Scholasticism

thumb|Scholasticism Scholasticism is a medieval European philosophical movement or methodology that was the predominant education in Europe from about 1100 to 1700. It is known for employing logically precise analyses toward the goal of reconciling classical philosophy (particularly Aristotelian logic) and Catholic Christianity. Saint Thomas Aquinas was its most prominent philosopher and theologian. Quotes about A The man who no longer expects miraculous changes either from a revolution or from an economic plan is not obliged to resign himself to the unjustifiable. It is because he likes individual human beings, participates in communities, and respects the truth, that he refuses to surrender his soul to an abstract ideal of humanity, a tyrannical party, and an absurd scholasticism. . . . If tolerance is born of doubt, let us teach everyone to doubt all the models and utopias, to challenge all the prophets of redemption and the heralds of catastrophe. If they can abolish fanaticism, let us pray for the advent of the sceptics. Raymond Aron, The Opium of Intellectuals (1955) B Nothing is more amusing than seeing how surely schoolchildren want to impose limits on their knowledge of beasts. According to them, beasts know only individual and material objects and seek exclusively the useful and the pleasant; they cannot reflect on their feelings and desires or draw conclusions from one thing to another. It would be said that they have searched the faculties and acts of the soul of beasts with better success than the most expert anatomists have done in the entrails of dogs. Their fearfulness is so great, that if even by chance they had found the truth, they would be unworthy of praise and even justification. Pierre Bayle, Dizionario storico-critico, vol. I , edited by Gianfranco Cantelli, Laterza, Bari, 1976, Rorario, pp. 167-168. Modern economics is “sick”. Economics has increasingly become an intellectual game played for its own sake and not for its practical consequences. Economists have gradually converted the subject into a sort of social mathematics in which analytical rigor as understood in math departments is everything and empirical relevance (as understood in physics departments) is nothing. If a topic cannot be tackled by formal modelling, it is simply consigned to the intellectual underworld. To pick up a copy of American Economic Review or Economic Journal, not to mention Econometrica or Review of Economic Studies these days is to wonder whether one has landed on a strange planet in which tedium is the deliberate objective of professional publication. Economics was condemned a century ago as “the dismal science”, but the dismal science of yesterday was a lot less dismal than the soporific scholasticism of today. Mark Blaug, "Ugly currents in modern economics" (1997) The distinctive feature of medieval philosophy, which has its culmination in scholasticism, is the effort to demonstrate with reason a set of metaphysical doctrines suitable for connecting, as far as possible, Hellenic philosophy of nature and Christian theology. While Greek philosophy had started from the idea of a nature entirely penetrated by the divine and had fallen following the dissociation of these two principles, scholasticism, according to which the divine is essentially infinite personality and perfection, initially radically separates God and nature and does not accord the latter anything other than the attributes indispensable to a contingent existence. Then nothing prevents us from conceiving perfect divine spirituality as coexisting with imperfect nature. Transcendent of things, God is not touched by their imperfection. And the very imperfection of nature provides reason with the starting point of the reasonings by which it establishes the philosophical truths involved in supernatural truths. Thus you reconciled the conditions of a natural philosophy with those of a religious philosophy. Émile Boutroux, La natura e lo spirito, translation into Italian by G. Papini, Carabba Editore, Lanciano, 1920., La scolastica, pp. 10-11. C By contrast, Galileo, the other legendary scientific figure of the era, not only published the most compelling critique of Aristotelian scholasticism in his Dialogues on the Two Chief World Systems, but in the process turned the issue of the epistemic authority of theology versus the epistemic authority of empirical science into a hallmark of modern times. Although Newton clearly sympathized with Galileo, he wrote virtually nothing critical of the Aristotelian tradition in philosophy, and the immense effort he devoted to theology was aimed not at challenging its epistemic authority, but largely at putting it on a firmer footing. Newton made no direct contributions to philosophy of a similar magnitude. Indeed, from his extant writings alone Newton has more claim to being a major theologian than a major philosopher. I. Bernard Cohen, The Triumph of Numbers: How Counting Shaped Modern Life (2005), p. 1. The greatest of all (the opponents of Scholasticism) was Bruno, who, despising the aridity of scholastic philosophy, devoted himself to following the Eleatics and the Neoplatonists of Alexandria. – For him there exists nothing but the One, an indeterminate being, a material and formal principle of all things, the soul and intelligence of everything. His will is necessary to produce sino ab eterno, because it would be impossible to pass from a state of eternal infertility to the opposite state; and therefore the world is eternal, essentially