In this kind of interview, it’s usual to start by asking, how did you become interested in philosophy? But I noticed from your CV that you didn’t read philosophy as an undergraduate, but rather read Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic. So let me first ask instead how you came to read ASNaC, and more generally how you came to the Middle Ages.

At school, when I was fourteen or fifteen, I began to get interested in philosophy. Philosophy wasn’t a subject that you could study as such at school at that time, but our school, which was a very good school, Westminster, had extra lessons where somebody was brought in to teach us about great modern thinkers – Marx, Freud and so on – and that probably got me interested in the general idea of philosophy.

For A-levels, I chose a fairly standard combination in those days in the arts: English, history and French. Our history teacher, a former Oxford don, was an expert on early modern history, but he decided that year that for fun he’d like to do medieval history so that’s what we would specialize in for A-levels. But he had an approach unlike that of most medievalists or most school-teachers. The first two books that he gave us to read were one about the Arabs in medieval history and Knowles’s book about the evolution of medieval thought. Of course, that had absolutely nothing to do with the A-level syllabus.

I got very interested in the Middle Ages. The first year of doing medieval history, before we had to worry about the exams, was wonderful (the second year, when we were told we’d better start preparing this and that in order to do well enough in our exams, was very boring). There was also a bit of philosophy put into it. We looked at Augustine and perhaps even a bit of Anselm, so I had this introduction to medieval philosophy.

But the general effect was to make me decide that I wanted to be a philosopher, without particularly thinking about the Middle Ages. So, although what my CV says is in a sense correct, it’s not the whole story by any means. I knew that philosophy as done in universities then, and even now, was very different from the philosophers whom I had read, but still the idea of philosophy really took me. It’s for that reason that I decided that I wanted to go to Cambridge rather than Oxford. My school sent lots of people to Oxford and Cambridge. Generally the idea was that in the humanities you’d aim for Oxford and in the sciences for Cambridge. But in Oxford you can’t do philosophy on its own, and I was a bit of an all-or-nothing person, so I liked the idea of the Cambridge philosophy course. I applied to Cambridge and was taken by Trinity [College].

I did philosophy for a term and was taught by Casimir Lewy, who was quite a famous figure in Cambridge, though probably not so much beyond that, and taught many of the best analytic philosophers of, I suppose, the last generation and to some extent mine. The one other person studying philosophy in my year at Trinity was Jeremy Butterfield, who ended up like me as a Senior Research Fellow at Trinity. Whereas Jeremy I think took a lot from Lewy’s teaching, I realized that analytic philosophy as done in Cambridge, and especially in the concentrated form that you got through Lewy, who was G. E. Moore’s pupil and follower, absolutely wasn’t for me. I think if I’d gone on doing philosophy, I could have done reasonably well, but I would have lost interest and certainly not become an academic. So, at the end of my first term, I changed subjects. In those days there were scholarship exams and I had done one the year before in English, so English was the obvious subject to change to.

But aside from the positive reason that I wanted to do philosophy, there was a negative reason why I hadn’t chosen to do English at Cambridge, namely that there was an enormous amount about studying English which I didn’t like. In particular, I really didn’t like the idea – and I came very strongly to feel this – of literary criticism. That was a bit of a pity because the English course was a course in literary criticism, so I was set against the course from the beginning.

One thing which perhaps had a big effect on me was that you had to do a preliminary exam in English after two terms. Having taken up most of my first term doing philosophy (and in the second term we did Shakespeare or seventeenth-century English or something like that), I had to make up the medieval part of that very quickly. I was supervised by a very bright young teacher whose interest was mainly in D. H. Lawrence but who was also quite interested in medieval things. I did a few essays on medieval literature for him, very much in my own way, not constrained by the Faculty. That was fine, and interesting. My salvation – and building on the interest in the Middle Ages that I already had from school – was to do a Part I course (the first two years) in English that was strongly medieval, including a new paper on what was called Insular Latin, Latin in the British Isles before 1066, borrowed from the Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic Tripos. Although I hadn’t done Latin at A-level, we’d done enough at school before then for my Latin to be quite good, so I was able to handle the Latin on that paper quite easily, though as it were I relearned my Latin by reading Aldhelm. I’m probably the only person who’s ever done that, and it’s amazing that it didn’t put me off Latin forever.

