Syllabus Showcase: Medieval Philosophy, Michael Wiitala

Below is my syllabus for Medieval Philosophy at Cleveland State University. At Cleveland State, Medieval is a 200-level general education course that philosophy majors are also required to take. The majority of students enrolled are non-majors taking it as a gen ed. About five years ago, however, enrollment began to decline due to some changes in general education requirements. In order to save the course, I redesigned it to fit the university’s diversity course requirements. This redesign also made the course more interesting and engaging for students and allowed me to cover a wider range of philosophical traditions and figures from the Middle Ages.

When designing the course, my goal was to make it engaging and topically interesting to the average student at a state university. I decided to design the course around these three questions:

1. What is the fundamental nature of reality or God?
2. What is the relationship between human reason and religious faith?
3. How should we orient ourselves toward human suffering?

These questions allowed me to include thinkers from a diverse array of philosophical and religious traditions and to embark with the students on some of the most influential answers people have given to these questions.

The first unit of the course (weeks 1-4) focuses on the question of the fundamental nature of reality or God. I take a broadly Neoplatonic approach, going over Plotinus’ basic framework—the One, Forms, Soul—and then discussing how that basic framework is adapted by al-Kindi and other philosophers in the Abrahamic traditions, so that the One, Forms, Soul gets reconstituted as roughly God, Universals, Particular Beings. I then take a week to present the ontologically rich notion of good and evil in medieval philosophy and various views on the afterlife.

With that introduction in place, in unit 2 (weeks 5-8) I explore various answers to the question of how reason and religion relate to one another. I take the students through various thinkers and identify seven different answers to the question. Students usually find that one or more of the views studied resonate with and help clarify their own beliefs about the relationship between reason and religion.

1. Rationalism: Religion is a way of popularizing what is knowable through philosophy. There is nothing we learn through religion that we can’t come to understand more accurately through human reason, although coming to that understanding requires extensive study and thus won’t be achieved by most people in society. I use al-Farabi as a representative of this view.
2. Traditional Faith-Reason Compatibilism: Human reason and the faith of the divinely revealed religious tradition (e.g., Islam, Christianity) are both sources of truth, but each gives us different kinds of truth. Of course, truth doesn’t contradict truth, so what we learn by reason will never contradict what we learn by faith and vice versa. I primarily use Aquinas as the representative of this view.
3. Neoplatonic Openness: For this view, I consider two texts that are not that well-known today: Letters 6 and 7 of the Christian Neoplatonist (Pseudo-) Dionysius the Areopagite. In these letters, he argues that instead of attacking the beliefs and rites of other religions, one should focus on determining whether one’s own religious views are true while being open to truth-seeking dialogue with others.
4. Individualist Faith-Reason Compatibilism: In this view I have the students read the 17th-century Ethiopian philosophers Zera Yacob and Wanda Heywat. Although from a Eurocentric perspective, they might seem too late to be considered “medieval,” their focus on religious questions fits topically into a medieval course. Yacob and Heywat argue against traditional organized religions and suggest that each person should use his or her own rationality to determine what is true when it comes to God, one’s way of life, morality, etc. In order to make this view relatable for the students, I tell them it is comparable to what people today might call “spiritual but not religious.” Yacob and Heywat, although they reject organized religion, continue to believe in God, miracles, and engage in prayer. In that way, they think faith and reason are compatible. But the faith here, unlike in Traditional Faith-Reason Compatibilism, is one’s own personal faith, rather than the shared faith of one’s religious tradition.
5. Fideism: Faith and religious experience give us access to God or the fundamental nature of reality, whereas reason cannot. Reason can discover truths about things like mathematics and the natural world. But when it comes to things like the ultimate meaning of everything, God, and morality, reason can’t answer our questions. Instead, we must rely on religious experience and faith to answer those sorts of questions. I use al-Ghazali as a representative of this view.
6. Literalism: Religion is our access to truth, and authoritative religious text must be believed and understood literally. Even to question what they mean is a sin. In order to make this view relatable to students, I say it is comparable with what today might be called religious fundamentalism. For this view, I use a secondary source that describes literalist views in the medieval Islamic world.
7. Skepticism: Neither religious faith nor reason can give us access to God or the fundamental nature of reality. We are left to our own devices to determine what we will believe and how we should live. For this view, I use a secondary source that describes various skeptics who lived and wrote in the medieval Islamic world.

Unit 3 (weeks 9-15) focuses on various medieval responses to the problem of suffering. I take the students through five different philosophical responses. Going through these basic responses with students involves a lot of oversimplification. But it gives them a taste of each.

1. The Mystical Experience Response: If one has a profound enough experience of God or the divine, all sufferings appear unimportant when compared to the beauty in that experience. I use al-Ghazali’s account of the “fruitional experience” of the Sufis as representative of this response.
2. The Buddhist Response: Eliminate suffering by recognizing desire and the self as illusory. I use Santaraksita’s metaphysically nihilistic Buddhism as a representative.
3. The Hindu Response: Be free of suffering by identifying with Brahman, the true Self of all things, instead of identifying with one’s individual, finite desires and merely a human sense of self. I use Shankara as a representative of this response.
4. The Platonist Response: Accept suffering as a necessary and inescapable part of human life, but also recognize that you are more than human and can, through reason and the practice of philosophy, participate in God’s own knowledge and governance of the world. I use “Platonist” here in a broad sense that includes most medieval Aristotelians. Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy is the text I use as representative of this response.
5. The Christian Solution: Accept suffering as a gift from God that draws you closer to him and to others in the Church or Christian Community. Suffering is not only a necessary part of human life but when willingly accepted becomes redemptive. No one suffers alone. You always suffer with Christ and with other members of the Christian Community. I use Meister Eckhard and Catherine of Siena as representatives of this response.

Here is the syllabus:

The Syllabus Showcase of the APA Blog is designed to share insights into the syllabi of philosophy educators. We include syllabi in their original, unedited format that showcase a wide variety of philosophy classes. We would love for you to be a part of this project. Please contact Series Editors, Dr. Smrutipriya Pattnaik via smrutipriya23@gmail.com or, Dr. Brynn Welch via bwelch@uab.edu or Editor of the Teaching Beat, Alexis LaBar via labaralexis06@gmail.com with potential submissions.

Michael Wiitala

Michael Wiitala teaches history of philosophy courses at Cleveland State University. His research, which focuses primarily on Plato and Neoplatonism, has appeared in journals such as Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Apeiron, Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, and British Journal for the History of Philosophy.