Abstract
What is the philosophical Middle Ages? What is the philosophical unity of a "period" that spans some ten centuries? When did it begin? When does it end? If any periodization is relative to an object, and if philosophy is taught as much as it is lived, we'll answer, with an eye fixed on the educational institution, that the philosophical Middle Ages began in the 6th century with the closure of the Neoplatonic School in Athens and ended, at the very end of the 15th century, with the creation of a chair in Padua to teach Aristotle in Greek. To study the history of medieval philosophy is therefore to study the history of ancient philosophical texts, their forms and genres, their survival, distribution, transmission, reproduction and reading; it's to look at translations and translators, the constitution of corpora, the formation of canons, the institutions, communities, social groups and individuals who in some way contributed to them; the relationships these actors maintained; their function in society or in the churches; their ideology. Between the closing of the School of Athens and the rise of Greek as a language of instruction in Italy, and later in France, there is not justone "Middle Ages": there are several continuations of Late Antiquity, and several breaks with it. Some of these continue right up to the present day: the "Long Middle Ages". Exploring such a vast field calls for a particular method: Robin G. Collingwood's Constructive Re-Enactment, Arthur O. Lovejoy's History of Ideas, the " intrigue of the Middle Ages". Lovejoy's history of ideas, narrativist " emplotment " and phenomenologicalAbbau (deconstruction) can, to varying degrees, provide principles or elements. The lectures given within the framework of the Chair in the History of Medieval Philosophy will take a further step in the direction of a philosophical archaeology whose objective we will evoke: to determine, in the words of Michel Foucault, "what makes a certain form of thought necessary", and whose first field of application we will specify for the 2014 academic year: the invention of the modern "subject", on the disputed borders of medieval philosophy of mind, "Cartesian" dualism and nascent psychology.