In Part II (the final year), I did do Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, but that was really so that I could do a general medieval course. I did some Anglo-Saxon but worked mainly on medieval Latin. Within medieval Latin there was a lot of philosophical or quasi-philosophical material: Boethius, Eriugena, Alan of Lille … This reflected the interests of Peter Dronke, then the University Lecturer in medieval Latin. For my [undergraduate] dissertation, I worked on the only philosopher that I could have been allowed to work on, John Scotus Eriugena, in the sense that, although he didn’t do any of his work in the British Isles, he came from Ireland. So, by my third year as an undergraduate, my philosophical interest had worked its way back and I was doing a lot of medieval philosophy.

I suppose it was natural to go on to the topic of your doctoral thesis, on philosophy, logic and theology in the Carolingian period. But how did you decide on graduate study in general, and which faculty did you do your thesis in?

The decision to do a doctorate was hardly a decision, because since I was about eight or nine I never conceived of myself as doing anything other than the academic. My father at one stage had different ideas. When we were talking about subjects to specialize in at school, he thought it would be good if I did maths and economics, among other things. He was in the business side of engineering; perhaps I might follow him in that or something of the sort. But my school said that they thought that economics was a very bad subject at A-level, and it would be silly for me to do maths if I didn’t really want to do so. Actually my father then changed his tune.

When I went to university, of course I didn’t know that I could go on to do research because you always fear that your results won’t be good enough, but certainly that was what I wanted to do. That’s probably part of the reason why I changed subjects. If I’d gone to university thinking there were all these different courses of life open to me, I might well have stuck with philosophy and developed other interests, but I so strongly wanted to do something academic that I wanted something which would occupy me completely.

My doctorate was in the Modern and Medieval Languages Faculty because that’s where Peter Dronke, the obvious supervisor, was, but it made then, and now still makes, hardly any difference what faculty you’re in for your doctorate. I came to know Peter Dronke very well; we lived within a quarter of a mile of each other for thirty-five years until he died, now three years ago, and I saw him very regularly. But I think I got much more from him later on than as his research student. I had, I would say, about an hour’s supervision altogether, maybe two hours’, in my time doing the PhD.

In a way he was a very good supervisor. I had spent my first year in France. I got a French government scholarship and was mainly looking at manuscripts. In the first supervision that I had with Peter Dronke, he was very critical of what I had written, in a thoroughly useful way. He showed me that I got myself burrowed down a hole with various rather obscure things to do with various manuscripts and got a bit lost in it. In the second supervision, when I’d done more, he was encouraging.

He wasn’t a historian of philosophy or a philosopher but a literary critic and a literary philologist; the main thing that he did was to put me in touch with people who could help me more, and he also supported me very much. When I was in Paris, I was put in touch with Edouard Jeauneau, who is – perhaps less on the philosophical side than the editorial side – the great Eriugena scholar of the twentieth century, perhaps of all time. He produced an extraordinary edition of Eriugena’s main work, the Periphyseon, which is the sort of thing that will last for hundreds of years, and knew an immense amount about the subject. Because I was in Paris with not all that much else to do, and he was busy with his work but not much else, I saw him for hours and hours, which was very useful.

Though I was reading lots of philosophy from the remote past, my philosophical training as such was limited to the one term I had in the Philosophy Faculty before I changed. Jeauneau himself wasn’t what we would think of as a philosopher, but a medievalist, philologist and editor of manuscripts interested in philosophical questions. At that stage of my work, there was therefore tremendous emphasis on the more technical medieval aspects; I spent most of that first year in the manuscripts room in the Bibliothèque nationale looking in detail at lots of early medieval manuscripts. There was no explicit training offered in Cambridge in palaeography as there is now; I followed bits of courses in France, but it was mainly a matter of picking it up as I looked at manuscripts and of Jeauneau, a very good palaeographer, helping me.

