Arts & Sciences

Newsletter
Fall 1995 Vol. 17 No. 1

In Praise of Norman Kretzmann

Scott MacDonald

Kretzmann's earliest investigations in medieval logic and philosophy of language convinced him that the received view of the nature of medieval philosophy was badly mistaken. First in his work in those areas and soon afterward in his groundbreaking studies in natural philosophy -- on the concepts of infinity, continuity, and change -- Kretzmann presented compelling evidence that the vast corpus of philosophical texts from the millennium separating the Renaissance from late antiquity is a rich repository of sophisticated reflection on a wide range of issues centrally important to twentieth-century philosophy. His pioneering labors and the enthusiasm they generated among philosophers and scholars inspired what has now grown into a full-scale international movement aimed at bringing scholarship in medieval philosophy together with the methods and insights of contemporary philosophy. The landmark Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, published in 1982 -- a 1,000-page volume involving the work of forty -one scholars from ten different countries, designed and coordinated by Kretzmann as principal editor -- is a concrete expression of the vision of his scholarship and a manifestation of its fruitfulness.

In recent years Kretzmann has increasingly turned his attention to the subject matter for which medieval philosophy has always been justly famous, namely, philosophical theology. His influential elaboration and defence of the conception of God as an absolutely perfect being not only draws on the detailed development of that conception by medieval philosophical theologians, but also shares with them a commitment to bringing the best philosophical resources and the highest standards of intellectual rigor to bear on the discussion of religion. His forthcoming book Philosophy From the Top Down explores Thomas Aquinas's attempt to build a systematic philosophical account of reality starting from the elements provided by natural theology. The book is based on Kretzmann's Wilde Lectures in Natural and Comparative Religion, delivered at Oxford in 1994.

Those of us fortunate enough to have taken Kretzmann's courses at Cornell -- even those of us who have gone on to work professionally in the academic fields that his research has shaped -- will always think of him as the tireless and extraordinarily generous teacher who made philosophy happen not just in his writings but also in our classrooms and in our lives. The understanding of the philosophical enterprise that motivates his research also drives his everyday dealings with his students: he views philoso phy as essentially involving reason-governed interchange between fellow inquirers. Kretzmann sees both his scholarly research and his teaching as opportunities for this sort of interchange: in the one case his fellow inquirers are other philosophers, living or dead, and in the other they are his students. I once heard him explain to a large undergraduate class in his course Reason and Religion that Augustine's, Anselm's, and Aquinas's primary philosophical tool was human intellect and that, since each memb er of the class possessed precisely the same tool, he could see no reason why each of them shouldn't be capable of understanding and criticizing the views of the great philosophers of the past and thereby contributing to the ongoing development of the intellectual project they themselves were committed to.

In a 1983 graduate seminar on Aquinas that I attended, Kretzmann began the seminar with a presentation on the role of reason in theological inquiry. He concluded the formal presentation with what we all recognized as both an invitation and a challenge: "I am prepared to defend the views I have just sketched." The challenge did not go unmet; in fact the discussion from that first meeting spilled over into the week preceding the second seminar meeting. Informal coffeeroom debate and circulating written objec tions and rejoinders became the pattern for what was, in essence, a sub-seminar running parallel to the formal meetings that explored in detail issues raised but not exhausted in the formal presentations. Each of the dozen or so graduate students in the seminar knew that his or her views would be taken with absolute seriousness and subjected to unflinching scrutiny. We felt as though we had a genuine stake in a project on the front lines of philosophical scholarship, and we revelled in the fact that we wer e really doing philosophy and not merely learning about it or watching it being done. We had become fellow inquirers with Kretzmann; we argued with him and with each other about issues worth taking seriously -- about the existence of God, the nature of evil, the analysis of causation, necessity, and freedom. Material from that seminar found its way into half a dozen doctoral dissertations (some of them in areas other than medieval philosophy) and gave rise to three or four published articles (not counting Kretzmann's own work that grew out of the seminar).

Stories essentially like this could be told for many of Kretzmann's courses. It was therefore no surprise to any of his students when, in 1992, the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools named him the first recipient of its Graduate Faculty Teaching Award.

The richness and vitality of the intellectual life that has grown up around him in his classrooms, in his department, and in the academic fields to which he has contributed are testimony to the intoxicating, irresistible appeal philosophy has had in Kretzmann's hands.