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The medieval Aristotle How do our senses receive information from the outside world? What do memories and dreams consist of? And how can we know anything at all? These were questions for which medieval scholars studied Aristotle in order to obtain answers. Now, the research programme, Representation and Reality, has been concluded, where linguists and philosophers have collaborated in order to understand, translate and make available medieval interpretations of the great philosopher. ARISTOTLE LIVED from 384– 322 BCE and was interested in more or less everything that is possible to ponder, such as logic, physics, zoology, langu-
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age, ethics and poetics. His original writings are not preserved but there are plenty of hand-written copies, which over the centuries after his death were copied, recopied and collected in libraries. – However, the fall of the Western Roman Empire at the end of the fifth century meant that all this knowledge more or less disappeared. Schools were closed, libraries were scattered and from a situation where all educated Romans spoke Greek, the knowledge of that language was almost wiped from Western European memory, says Christina Thomsen Thörnqvist, Professor of Latin, and Project Manager of the research programme. However, in the ninth century the interest in Aristotle’s natural philosophy was rekindled, but initially in a different place, in Baghdad. – All known writings by
If, for example, we hear a parrot and then see a horse, we conclude that we have misheard, not that there is some thing wrong with our eyesight. CHRISTINA THOMSEN THÖRNQVIST
Aristotle were soon translated into Arabic. Translations into Latin, however, were not made until several hundred years later, some of them via Arabic. It was only in 1275 that most of Aristotle’s work was available in Latin. Today, when hostilities between East and West are so prominent, it is both a fascinating and moving realisation that so
In the programme Representation and Reality linguists and philosophers have collaborated in order to understand medieval interpretations of Aristotle.
much of western thought has come from the Muslim world, through exchanges over many hundreds of years that both parties benefited from. For example, it was the Arabs who realised that our sensory perceptions were interpreted in the brain, not the heart, as Aristotle thought. And it was the Persian Avicenna who solved the difficult philosophical problem of whether it is possible to say something about things that do not exist in reality, but still have a designation. The standard example of such an object in the Arabic tradition was the Simurgh, an ancient bird that according to Eastern mythology was the intellectual equal of man. ONCE ARISTOTLE HAD been
translated into Latin, his writings were studied at the cathedral schools and universities that were being
