The main peculiarities of the Mediaeval Philosophy:

1. Theocentricism, meaning that any problem in philosophy including the problem of man is solved via God.

2. Theodicy solves the contradiction between the idea of God as Absolute Good and the existence of Evil in the world.

3. Providentialism (from Geek “foresigh”) means that everything is developing according to God’s purport and is supposed to achieve it at last.

4 Personalism, meaning that God is the Absolute Personality and derivative from him is the personality of man, who is able to cognise God only through deep and mystic communication of persolalities, by means of prayer, confession and penance.

The history of the Mediaeval philosophy can be divided into 3 periods: Patristics with Apologetics, Early Scholasticism and the Late Scholasticism.

These periods are closely connected with the ways of philosophisizingof religious philosophers. During the whole period it was the interpretation and commentaries of Holy Scripture. As the whole truth is contained in the Byble, everybody should learn this devine knowledge. But this knowledge was symbolic, mysterions and figurative, so the aim of philosophers was to interprete, explicate, clear out the Holy Writ. This process had three stages:

1. When ethymological analysis was attemted;

2. When conceptual analysis was attempted;

3. When the text of Holy Writ became the base for the further development of philosophical ideas by religious philosophers themselves.

ThemainproblemsinvestigatedintheMediaevalperiodwereconcerned:

1) The nature of the universals. During the whole Mediaeval period there was a hot discussion between realism and nominalism attemping to solve this problem.

2) Correlation of will and coscionsness.

3) The problem of free will, the choice between good and evil.

4) Correlation of soul and body (Origen: man is spirit, which is given by God and directed to good and truth;soul is of dual nature: high and low (passions);body manifests nature. So evil comes from abuse(breach) of freedom. The Mediaeval asceticism was not to restrain the nature(body) but to bring up flesh to bendl it to the spiritual grounds.

5) Correlation of nature and blessings.

6) Correlation of faith, consciousness and will.

Scholasticism is a Medieval school of philosophy (or, perhaps more accurately, a method of learning) taught by theacademics of medieval universities and cathedrals in the period from the 12th to 16th Century. It combined Logic, Metaphysicsand semantics into one discipline, and is generally recognised to have developed our understanding of Logic significantly.

There are perhaps six main characteristics of Scholasticism:

• An acceptance of the prevailing Catholic orthodoxy.

• Within this orthodoxy, an acceptance of Aristotle as a greater thinker than Plato.

• The recognition that Aristotle and Plato disagreed about the notion of universals, and that this was a vital question to resolve.

• Giving prominence to dialectical thinking and syllogistic reasoning.

• An acceptance of the distinction between "natural" and "revealed" theology.

• A tendency to dispute everything at great length and in minute detail, often involving word-play.