Date/Time
13/11/2025 (Thursday)
8.00 - 9.30 pm
Location
The Adelaide
We shall listen to the forty-minute discussion between Bryan Magee and Anthony Kenny on medieval philosophy, from the high-quality BBC series “The Great Philosophers” (1987). Their discussion falls into two parts:
(1) the virtual disappearance of the study of philosophy in the centuries after the fall of Rome and its re-emergence with a vengeance in the second half of the medieval period at the new institutions of learning that soon came to be called “universities”;
(2) the output from the medieval universities – including in logic, language, ethics, free will/determinism – that, Magee and Kenny argue, are still relevant for the study of those topics today.
We shall then discuss among ourselves what we have heard, including (time permitting) a search for the fallacies (if there are any) in Anselm’s ontological (not his word) argument for the existence of god/God.
A list of all the episodes of the BBC 1987 series (available on BBC i-player and You Tube) and its equally high-quality 1978 forerunner series “Men of Ideas” (available on You Tube) will be circulated at the meeting.