I finished my thesis after two years and submitted it as a fellowship dissertation for Trinity. I didn’t change it much after that, although I couldn’t submit it for another year because you couldn’t submit until the end of your third year.

Although you hadn’t much formal training in philosophy, in your subsequent work you do often relate the philosophers you study to contemporary philosophy. Have you largely been self-educated in contemporary analytical philosophy?

I started off by being trained in this historically, philologically based approach to medieval culture, concentrating on philosophy because that’s what interested me, but not particularly taught by philosophers. Insofar as I was reading philosophers and people who talk about philosophy, they were mostly French ones. Then I put in for the research fellowship in Trinity. That was the one moment of my life when I seriously thought of not being an academic, because I got very bored with the work I was doing. I’m really not a born philologist or manuscript editor. I was doing a lot of it and thought: ‘this is the most terribly boring occupation; I won’t put in for any other fellowships, but I will put in for a Trinity fellowship; I don’t expect to get it, but at least it means I’ll get the work done.’ I was planning to spend the next year mainly doing preparatory work to train to be a barrister, but, to my surprise, I got the Trinity fellowship.

At first, I thought that it only put my plans on hold because I would never get a job doing medieval philosophy – nobody wanted that. But I had four years and a quite interesting project on medieval aesthetics. Also, that year and the year before, because I’d done an English degree, people asked me to supervise [undergraduates] in English, so I was supervising lots of people in all sorts of subjects I’d never studied; I was reading the authors at the same time as the undergraduates. Then, in my first year as a research fellow, while giving a supervision, I suddenly got a call from the Senior Tutor. He said, ‘Hello, I just wanted to call you because we’ve decided to offer you a college teaching fellowship in English, but I just thought I’d check with you that you wanted it before we finalize it.’ This was something I had absolutely no idea of. I thought, this is quite nice, being offered what was in principle a job for life, so I said, ‘Yes, I think I would like it. Thank you very much.’ And then I went on with the supervision.

The college would have delayed the start of the teaching fellowship to let me take my full research fellowship, but I decided I wanted to get into teaching English. The next year, therefore, I started as a college fellow teaching English, doing lots of supervisions. There was not necessarily any university lecturing, though in fact I did do a bit.

You might think that that’s a turn further away from philosophy, but two things happened. One was that I was very keen, despite the teaching I was doing, that my research remained in medieval philosophy. A publisher from Routledge, visiting Trinity, asked to talk to the new research fellows, and had a chat with me. I said that it would be interesting to write a general book on early medieval philosophy, because there wasn’t anything. He suggested that I write one. So I did that, which meant that I had to expand properly into the twelfth century, again really just by reading things. Then they wanted a sequel, which meant that I had to do more reading, going into the later Middle Ages.

The other thing was that, as I taught English, on the one hand the differences between my approach and what the Faculty would want, especially for medieval English, became more and more obvious, on the other there were quite a lot of places in the English Tripos in Cambridge where you could do philosophy. You could do a paper called ‘English Moralists’, which starts with Socrates and includes such other English figures as Plato and Kant and could be regarded as a course in moral philosophy. There was a paper about the history and theory of literary criticism, which you could think of as aesthetics. And everybody had to do Tragedy, in which they could be asked to think about the theory of tragedy, Aristotle on tragedy, and so on. So I found I was teaching a lot of philosophy or history of philosophy (not particularly medieval, though some medieval).

There was still nothing much to do with analytic philosophy. That came later. It would have been very strange for anybody in my time to have got into medieval philosophy through analytic philosophy. Even now, it is not so usual, but happens more. In those days, medieval philosophy in the UK was very much studied as part of history, and people working on medieval philosophy tended not to have links with philosophy faculties, with some exceptions. A big exception was Anthony Kenny, who had strong medieval interests because he had started off training to be a priest. He was involved with the first generation of people who tried to bring analytical interests to the study of medieval philosophy.

In the early 90s, Kenny and Michael Frede managed to get a job opened up at Oxford in medieval philosophy. This was the job that Minio-Paluello, the famous editor of the Latin Aristotle, had after the war (but I don’t think he did much teaching). The job had then been frozen, and everybody said that it would always be frozen, but Kenny and Frede, who in different ways both thought that medieval philosophy should be studied, managed to get it unfrozen and transferred to a University Lecturership attached to All Souls, so there wasn’t a problem about a college having to justify it by having enough undergraduate teaching. This was advertised as a Lecturership in medieval philosophy or ancient philosophy, because the ancient philosophers thought that there wouldn’t be good enough applicants in medieval philosophy, but they – the people behind the job, such as Kenny and Frede – were hoping to find someone in medieval philosophy. Although I loved being at Trinity, I also thought my job was very unsatisfactory because I had to spend my time supervising in English, and there seemed no chance of getting a University post in Cambridge because I wasn’t an English person for people in English, I wasn’t a historian for people in History, I wasn’t a philosopher for people in Philosophy. So I thought this job was a marvellous opportunity and put in for it. I’d just about finished a book about Abelard (which eventually came out in a rather different version in 1997), so I had that to present. Although one never presumes on getting a job, I thought I had a very good chance because I couldn’t think of other people working at that level on medieval philosophy in the UK.

I went to an interview which was absolutely horrible, but also a big turning point. Anthony Kenny had been deputed to look at my book and ask me the questions. The first thing he asked was, ‘Which term of Frege’s would you use to translate what Abelard means by significatio?’ That was a question which just never entered my head. I’d read ‘On Sense and Reference’ more than twenty years before that, when I was preparing to come to Cambridge to study philosophy. I wracked my mind and gave some very bad answer. Things went from bad to worse in that interview. But what I realized, even immediately after the interview, was that they were looking for somebody completely different from me, somebody who had the training of an analytic philosopher but worked on the Middle Ages. (And they indeed made a splendid appointment, who fitted that description, but also had a remarkably wide philological training and breadth of interest in medieval thought, in the person of Dominik Perler.)

At about the same time, I also became aware of the book edited by Kenny, Pinborg and, especially, Kretzmann, The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, which was like a manifesto of the analytical approach to medieval philosophy, in which about a third of the whole book is occupied by logic and theology is very much pushed out to the edges.

I rather self-consciously thought that this was something I needed to know about. I started to try to teach myself about contemporary philosophy, even going to some of the undergraduate lectures at Cambridge. I was sometimes quite surprised by them. There was, I remember, a lecture on modality, where the lecturer began by saying, ‘Modality has a very long history. It goes back to as early as the 1950s.’

So I had two periods of self-education. One was in history of philosophy broadly, mainly for teaching English students. The second was in trying to learn something about analytic philosophy in the period after the disastrous interview, but also when I realized that the subject was now being seen in a very different way from how it had been by the generation of my mentors.

Also, I got to know people like Chris Martin (who works on medieval logic and has done some of the best things on Abelard’s logic), Peter King and a whole crowd of people with analytic training who worked on medieval philosophy. Especially important for me because of his conversation, advice and encouragement was the late Simo Knuuttila, as a result of whom I had a long-lasting connection with Finland. For different reasons, I got very much to know the people working on medieval philosophy in Paris. I ended up being regarded by people like Chris Martin and Peter King as very historical and not analytic and by the French people as extremely English and analytic.

Had you had contact with Continental philosophy? Did you, for example, frequent any philosophical lectures in Paris? And are there significant distinctive national traditions in the study of medieval philosophy?

In my original period in Paris, I went to lots of lectures, but they were on medieval subjects, so people like Courcelle, a long way away from what we think of as Continental philosophy. I didn’t go to any of the first-order philosophers in Paris.

