Contents · 4 sections · 1 min
Core Theses
Faith seeks understanding (fides quaerens intellectum) — reason can clarify and in part demonstrate revealed truth.
Authorities (Scripture, the Fathers, Aristotle) must be reconciled through careful distinctions.
Truth is reached by disputation — stating objections, answering them, and drawing distinctions.
Universals, being, and the nature of God can be investigated rationally.
Scholasticism (from scholasticus, “of the schools”) is the philosophy and method of the cathedral schools and universities of medieval Europe — Paris, Oxford, Bologna, Cologne — roughly from the eleventh to the fifteenth century.
Method
Its hallmark is the disputation: a question is posed, arguments on both sides are set out, authorities are cited, and the master “determines” the question by drawing distinctions. Peter Abelard’s Sic et Non (“Yes and No”, c. 1120) collected contradictory statements of the Church Fathers on 158 questions, challenging students to reconcile them. Peter Lombard’s Sentences became the standard textbook on which every theologian wrote a commentary. The method reached its perfection in Thomas Aquinas‘s Summa.
Great names
- Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109): “faith seeking understanding”; the ontological argument.
- Peter Abelard (1079–1142): logic, ethics of intention — and his tragic love affair with Héloïse.
- Albert the Great (c. 1200–1280) and Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274): the Aristotelian synthesis.
- Bonaventure (1221–1274): the Franciscan, Augustinian alternative.
- John Duns Scotus (c. 1266–1308): the “Subtle Doctor” — the univocity of being, haecceity (“thisness”).
- William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347): nominalism — only individuals exist; universals are names; and “Ockham’s razor”: do not multiply entities beyond necessity.
The problem of universals
Do universals — “humanity”, “redness” — exist? Realists said yes (in things or in God’s mind); nominalists said only individuals exist, and universals are names or concepts. The debate shaped the later empiricism of Locke and Hume.
Decline and reputation
Renaissance humanists (Erasmus, Rabelais) mocked scholastic jargon and hair-splitting — “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” (a jibe the scholastics never actually debated in those words). Descartes, Bacon and Hobbes rejected its Aristotelian physics. Yet scholastic logic and the university itself are among its enduring achievements. See also Platonism and the Islamic philosophers Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā) and Averroes (Ibn Rushd), whose work it absorbed.
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Summa Theologiae
Aquinas’s unfinished masterpiece — a systematic theology in some 3,000 articles, each a model of fair argument, synthesizing Aristotle and Christian revelation.
Averroes (Ibn Rushd)
Andalusian judge and philosopher — “the Commentator” on Aristotle — who defended philosophy against al-Ghazālī and argued that reason and revelation cannot contradict each other.
Critique of Pure Reason
Kant’s masterwork, asking what reason can know without experience — and answering that it can know the forms of all possible experience, but nothing beyond.
Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā)
Persian polymath — physician, metaphysician, logician — whose Canon of Medicine was taught in Europe for 500 years and whose distinction between essence and existence reshaped philosophy in Islam and the Latin West.
What Are the Limits of the Human Mind?
Can reason know everything — or are there things the mind can never reach? From the Upanishads’ unknowable knower to Kant’s boundary and Wittgenstein’s silence.
Kumārila Bhaṭṭa
The 7th-century Mīmāṃsā philosopher who turned Vedic ritual hermeneutics into a full philosophy — defending the authorless Veda, the self-validity of knowledge and a realist world against the Buddhists, and arguing that no creator God is needed.