Scholasticism

References

• Scholasticism Wikipedia Article

Related

• Organon
• • The standard collection of Aristotle's six works on logical analysis and dialectic. The name Organon was given by Aristotle's followers, the Peripatetics, who maintained against the stoic that Logic was an instrument of Philosophy.
• Categories
• • A text form Aristotle's Organon that enumerates all the possible kinds of things that can be the subject or the predicate of a proposition., They are perhaps the single most discussed of all of Aristotelian notions. The work is brief enough to be divided not into books, as is usual with Aristotle's works, but into fifteen chapters.
• Monastic Schools
• • The most important institutions of higher learning in the Latin West from the early Middle Ages until the 12th century (along with cathedral schools). Since Cassiodorus's educational program, the standard curriculum incorporated religious studies, the Trivium, and the Quadrivium. In some places monastic schools evolved into medieval universities which eventually largely superseded both as centers of higher learning.
• Metaphysics
• • Metaphysics is the branch of Philosophy that examines the basic structure of reality. It is often characterized as first philosophy, implying that it is more fundamental than other forms of philosophical inquiry. Metaphysics is traditionally seen as the study of min-independent features of the world, but some modern theorists understand it as an inquiry into the conceptual schemes that underlie human thought and experience.
• Prime Mover
• • Concept advanced by Aristotle as a primary cause or mover of all the motion in the universe. The unmoved mover moves other things, but is not itself moved by any prior action.
• Dialectical Reasoning
• • Dialectic refers originally to dialogue between two people holding different points of view about a subject but wishing to arrive at the truth through reasoned argumentation. Dialectic resembles debate, but the concept excludes subjective elements such as emotional appeal and rhetoric. It has its origins in ancient philosophy and continued to be developed in the Middle Ages.
• Inference
• • Steps in reasoning, moving from premises to logical consequences. Inference is theoretically traditionally divided into deduction and induction, a distinction that in Europe dates at least to Aristotle. Deduction is inference deriving logical conclusions from premises known or assumed to be true, with the laws of valid inference being studied in logic. Induction is inference from particular evidence to a universal conclusion. A third type of inference is sometimes distinguished contradistinguishing abduction from induction.
• Disputation
• • Genre of literature involving two contenders who seek to establish a resolution to a problem or establish the superiority of something. In the scholastic system of education in the Middle Ages, disputations offered a formalized method of debate designed to uncover and establish truths in theology and in sciences. Fixed rules governed the process: they demanded dependence on traditional written authorities and the thorough understanding of each argument on each side.
• Neoplatonism
• • Version of platonic philosophy that emerged in the 3rd century AD against the background of Hellenistic philosophy and religion. The term does not encapsulate a set of ideas as much as a series of thinkers. Among the common ideas it maintains is monism, the doctrine that all of reality can be derived from a single principle, the One.
• Summa Theologica
• • Best known work of Thomas Aquinas. It is a compendium of all the theological teachings of the Catholic Church, intended to be an instrumental guide for theology students, including seminarians and the literate laity. Presenting the reasoning for almost all points of Christian theology in the West, topics of the Summa follow the following cycle: God, Creation, Man, Man's purpose, Christ, the Sacraments, and back to God.

Notes

Scholasticism was a medieval school of philosophy that employed a critical organic method of philosophical analysis predicated upon the Aristotelian 10 categories. Christian scholasticism emerged within the monastic schools that translated scholastic Judeo-Islamic philosophies, and rediscover the collected works of Aristotle. Endeavoring to harmonize his metaphysics and its account of a prime mover with the Latin Catholic dogmatic trinitarian theology, these monastic schools became the basis of the earliest European mediaeval universities, and thus became the bedrock of modern science and philosophy in the Western world. Scholasticism dominated education in Europe from about 1100 to 1700. The rise of scholasticism was closely associated with these schools that flourished in Italy, France, Portugal, Spain, and England.

• Scholasticism is a method of learning more than a philosophy or a theology, since it places a strong emphasis on dialectical reasoning to extend knowledge by inference to resolve contradictions.
• It is known for its rigorous conceptual analysis and the careful drawing of distinctions.
• In the classroom and in writing, it often takes the form of explicit disputation: a topic drawn from the tradition is broached in the form of a question, oppositional responses are given, a counterproposal is argued and oppositional arguments rebutted.
• It was initially a program conducted by medieval Christian thinkers attempting to harmonize the various authorities of their own tradition, and to reconcile Christina theology with classical and late antiquity philosophy, especially that of Aristotle but also of Neoplatonism.
• Notable Scholastics:
• • Anselm of Canterbury (the father of scholasticism)
  • • Italian, Benedictine monk, abbot, philosopher, and theologian of the Catholic Church, wo was the Archbishop or Canterbury form 1903 to 1109.
    • He defended the Church's interests in England amid the Investiture Controversy. He was exiled twice.
    • He composed dialogues and treatises with a rational and philosophical approach, which have sometimes caused him to be credited as the founder of Scholasticism. Despite his lack of recognition in this field in his own time, Anselm is now famous as the originator of the ontological argument for the existence of God and the satisfaction theory of atonement (a theory in Catholic ideology which holds that Jesus Christ redeemed humanity through making satisfaction for humankind's disobedience through his own supererogatory obedience.

• • Peter Abelard
  • • French scholastic philosopher, leading logician, theologian, poet, composer, and musician.
    • He is celebrated for his logical solution to the problem of universals via nominalism and conceptualism and his pioneering of intent in ethics.
    • Often referred to as the Descartes of the twelfth century, he is considered a forerunner of Rousseau, Kant, and Spinoza. He is sometimes credited as a chief forerunner of modern empiricism.
    • He was a defender of women and their education. In history and popular culture, he is best known for his passionate and tragic love affair and philosophical exchange, with his brilliant student and eventual wife Héloïse d'Argenteuil.