identical with God himself, being one thing natura naturans and natura naturata. (Vol. I, chap. V, p. 73) Simone Corleo, Filosofia universale, vol. I, Officio tipografico Lo Bianco, Palermo, 1860. D Scholasticism was the last form of Christian philosophy in the Middle Ages, and it taught us by its example how inconclusive and pernicious it was in knowing the division of reason into natural and supernatural and the attributions assigned to them. Since, although they wanted to, the philosophers and theologians of the school were never allowed to establish the union of philosophy and theology with good and lasting agreements; although they abounded in ingenuity and knowledge of the subjects to be agreed upon. Saverio Fausto De Dominicis, Galilei e Kant o l'esperienza e la critica nella filosofia moderna, Nicola Zanichelli, Bologna, 1874 (incipit). Windelband, the historian of philosophy, in his essay on the meaning of philosophy (Was ist Philosophie? in the first volume of his Präludien) tells us that "the history of the word 'philosophy' is the history of the cultural significance of science." He continues: "When scientific thought attains an independent existence as a desire for knowledge, it takes the name of philosophy; when subsequently knowledge as a whole divides into its various branches, philosophy is the general knowledge of the world that embraces all other knowledge. As soon as scientific thought stoops again to becoming a means to ethics or religious contemplation, philosophy is transformed into an art of life or into a formulation of religious beliefs. And when afterwards the scientific life regains its liberty, philosophy acquires once again its character as an independent knowledge of the world, and in so far as it abandons the attempt to solve this problem, it is changed into a theory of knowledge itself." Here you have a brief recapitulation of the history of philosophy from Thales to Kant, including the medieval scholasticism upon which it endeavored to establish religious beliefs. But has philosophy no other office to perform, and may not its office be to reflect upon the tragic sense of life itself, such as we have been studying it, to formulate this conflict between reason and faith, between science and religion, and deliberately to perpetuate this conflict? Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life (1913) , Conclusion : Don Quixote in the Contemporary European Tragi-Comedy. Intellectual happiness does not exclude the reasonable satisfaction of the body, and duty is harmonized with pleasure. The same appears in social philosophy where the individual good is harmonized with the well-being of the whole. In logic deductive and inductive methods assist each other and we could multiply similar examples. Its sense of measure makes scholasticism an eminently human philosophy. Maurice De Wulf, Mediaeval Philosophy Illustrated from the System of Thomas Aquinas (1922) The unity of Western Christianity in the Latin Church, and for no time under the renewed Empire of Charlemagne and his successors, gave but one and the same philosophy, which was Christian and from the schools of the time called scholastic, to the Western nations, where it flourished wonderfully now combative now peaceful. Except for a little special color, which supported one or another nation from the famous sects of the time, which divided the field of science into names of both nominals, real numbers, and conceptual numbers, Scholasticism for everything presents itself with the same disputes, with the support of the authority itself, with a language that alone was intelligible to everyone on whatever side they were: so that either from the Universities or Monasteries, from the chairs, Italy, as from those of Alemagna, France, Spain, was a work to which one intended with different forces, that is, to bring the ancient philosophy into service of the Christian dogma, or to expose the Christian dogma and scientifically interpenetrate it with the forms of ancient Aristotelian logic. Vincenzo Di Giovanni, Storia della filosofia in Sicilia, L. Pedone Lauriel editore, vol. I, Filosofia antica, scolastica, moderna, Palermo, 1873, Book II, Ch. I, pp. 95-96. Modern science was born in the period beginning with Copernicus's work De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (1543) and ending with Newton's Philosophia Naturalis Philosophiae Mathematica. For reasons not to be entered into here, mediaeval scholasticism had not succeeded in finding an effective method for the investigation of natural phenomena. And Humanism, though indirectly instrumental in the creation of natural science through the promotion of knowledge of Greek works on mathematics, mechanics, and astronomy, had not been able to find the new paths that science would have to follow. The conviction shared by the two movements, viz. that science was something which mankind had once possessed, but had since lost, turned men's eyes towards the past instead of to the future — to ancient books instead of to new investigations and experiments. The creation of modern science required a different philosophy. Man had to realize that if science is to grow, each generation must make its own contribution; and that the accumulated wisdom of antiquity is useful only as a starting-point for new research. Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis (1970), Simon Stevin: Science in the Netherlands around 1600. Republished in 2012.p. 1; Lead paragraph F What the mathematically-oriented methods of modern physics do is to focus on those aspects of nature which can be strictly predicted and controlled and to ignore anything that doesn’t fit that method. As a result, physics tends brilliantly to uncover those aspects of reality that fit that method, and which can therefore be exploited technologically. But it simply does not follow that there are no other aspects of reality. To think otherwise is like the drunk’s fallacy of assuming that his lost car keys must be under the street lamp somewhere, because that is where the light is. Edward Feser, Scholasticism vs. Scientism: An Interview with Dr. Edward Feser (November 2014) G The Scholastic species -Descartes will observe- which were to be the means by which our mind reached things, had become diaphragms that prevented man from relating to the world, to others, to God. Humanistic culture, with its appeal to things, was precisely an effort at liberation, or, as one loved to say, a sort of new birth, of purity reconquered within a rediscovered reality. Eugene Garin, Storia della filosofia italiana, 3 voll., 3rd edition, Edizione CDE on licence from Giulio Einaudi editore, Milano, 1989, vol. 1, Part 2, Ch. 1, p. 237 At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality. Perhaps it is one of the great dramas of the leader that he or she must combine a passionate spirit with a cold intelligence and make painful decisions without flinching. Our vanguard revolutionaries must idealize this love of the people, of the most sacred causes, and make it one and indivisible. They cannot descend, with small doses of daily affection, to the level where ordinary people put their love into practice. The leaders of the revolution have children just beginning to talk, who are not learning to call their fathers by name; wives, from whom they have to be separated as part of the general sacrifice of their lives to bring the revolution to its fulfilment; the circle of their friends is limited strictly to the number of fellow revolutionists. There is no life outside of the revolution.In these circumstances one must have a great deal of humanity and a strong sense of justice and truth in order not to fall into extreme dogmatism and cold scholasticism, into isolation from the masses. We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity will be transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force. Che Guevara, Excerpts from the two paragraphs above have sometimes been quoted in abbreviated form: 'At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality... We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity will be transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force. H With the advent of medieval Scholasticism, … we find a clear distinction between theologia and philosophia. Theology became conscious of its autonomy qua supreme science, which philosophy was emptied of its spiritual exercises, which, from now on, were relegated to Christian mysticism and ethics. Reduced to the rank of a “handmaid of theology,” philosophy’s role was henceforth to furnish theology with conceptual—and hence purely theoretical—material. When, in the modern age, philosophy regained its autonomy, it still retained many features inherited from this medieval conception. In particular, it maintained its purely theoretical character, which even evolved in the direction of a more and more thorough systemization. Not until Nietzsche, Bergson, and existentialism does philosophy consciously return to being a concrete attitude, a way of life and of seeing the world. Pierre Hadot, La Philosophie comme manière de vivre: Entretiens avec Jeannie Carlier et Arnold I. Davidson. Paris: Albin Michel, (2001), trans. Michael Chase (1995), p. 107 J History knew a midnight, which we may estimate at about the year 1000 A.D., when the human race lost the arts and sciences even to the memory. The last twilight of paganism was gone, and the new day had not yet begun. Whatever was left of culture in the world was found only in the Saracens, and a Pope eager to learn studied in disguise in their universities, and so became the wonder of the West. At last Christendom, tired of praying to the dead bones of the martyrs, flocked to the tomb of the Saviour Himself, only to find for a second time that the grave was empty and that Christ was risen from the dead. Then mankind too rose from the dead. It returned to the activities and the business of life; there was a feverish revival in the arts and in the crafts. The cities flourished, a new citizenry was founded. Cimabue rediscovered the extinct art of painting; Dante, that of poetry. Then it was, also, that great courageous spirits like Abelard and Saint Thomas Aquinas dared to introduce into Catholicism the concepts of Aristotelian logic, and thus founded scholastic philosophy. But when the Church took the sciences under her wing, she demanded that the forms in which they moved be subjected to the same unconditioned faith in authority as were her own laws. And so it happened that scholasticism, far from freeing the human spirit, enchained it for many centuries to come, until the very possibility of free scientific research came to be doubted. At last, however, here too daylight broke, and mankind, reassured, determined to take advantage of its gifts and to create a knowledge of nature based on independent thought. The dawn of the day in history is know as the Renaissance or the Revival of Learning. Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi, "Über Descartes Leben und seine Methode die Vernunft Richtig zu Leiten und die Wahrheit in den Wissenschaften zu Suchen," "About Descartes' Life and Method of Reason.." (Jan 3, 1846) C. G. J. Jacobi's Gesammelte werke Vol. 7 p.309, as quoted by Tobias Dantzig, Number: The Language of Science (1930). K I am interested to hear that some of their chief difficulties were with definitions. I am not at all surprised, though it is extraordinarily tiresome and boring that it should be so. In my book I have deemed it necessary to go into these matters at disproportionate length, whilst feeling that this was in a sense a great pity and might divert the readers' minds from the real issues. It is, I think, a further illustration of the appalling state of scholasticism into which the minds of so many economists have got which allow them to take leave of their intuitions altogether. Yet in writing economics one is not writing either a mathematical proof or a legal document. One is trying to arouse and appeal to the reader's intuitions; and, if he has worked himself into a state when he has none, one is helpless! John Maynard Keynes, Letter to R. B. Bryce, 10 July 1935, published in The General Theory and After: A Supplement. Collected Writings vol. XXIX. (1979) L Hegel... scornfully characterizes Empiricism as seeking truth in Experience instead of in Thought. It is on such principles that the modern German Philosophy has reproduced the ambitious but inane attempts of Scholasticism. George Henry Lewes, Aristotle: a Chapter from the History of Science (1864) M Above all, the great role of the Arabs and Jews was as the transmitters of Aristotelian thought. It was especially the Spanish Arabs who brought the texts of the great Greek philosopher to the countries of the West, and this contribution marks the period of Scholasticism's maturity. From the point of view of this transmission as well as from the point of view of philosophic activity, Arabic Spain merits first place in the world of medieval Eastern philosophy. Julián Marías about al-Andalus, History of Philosophy (1941), Courrier Dover, 1967, p. 153 N The subtlety of the scholastics of the Middle Ages arises from their dependence, that of the Greek philosophers on their freedom. Giovan Battista Niccolini, Ricordi della vita e delle opera di G.B. Niccolini, vol. 1, Le Monnier, Firenze, 1866, p. 388. R If creatureliness is real, God becomes the Divine Nothing. God is not, as in scholasticism, the final subject of all predicates. He is being as unpredicable. The existence of the creature, in so far as it exists, is the existence of God, and the creature's experience of God is therefore in the final analysis equally unpredicable. Neither can even be described; both can only be indicated. We can only point at reality, our own or God's. The soul comes to the realization of God by knowledge, not as in the older Christian mysticism by love. Love is the garment of knowledge. The soul first trains itself by systematic unknowing until at last it confronts the only reality, the only knowledge, God manifest in itself. The soul can say nothing about this experience in the sense of defining it. It can only reveal it to others. Kenneth Rexroth, in "Eckhart, Brethren of the Free Spirit," from Communalism: From Its Origins to the Twentieth Century (1974), ch. 4 There came to be not one Protestantism, but a multitude of sects; not one philosophy opposed to scholasticism, but as many as there were philosophers; not, as in the thirteenth century, one Emperor opposed to the Pope, but a large number of heretical kings. The result, in thought as in literature, was a continually deepening subjectivism, operating at first as a wholesome liberation from spiritual slavery, but advancing steadily towards a personal isolation inimical to sanity. Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy , Introductory. S Spinoza in particular belongs to the immortal authors. He is great because of the sublime simplicity of his thoughts and his way of writing, great because of his distance from all scholasticism, and, on the other hand, from all false embellishment or ostentation of language. Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy (1833) [Translated from the German by Andrew Bowie] When Science at last escaped from the clutches of medieval Scholasticism (which was itself a hybrid between theology and Formal Logic), it happened that ‘Logic’ remained in the old curriculum. So the students of Science were not taught it, and consequently were not paralysed by its technicalities and ineptitudes. They could therefore go ahead, and advance their subjects by the light of nature, without being blocked at every step by sterile subtleties. F. C. S. Schiller, Formal Logic: A Scientific and Social Problem (London: Macmillan & Co, Ltd, 1912) Preface (p. x) I do reproach a school of modern philosophers for wishing to force, so to speak, impersonal philosophy, a moral science, indifferent nature, to speak the same language as our aspirations and our passions — even, I grant, our generous aspirations, our noble passions. Our innate and psychic tendencies (in the moral, social, and religious realms) are phenomena for science to record and authenticate, not to justify or legitimize. The epoch of scholasticism ought to be left behind for good and all. Albert Schinz, Anti-Pragmatism; an Examination into the Respective Rights of Intellectual Aristocracy and Social Democracy (1909), pp. xvii-xviii. T There is no more familiar, and possibly no more important, figure in the history of Latin learning during the twelfth century that Peter Abelard who flourished at its beginning. His career, as set forth in his own words, illustrated educational conditions in Gaul at that time. His brilliant success as a lecturer on logic and theology at Paris reveals the University of Paris#History great medieval university of that city in embryo. His pioneer work, Sic et Non, set the fashion for the standard method of presentation employed in scholasticism. Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science: The first thirteen centuries of our era Volume 2 of A History of Magic and Experimental Science by Lynn Thorndike Macmillan 1923 https://books.google.com/books?id=B2OQzgEACAAJ&pg=PA4 4 In its most general form and from the point of view of physics, love is the internal, affectively apprehended, aspect of the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world, centre to centre. This is how it has been understood by the great philosophers from Plato, the poet, to Nicolas of Cusa and other representatives of frigid scholasticism. Once this definition has been accepted, it gives rise to a series of important consequences. Love is power of producing inter-centric relationship. It is present, therefore (at least in a rudimentary state), in all the natural centres, living and pre-living, which make up the world; and it represents, too, the most profound, most direct, and most creative form of inter-action that it is possible to conceive between those centres. Love, in fact, is the expression and the agent of universal synthesis. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Activation of Energy (1976), pp. 70–71 The educated Greeks had no interest in observing or in explaining the phenomena of technical processes. However prone they might be to speculation, they had no inclination to experiment or to engage in the patient accumulation of the knowledge of physical facts. ...The influence of a spurious Aristotelianism, which lasted through many centuries and even beyond the time of Boyle, was wholly opposed to the true methods of science, and it was only when philosophy had shaken itself free from scholasticism that chemistry, as a science, was able to develop. Thomas Edward Thorpe, History of Chemistry (Thorpe) In matter-theory, as in astronomy, the Church's commitment to Aristotle was in due course to prove an embarassment. In both branches of science his speculative distinction between terrestrial and celestial matter was insecure from the very beginning. His own most loyal commentator, Alexander of Aphrodisias... had already dreamt of a theory unifying all things, and John Philoponos... had rejected the distinction between terrestrial and celestial matter outright. Nevertheless, it was still an axiom of scholasticism almost a thousand years later. Stephen Toulmin, June Goodfield, The Architecture of Matter (1962) In his controversial writings William of Ockham appears as the advocate of secular absolutism. He denies the right of the popes to exercise temporal power, or to interfere in any way whatever in the affairs of the Empire. ... In philosophy William advocated a reform of Scholasticism both in method and in content. The aim of this reformation movement in general was simplification. This aim he formulated in the celebrated "Law of Parsimony", commonly called "Ockham's Razor": "Entia non sunt multiplicanda sine necessitate". With this tendency towards simplification was united a very marked tendency towards skepticism a distrust, namely, of the ability of the human mind to reach certitude in the most important problems of philosophy. ... Ockham's attitude towards the established order in the Church and towards the recognized system of philosophy in the academic world of his day was one of protest. He has, indeed, been called "the first Protestant". Nevertheless, he recognized in his polemical writings the authority of the Church in spiritual matters, and did not diminish that authority in any respect. Similarly, although he rejected the rational demonstration of several truths which are fundamental in the Christian system of theology, he held firmly to the same truths as matters of faith. William Turner, in "William of Ockham" in The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913) W The expression artes liberales, chiefly used during the Middle Ages, does not mean arts as we understand the word at this present day, but those branches of knowledge which were taught in the schools of that time. They are called liberal (Latin liber, free), because they serve the purpose of training the free man, in contrast with the artes illiberales, which are pursued for economic purposes; their aim is to prepare the student not for gaining a livelihood, but for the pursuit of science in the strict sense of the term, i.e. the combination of philosophy and theology known as scholasticism. They are seven in number and may be arranged in two groups, the first embracing grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, in other words, the sciences of language, of oratory, and of logic, better known as the artes sermocinales, or language studies; the second group comprises arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, i.e. the mathematico-physical disciplines, known as the artes reales, or physicae. Otto Willmann (1907) "The Seven Liberal Arts". In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. See also Christian philosophy Thomas Aquinas External links Category:Philosophy Category:History of Christianity