In the period from my late 40s onwards, I had very close contacts with Paris. There was a year when Ruedi Imbach, the professor of medieval philosophy at the Sorbonne (Paris–IV), was on leave and got me to do his teaching. I didn’t live in Paris but was going over almost every week, doing teaching and doctoral examining. But there doesn’t seem to be much connexion between what people in the UK and the US study as ‘continental philosophy’ and what at least that group of people were doing. In general, I think most people studying philosophy in Paris would be studying some sort of history of philosophy, though often done very unhistorically.

There have been distinctive national traditions in studying medieval philosophy, but to a considerable extent they’re breaking down. The English tradition – not very strong before the 70s and 80s – was philological and historical and pretty non-philosophical. The French approach was much more philosophical, though often also strongly philologically based. Some of the people working on medieval philosophy in France did get very concerned by Heidegger and Foucault. One of the most important exponents of medieval philosophy in the French tradition, Alain de Libera, is very distinctively French and untranslatable: people have tried to translate his work into other languages and largely failed. Others were less flamboyant than de Libera and more combining philological work with the sort of philosophy that remained close to the text and was almost summary-like; it was a bit like this in Italy too. There was a German approach that could – at least with someone like Eriugena, who lends himself to this – be quite strongly linked to interests in German idealism. But these different approaches are collapsing into a standard analytic, or perhaps you might say sub-analytic, approach, as people on the continent want to be analytic, write in English and want to be published by the English-language, analytic-leaning journals.

Much of your work has been on medieval philosophy from before the thirteenth century, particularly Abelard and Boethius. Why did you choose these two figures? Has it anything to do with both having sometimes been seen as thinkers with an uneasy relationship with religious conformity?

That wouldn’t really apply to Boethius, although some people have said that. It would apply to Eriugena – Boethius, Eriugena and Abelard are probably the three big people I worked on. But I’ve also been very interested in Anselm and nobody thinks he has a difficult relationship with religious conformity. Still, just thinking of other people who also particularly interested me, I must have a bit of a special interest in thinkers with a difficult relationship with religious conformity. Pomponazzi is a good case for this, or Maimonides, a pillar of Jewish orthodoxy but also a very controversial figure, as well as al-Farabi, Avicenna and Averroes. It may be that a slightly uneasy relationship is just very widespread and that with most interesting thinkers questions, justly or not, questions will arise about their relationship with the religion of their time. People forget that shortly after the death of Aquinas his main doctrines came within an ace of being condemned; he was working pretty much on the edge.

Why the early period? I started there with Eriugena (a very odd place to start) for completely contingent reasons to do with my undergraduate studies. Having started with the ninth and tenth centuries, it seemed natural, and fitted well into my training, to move on to the twelfth. I also thought then that if one wanted to work properly on the thirteenth century, one would have to learn Arabic. I wasn’t even thinking of reading the philosophers who wrote in Arabic for their own sake, but just because they were such an important influence on the thirteenth-century Latin philosophers. Actually, if all you’re interested in is the influence of writing in Arabic on the thirteenth-century Latin philosophers, you can do just as well, or perhaps better, to read the Latin versions in which they themselves read these people, so that probably wasn’t a good reason. But I would have had to do an enormous amount of extra learning to work in detail on those authors. More recently, as well as writing in more general books about later medieval philosophy, I have done some articles on Scotus and people like that – I felt more confident in doing it – and developed an interest in Arabic philosophy for its own sake.

I also thought there was a lot to be done in the early Middle Ages. Altogether, medieval philosophy is quite an under-researched field, except perhaps for Aquinas, but in particular there’s less done on the early Middle Ages. You feel it’s easier to say something interesting which people haven’t said before. It’s not out of some view that that’s the most interesting period in the history of philosophy; I just think it’s a lot less uninteresting than its neglect might lead one to imagine.

You’ve advocated a reprioritization of the history of Western philosophy, in particular a long Middle Ages from about 200 to about 1700, consisting of four traditions, Latin, Arabic, Jewish and Greek, with ancient Greek philosophy, particularly as mediated through Neoplatonism, as their common heritage. Could you briefly make the case for it for our readers’ benefit?

