Greek
literature could have taken to reach medieval Europe after the split of the Roman
Empire into east and west sectors, but these two potential paths functionally became,
instead, dual roadblocks to its transmission. In the western portion of the former
Roman Empire there was an overwhelming passive indifference to Greek philosophy
coupled with a decline of culture generally in Western Europe during the so-called
Dark Ages. Greek philosophy was, for all practical purposes, ignored and/or forgotten
3