• • Alexander of Hales
  • • Franciscan friar, theologian and philosopher important in the development of scholasticism.
    • He is best known for reflecting the works of Anselm of Canterbury and Augustine of Hippo.

• • Albertus Magnus
  • • German Dominican friar, philosopher, scientist, and bishop, considered one of the greatest medieval philosophers and thinkers.
    • One of the Doctors of the Church.

• • Duns Scotus
  • • Scottish Catholic priest and Franciscan friar, university professor, philosopher, and theologian. He is one of the four most important Christian philosopher-theologians of Western Europe in the High Middle Ages, together with those listed below.
    • He is best known for the univocity of being - that existence is the most abstract concept we have, applicable to everything that exists; the formal distinction - a way of distinguishing between different formalities of the same thing; and the idea of haecceity - the property supposed to be in each individual thing that makes it an individual.

• • William of Ockham
  • • English Franciscan friar, scholastic philosopher, apologist, and Catholic theologian, who is believed to have been born in Ockham, a small village in Surrey.
    • He is commonly known for Occam's Razor, the problem solving principle that recommends searching for explanations constructed with the smallest possible set of elements.

• • Bonaventure
  • • Italian Catholic Franciscan bishop, cardinal, scholastic theologian, and philosopher.
    • No work of Bonaventure's is exclusively philosophical, a striking illustration of the mutual interpretation of philosophy and theology that is a distinguishing mark of the Scholastic period.

• • Thomas Aquinas
  • • His work Summa Theologica is considered to be the pinnacle of scholastic, medieval, and Christina philosophy.
    • Italian Dominican friar and priest, an influential philosopher and theologian, and a jurist in the tradition of scholasticism from the county of Aquino in the Kingdom of Sicily.

History

• The foundations of Christina scholasticism were laid by Boethius through his logical and theological essays.

Early Scholasticism

The first renewal of leaning in the West came with the Carolingian Renaissance of the Early Middle Ages. Charlemagne, advised by Peter of Pisa and Alcuin of York, attracted the scholars of England and Ireland, where some Greek works continues to survive in the original. By a 787 decree, he established schools at every abbey in his empire. These schools, from which the name scholasticism derived, became centers of medieval learning.

• During this period, knowledge of Ancient Greek has vanished in the West except in Ireland, where its teaching and use was fairly common in monastic schools.
• This period saw the beginning of the rediscovery of many Greek works which had been lost to the Latin West.
• The School of Chartes produced works that attempted to reconcile the use of classical pagan and philosophical sources in a medieval Christian concept using the kludge of inegumentum, treating the obviously heretical surface meanings as coverings disguising a deeper (and more orthodox) truth.

High Scholasticism

• The 13th and 14th centuries are generally seen as the high period of scholasticism. The early 13th century witnessed the culmination of the recovery of Greek philosophy.
• Powerful Norman kinds gathered men of knowledge into their courts as signs of prestige.
• The order of languages in which works were translated appeared to be of importance. Greek Latin proved easier reading than Greek Syriac Arabic Latin.
• Universities developed in large cities of Europe during this period, and rival clerical orders within the church began to battle for political and intellectual control over these centers of educational life. The two main orders founded in this period were the Franciscans and the Dominicans.
• • Franciscans were founded by Francis of Assisi and were led by Bonaventure, who defended Augustine and supposed that reason can only discover truth when philosophy is illuminated by religious faith, in the middle of the 13th century. They incorporated more Plato than Aristotle.
  • The Dominicans, founded by St. Dominic in 1215, were found to propagate and defend the Christian doctrine, placed more emphasis on the use of reason and made extensive use of the new Aristotelian sources derived form the East and Moorish Spain. The great representatives of this order were Albert Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, whose artful synthesis of Greek rationalism and Christian doctrine eventually came to define Catholic philosophy.
  • • Aquinas placed more emphasis on reason and argumentation, and was one of the first to use the new translation of Aristotle's metaphysical and epistemological writing. This was a significant departure form the Neoplatonic and Augustinian thinking that had dominated much of early scholasticism.

Thomistic Scholasticism

• Thomistic scholasticism or scholastic Thomism identifies with the philosophical and theological tradition stretching back to the time of St. Thomas. It focuses not only on exegesis of the historical Aquinas but also on the articulation of a rigorous system of orthodox Thomism to be used as an instrument of critique of contemporary thought.

Analytical Scholasticism

• A reviewed interest in the scholastic way of doing philosophy has recently awoken in the confines of analytic philosophy. Attempts emerged to combine elements of scholastic and analytic methodology in pursuit of a contemporary philosophical synthesis.

Scholastic Method

• Scholasticism focuses on how to acquire knowledge and how to communicate effectively so that it may be acquired by others. It was thought that the best way to achieve this was by replicating the discovery process.
• The scholastics would choose a book by a renowned author as a subject of investigation. They would read it critically and other documents related to the text would be referenced.
• Points of disagreement and contention between multiple sources would be noted.
• Once the sources and points of disagreement has been laid out through a series of dialects, the two sides of an argument would be made whole so that they would be in agreement and not contradictory. This was done by philosophical or logical analysis.
• • Philosophical analysis was when words were examined and argued to have multiple meanings.
  • Logical analysis was used to show that contradictions did not exist but were subjective to the reader.

Scholastic Instruction

• Scholastic instruction consisted of several elements. The first was the lectio: a teacher would read an authoritative text followed by a commentary, but no questions were permitted. This was followed by the meditatio in which students reflected on and appropriated the text. Finally, in the quaestio students could ask questions that might have occurred to them in the meditatio. Disputationes were arranged to resolve controversial quaestiones.