You have to start with what you mean by period divisions and what their value is. The standard belief that you’ll find in lots of histories of medieval philosophy is that period divisions are purely arbitrary: let’s say 500 to 1500, not because we think that those figures mean anything, but just because you need some way of dividing labour. I think that’s silly, because an enormous amount hinges on the period divisions you make. They determine whom you mix with – with medievalists or with ancient or modern people? – and how you see the material within the divisions that you’ve put down. To put down 500 and 1500 and to say that it’s purely arbitrary, but then to write a book that is limited to those divisions and therefore takes a certain shape, seems to me short-sighted.

A reason for holding that period divisions should be arbitrary is the idea that otherwise we go into some sort of Hegelianism, that there are different periods each marked by its period character, so that there is something medieval about medieval philosophy, which is supposed to penetrate the whole of culture and society. I don’t think we have to accept that idea. When I propose this re-periodization, it’s in terms of what I call ‘shallow period divisions’. Shallow period divisions are only proposed with regard to one area of work. So, these are divisions in the history of philosophy; I’m not saying they’d be good divisions in, say, literary history or economic history. Also, they’re put forward as one way of doing it for which there’s a justification, but there may be justifications for other ways of doing it. And they admit of overlap. When I say I begin in 200, I’m not trying to stop historians of ancient philosophy from taking on their discussions to 600. The overlap is very useful.

Why do I choose this beginning and this ending (but I have to correct you slightly on the ending)? It’s roughly with Plotinus that I begin because the Platonic schools of late antiquity, and especially the version of Aristotle that they give, are the basis of the four traditions. This heritage is rather directly passed on to the Greeks, perhaps even more directly to Arabic philosophy, through Arabic philosophy to Jewish philosophy, with it coming to Latin philosophy in dribs and drabs but eventually being very important. There were a lot of interactions between these traditions; the translation of Arabic works into Latin mainly in the twelfth century is one of the best known, but there were also, for instance, translations from Latin into Hebrew, Greek into Latin, Latin into Greek.

Why go on so late? When I talk about 1700, I’m thinking of the Latin Christian tradition and the Jewish tradition which has become so strongly connected with it. I think of about 1700 partly because of one figure, Leibniz, who really seems to call for being seen as somebody who sums up and looks back to all this earlier tradition, which he’s so conscious of, but also because what sustained this tradition in the Latin world were the universities (though there was also a lot of philosophy going on outside the universities, which is one of my new interests). The university tradition based on Aristotle goes on through the seventeenth century; while it starts to change, and by the end of the century really has changed, the changes take their time. The Greek tradition, one might say, largely, though not entirely, stops with the fall of Constantinople. In the Arabic tradition, there’s no reason to stop in 1700. We see people continuing this tradition of philosophy with its Aristotelian and Platonic roots right up to Gelenbevi in the late eighteenth century in Ottoman Turkey. The Arabic version of Aristotelian logic is still found in a very sophisticated way in some nineteenth-century work.

I would now want to modify my single tree with four branches because that does oversimplify. It’s not as if all Arabic philosophy, for instance, comes from the heritage of the Platonic schools, because there’s the very important tradition of kalām, which has ancient elements but is also an indigenous development, which merges with the falsafa tradition based on the Greeks.

You can make a good case for practical reasons for centring on the unity of the four traditions and, if you want, calling them Western philosophy. I don’t hang much on the word ‘Western’, but it’s perhaps worthwhile using it because of the way in which what people mean by ‘Western’ is questioned when you say that perhaps the greatest exponent of Western philosophy in the whole of the long Middle Ages was Avicenna, who was born in present-day Uzbekistan, nearer to Beijing than to Rome.

There’s also perhaps more openness than I gave credit to. For example, in the early period in Arabic philosophy, al-Biruni goes to India, learns Sanskrit, translates Sanskrit philosophy into Arabic and makes comparisons between Sanskrit philosophy and ancient Greek philosophy. By the seventeenth century, people are getting very interested in Chinese philosophy. In talking about this broad and long Middle Ages, one doesn’t want to cut it off from philosophy in other parts of the world; still, there are much stronger and more direct connexions within these four, as I call them, Western traditions than between them and other traditions.

