Author:

Keywords:

Arts & Humanities, Philosophy, Maurice De Wulf, Johan Huizinga, Scholasticism, medieval philosophy, historiography of philosophy, nationalism, 2202 History and Philosophy of Specific Fields, 2203 Philosophy, 2204 Religion and Religious Studies, 5003 Philosophy

Abstract:

© 2015 by Tijdschrift voor Filosofie. All rights reserved. Starting from his editorial project "Les philosophes beiges", I present Louvain professor Maurice De Wulf's (1867-1947) views on the history of medieval philosophy, specifically, his conviction that the diverse development of philosophical ideas in the 13th-l4th century had an important role in the formation of the different 'national temperaments' of Europe. According to his view, Scholasticism, which emphasizes the role of reason and never subordinates the individual to a totality, is the perfect expression of the Latin civilization, which flourished above all in France. Different anti-scholastic tendencies in philosophy (adepts of pantheism, irrationalism and mysticism), inspired by Averroes and by Neoplatonism, found fertile soil in the German regions. After critically reviewing this nationalistic approach to medieval philosophy - to be explained by the traumatism of the First World War - I turn to Huizinga's much more promising search for a philosophy corresponding to the Burgundian civilisation of the waning Middle Ages and end with a discussion of Loris Sturlese's defence of a regional diversity of philosophy without any form of nationalism. A first version of this study was published in English in 2011 (see footnote 1).