John Scootus Erigena Analysis

John Scotus Erigena (810-877) [Ireland, Paris]. After Gottschalk, the next outstanding personality in Western philosophy is John Scotus Erigena, widely regarded as the first great philosopher of the Christian Middle Ages. He translated the Neo-Platonic mystical work supposed to have been written by Dionysuius the Areopagite at the time of St. Paul, and that work had great influence upon his ideas. His most important writing was On the Division of Nature. John Scotus Erigena held that philosophy and religion were really the same, the functions of philosophy being to divide, define, demonstrate, and analyse. That which cannot be known does not exist for us. Nature is the designation of the totality of things, ranging from the purely creative but uncreated (that is, God) through the creative and created (the Logos or the realm of types of things), to the realm of phenomena which are created but do not create anything. Beyond this is the uncreated which is God as the end to which all things finally return. (Are you still with us?) The tone of this philosophers work was so Pantheistic* that it was condemned in the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, but

Perhaps this chap was better known as ibn-Sina. He was an Arabian philosopher, a student of Neo-Platonism and Aristotle, as well as of medicine. His special interest lay in metaphysics in which he combined the features of the two philosophies. His belief was that reality extends from a supreme intelligence of matter, whose distance is negative. His theories of the status of universals (moderate realism) and of the nature of the soul (Aristotelianism), were often quoted by the scholastics. Translated into Latin, his works stimulated the revival of interest in Aristotle and his philosophy in the twelth and thirteenth centuries. Avicenna was sometimes called "The Third Aristotle." His Healing, contained doctrines which influenced the development of medieval