Precisely because periodization has practical functions like determining what literature one keeps up with or what conferences one goes to, is there a risk that 200 to 1700 is unrealistically long?

I really do think that one should have the demand that philosophers read a lot through lots of periods. Most of the people who work on the long Middle Ages also read quite a bit of more ancient philosophy; you can’t really start reading ancient philosophy with Plotinus because you have to know your Plato and Aristotle. The approach needs to be via what’s interesting philosophically now, but this is wider than just what interests analytic philosophers now. You need both to read what’s going on in philosophy now and, so that you’re not restricted by the narrowness of analytic philosophy, to have a good knowledge of the period between the late end of even my long Middle Ages and now.

One thing that at least the Cambridge philosophy curriculum emphatically doesn’t do is to get people to read a lot of philosophy. You’re not at all likely, after an undergraduate degree in Cambridge, and perhaps not much even later on, to have read what everybody would recognize as the main philosophical classics, to say nothing about wider reading, or even to have read a book that gives a good account of them; you’re likely to be ignorant of most of what has been thought that people would count generally as philosophy, and that’s a bit strange. I think in English, although they are very much wanting to expand the canon and question the great authors, they do still have the idea – they may be giving it up – that you should be familiar with the main run of English literature, that if you don’t come out of your degree knowing something about most of, say, Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton and George Eliot and Wordsworth and Keats, there would be something missing. There’s no sense of that in philosophy, and that seems a pity.

Medieval philosophy is particularly demanding of technical skills. There are those to do with studying manuscripts: palaeography, textual criticism and so on. It is also – especially if conceived of as including Islamic, Jewish and Greek philosophy – demanding of linguistic skills. Ideally a scholar would have not just the once-standard equipment of Latin, English, French, German, Italian and perhaps ancient Greek, but also Arabic and perhaps Hebrew. At a time when even standards of Latin seem to be declining, are you optimistic about the future of the study of medieval philosophy?

The technical skills are a problem. It can’t be taken for granted, as it used to be in the UK, that people doing research work in the humanities would have Latin and even perhaps some Greek. But it wasn’t taken for granted in the US, which led to some places there, good places, having very good schemes for teaching people languages. That I think is the way to go. It’s a great pity that universities in the UK don’t seem to have adjusted to that, because I think you always will get people who will rise to the challenge if they’re provided with the teaching that they need, even if they don’t have these languages at the start.

It’s probably worth saying that one way in which people in the future might be able to lighten their load – though I think with great loss to themselves – is, if they’re English speakers, not to know so much of the other modern European languages, which, alas, are becoming much less important for scholarship (though of course there would be older scholarship that they wouldn’t be able to read).

I don’t think the language problem need be decisive. It’s much better to know the language of the text that you’re working on, and anybody making a scholarly career in medieval philosophy should know at least one of the languages concerned. Ideally they would have Latin, Greek, Arabic and Hebrew. But that’s an ideal, and insofar as they don’t live up to it, and certainly I don’t, they can make that up by using translations where they’re available, being willing to consult people about particular words, and so on. It’s much better to open yourself up to the width of the subject even if that means compromising, rather than saying, the only language I know is Latin, so I’m not going to read Avicenna (except perhaps a Latin version), because that would mean reading him through a translation. That’s a bit silly. One thing I realized, having learned some Arabic but not really enough, is that, while even if I learned more Arabic I wouldn’t be able to pit my judgement about what an Arabic sentence meant against an expert Arabist’s, even now I probably could go to an Arabist and have a discussion about some translation that seems to me wrong, and the Arabist could explain to me why the passage has to be read in this way or perhaps I could persuade him it shouldn’t be read in this way.

