"One of the many merits of this book is that it places Western scholasticism in its setting--and this both in space and in time. Plotinus lives on, Aristotle comes back to life again, Averroes breaks in--but this is not the right word, for this Muslim philosopher and his Western Christian disciples are inmates of the same house. Professor Knowles brings out the unity of Islamic and Western Christian culture. Medieval Islam and Western Christendom had a common mental heritage of Jewish (...) religion and Greek philosophy; both were stimulated intellectually by a tension between the Judaic and the Hellenic pole of their thought; and the same stimulus led thinkers in both provinces of this Judaistic-Hellenistic Christian-Muslim world to interest themselves in the same problems."--In The Observer (London). (shrink)