The next step in this project is to consider a movement of thought that occurred in the late middles ages and which will help us better understand how the middles ages understood the relationship between reason and faith: scholasticism. Its key representative is Saint Thomas Aquinas who lived through the middle years of the XIII century, but in this episode we'll take a look at one of Aquinas's contemporaries, Saint Bonaventure.

Bonaventure’s intuition, unlike Aquinas's, was to reject Aristotle altogether, since he thought certain aspects of Aristotle’s thought went against Christian theology. Despite this rejection, he did engage with Aristotle in substantial ways.

The Plato/Aristotle debates of the XIII century are another important step in our effort to identify the course of reason from classical antiquity to the present.

Episode resources:

-Cullen, Christopher M., Bonaventure, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

-Glavin, Leonard, "A Comparison Between the Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventure on Mary, the Mother of God," Marian Library Studies: 29 (2015).

-Reason & Faith: Philosophy in the Middle Ages. A lecture series by Dr. Thomas Williams on Audible.

-“Socrates to Sartre and Beyond,” Seventh Edition, by Samuel Enoch Stump and James Fieser, 2003.

Thanks for listening to the Poiein podcast. This was episode seven of a series on reason and desire.

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