You can do a lot without being a supreme master of all these languages, which almost nobody is ever going to be. Indeed, very few people are going to be a supreme master even of one of them. When I did a joint edition of Abelard’s Collationes with a friend, alas dead now for a while, Giovanni Orlandi, who was a philologist of medieval Latin, I realized that, although I think of medieval Latin as my language, his knowledge of the language was far more than I could ever aspire to; he could see nuances and make points that I would never realize. The important thing is to realize one’s limitations and be willing to consult people who are better.

In recent years, you’ve also been Honorary Professor of Medieval Philosophy in the University of Cambridge, and you’ve convened an undergraduate paper on philosophy in the long Middle Ages. What has been your relationship over the years with the Philosophy Faculty at Cambridge, and how has the place of medieval philosophy in the Philosophy Faculty developed over the years?

My relations with the Philosophy Faculty have been rather good. There was a period before I became a Senior Research Fellow at Trinity, when I was still having to do a lot of teaching, when the college very kindly opened up the sort of teaching I could do, allowing me to do some teaching for the University. It was also then that I was becoming interested in analytic philosophy, so I asked the Philosophy Faculty whether I could start a course in medieval philosophy for them. They said, we’ve asked the students whether they would be interested in medieval philosophy and they all said no. But Susan James suggested to me to do something on seventeenth-century philosophers but to bring in the Middle Ages in doing so, which would get me an audience. This was very good advice both for getting an audience in philosophy and educationally for me. I suppose my long Middle Ages comes from doing work for that teaching.

I became a bit involved in Philosophy Faculty discussions. When they asked about possible texts for their [undergraduate] paper on early modern philosophy, I suggested expanding it to include as a possibility some medieval text, for which I’d be willing to lecture. To my immense surprise, they agreed – not at all, they said, because they thought it’s a bad thing to have a gap in the history of philosophy, but because they thought some of the medieval philosophers were quite interesting. I started by giving lectures for an essay in a paper; after I got the Senior Research Fellowship at Trinity, I had the idea for a paper called ‘Philosophy in the Long Middle Ages’, and both the philosophers and people in the Divinity Faculty were interested. Eventually the paper was accepted, shared between Divinity and Philosophy, though more students have tended to do it from Philosophy. This year there are about fourteen or fifteen candidates, which is quite big for a Part II specialized subject.

At the moment, I’m quite short-term optimistic for medieval philosophy in Cambridge. There’s this paper, which I intend to go on teaching at least for a bit. There’s a big European-funded project, centred on Arabic and Jewish logic, which my colleague Tony Street is involved with in the Divinity Faculty and is bringing to Cambridge a set of very talented post-docs in medieval philosophy. My best ever research student is somebody called Suf Amichay, who works on Latin, Arabic and Hebrew philosophy in the Middle Ages and is a research fellow at Trinity Hall; one hopes that this is going to be some way of keeping her in Cambridge. At the moment things are fine, but it’s very fragile because there’s no institutional basis – there’s no job in medieval philosophy.

A final question on behalf of a friend: which do you think is the most undeservedly understudied medieval philosophical work?

There’s so much Arabic material from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that is just beginning to be studied. For instance, people are starting to realize that Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī in the twelfth century is a really major figure, who also had a vast output. Absolutely everything is understudied and hardly anything has been translated.

In the Latin tradition, an obvious thing to point to, though its being understudied is not completely undeserved, would be Bradwardine’s De causa dei. Bradwardine is a complex and very interesting early fourteenth-century thinker. The work is very long and often written in much more difficult Latin than most medieval Latin philosophy; I’ve read bits of it but certainly not all. But I think there’s a lot of important material there. There was an edition in the seventeenth century, but it hasn’t been fully re-edited, let alone translated, since then.

John Marenbon is a Senior Research Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge and Honorary Professor of Medieval Philosophy Emeritus in the University of Cambridge. His books include Pagans and Philosophers: The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz (2015), Abelard in Four Dimensions: A Twelfth-Century Philosopher in His Context and Ours (2013) and Medieval Philosophy: An Historical and Philosophical Introduction (2007). E. E. Sheng is a doctoral student in Philosophy at Merton College, Oxford.