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Thesis Scholastic reasoning was rigorous, but it was rigour inside a fence

Arvind Poojary Fellow
· 6 replies · 204 views
Faith & reasonJewishMedieval ChristianScholasticismPierre DuhemWilliam of Ockham#authority#condemnations-of-1277#open-inquiry#scholasticism
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Where it stands

I'm an atheist, and I don't share the old Enlightenment sneer at the scholastics. The method was superb: state the objections, distinguish the senses of terms, answer point by point. Modern philosophy papers are built on it.

But I want to argue that the method operated inside a perimeter it could not cross. Premises supplied by revelation were not up for revision. Objections were answered, never allowed to win against the creed. When arguments started going in unwelcome directions, the fence was policed: in 1277 the bishop of Paris condemned a long list of philosophical propositions, many drawn from Aristotle and his Arabic commentators, and teaching them could bring excommunication.

A method that can't revise its own premises is sophisticated reasoning, not open inquiry. That matters, because people now praise scholasticism as a model of free intellectual exchange.

Thesis: scholasticism was rigorous argument within a fixed canon, and it should not be held up as a model of open inquiry. I expect pushback from the believers here, and I'd like the strongest version.

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6 replies

For the thesis 1

  1. Hamza Qureshi

    For Fellow

    I'll accept Arvind's description and dispute his tone. Usul al-fiqh works inside revealed sources too, and constitutional law works inside a constitution. Rigorous reasoning within an authoritative text is a real form of inquiry, and arguably the commonest one in human history. The question is whether it is the only form a culture permits, and that's a question about institutions, not about the method.

    Helpful · 3

Against the thesis 3

  1. Fr. Ikechukwu Anyanwu

    Against Fellow

    Every inquiry has unrevisable commitments at some level. Yours include that the natural world is all there is and that your senses are broadly reliable; you don't revise those in the middle of exposing a miracle trick. The scholastics were unusual in writing theirs down. And within the fence they were honest about reason's limits: Aquinas held that reason cannot demonstrate that the world had a beginning in time. He believed it by faith and said plainly that the philosophical arguments for it were not conclusive.

    Helpful · 1
  2. Miriam Adler

    Against Fellow

    The fence moved more than you think. Maimonides says in the Guide that if the eternity of the world had been demonstrated, he would have interpreted the scriptural verses about creation figuratively, as he does with verses that seem to give God a body. He rejects eternity because the arguments for it don't amount to demonstration, not because scripture forbids him. That's a philosopher letting reason set the terms for reading revelation.

    Helpful · 2
    1. Arvind Poojary

      Fellow

      Maimonides is a better counterexample than I expected, Miriam. But 1277 still stands. When reasoning reached conclusions the authorities disliked, the response was condemnation, not reply. That's the fence I mean.

  3. Nikos Stavridis

    Against Fellow

    On 1277 there's an irony you'll enjoy. Pierre Duhem, the physicist and historian, argued that the condemnation helped free natural philosophy from Aristotle, because it forbade denying God's power to do things Aristotle thought impossible, such as moving the whole cosmos in a straight line, which implies a void. Thinkers then had to take non-Aristotelian possibilities seriously. Most historians now think Duhem overstated it. But a fence that pushes people to imagine new physics is an odd sort of fence.

    Helpful · 1

Other replies

  1. Arvind Poojary

    Fellow

    Revised thesis, then: the scholastic method itself was open; the institutions that housed it were not always. Ockham's nominalism and the Maimonides passage show the method could unsettle its own framework. Condemnations like 1277 show that the institutions were willing to stop it. I still wouldn't call that open inquiry, but I'll stop blaming the method for the bishop.

    Helpful · 2