Outsiders and Forerunners: Modern Reason and Historiographical Births of Medieval Philosophy

This book focuses on the emergence and development of philosophical historiography as a university discipline in the 18th and 19th centuries. During that period historians of philosophy evaluated medieval philosophical theories through the lenses of modern leitmotifs and assigned to medieval thinkers positions within an imaginary map of cultural identities based on the juxtaposition of 'self' and 'other'. Some medieval philosophers were regarded as 'forerunners' who had constructively paved the way for modern rationality; whereas others, viewed as 'outsiders', had contributed to the same effect by way of their struggle against established forms of philosophy. The contributions gathered in this volume each deal with the creative reception of a particular figure in modern history of philosophy. From the 9th century, with al-Farabi, to the 16th century, these philosophers belong to four historical worlds which have been characterized by European cultural history or have defined themselves as such: the (Jewish-)Arabic world (al-Farabi, Avicenna, Maimonides), Latin scholasticism (Roger Bacon, Henry of Ghent, William of Ockham, Marsilius of Padua), medieval lay philosophy (Ramon Lull, Petrarch), and Humanism in a broader sense (Nicholas of Cusa, Petrus Ramus, Andrea Cesalpino).