The Middle Ages is not only the longest period of philosophical development in the West,
but also one of the richest and more complex. Its roots go back to ancient philosophy and
we are still living with some of its consequences today. Indeed, a very large part of our philosophical
vocabulary, whether in English, Spanish, or any other western European language,
was developed in the Middle Ages, and most of the philosophical problems about which we
still worry were first formulated in the version in which we know them in this period. The
historical importance of the Middle Ages and its influence in the subsequent history of
western thought is difficult to overestimate.
In spite of this, however, the study of the philosophy of the Middle Ages was, until
relatively recently, rare outside Roman Catholic contexts. Secular universities, and even
Christian colleges from denominations other than Roman Catholicism, rarely offered
courses in medieval philosophy, and their faculty seldom did research in the field. The
medieval period was mentioned in two kinds of courses: in history of philosophy sequences,
the Middle Ages was usually appended to the ancient period, as an afterthought, and was
generally given little emphasis; in courses in the philosophy of religion, where arguments
for the existence of God were examined, mention was usually made of Anselm’s so-called
ontological argument and Aquinas’s “five ways.”