Early Scholasticism

The claim

Faith seeks understanding. What is believed on authority can and should be examined by reason, and apparent contradictions between authorities are resolved by drawing the right distinction.

What it held

Scholasticism is a technique before it is a set of beliefs, and the technique is what made the universities possible. Take a question. State it so it can be answered yes or no. Assemble the authorities who say yes and those who say no — and they will genuinely conflict, because Abelard's Sic et Non lists 158 such conflicts on purpose. Then resolve.

The resolution is almost always a distinction: the authorities were speaking of different things, or in different respects, or one was using a term loosely. This sounds like evasion and is in fact a discipline, because a bad distinction is visible and can be attacked.

Anselm supplies the motto — faith seeking understanding — and the most argued-over argument in philosophy, that a being than which nothing greater can be conceived cannot exist in the understanding alone. Gaunilo objected immediately, Aquinas rejected it, Descartes revived it, Kant thought he had killed it, and it is still being published on.

How it argued

The quaestio and the disputation. A question posed, objections stated in their strongest form first, a determination given, and each objection answered individually.

What it was arguing against

Not an opponent so much as disorder: an inherited body of authorities that had never been systematically compared.

Where it disagreed with itself

Universals — whether genera and species are things, or in things, or only names — which runs through the whole period and eventually splits it. Whether dialectic should be applied to the mysteries at all, which Bernard of Clairvaux argued forcefully that it should not.

Common misconceptions

That the scholastics argued about angels on pinheads. There is no such dispute in the literature; it is a seventeenth-century joke about a method its critics no longer used. And scholasticism is not the same as Thomism — Aquinas is one practitioner among many who disagreed with each other sharply.

How it began

The cathedral schools of northern France, and the recovery of enough of Aristotle's logic through Boethius to make formal disputation possible.

What became of it

Transformed rather than ended by the arrival of the full Aristotle in the thirteenth century, which gave the method vastly more material and produced the great summae.

Lasting influence

The university itself — the lecture, the disputation, the degree — is its institutional residue. So is the habit of stating the strongest case against your own position before making it.

Why it still matters

The objection-and-reply structure is still how analytic philosophy is written, eight centuries later, mostly without anyone noticing where it came from.

Put another way

A courtroom where both sides must be given their best case before judgement.

Where to start

The Proslogion. It is very short and the argument is on the second page.

The surprising bit

Abelard's Sic et Non collects 158 questions on which the church fathers flatly contradict one another, and offers no resolutions. He published the contradictions and left them there as an exercise.

In their own words

Connections

Answers

Latin Patristic Platonism

Influenced

Thomism, Scotism, Ockhamism, Nominalism

The verdict

A method for handling disagreement that outlived every doctrine it was invented to defend.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy