Scholasticism

:Scholastic redirects here. For the U.S. book publisher, see Scholastic Press.

Scholastic method

The scholastics would choose a book by a renowned scholar, called auctor, as a subject of investigation, for example the Bible. By reading the book thoroughly and critically, the disciples learned to appreciate the theories of the auctor. Then other documents related to the source document would be referenced, such as Church councils, papal letters, anything written on the subject, be it ancient text or contemporary. The points of disagreement and contention between these multiple sources would be written down. For example, the Bible has apparent contradictions and these have been written about by scholars ancient and contemporary, so a scholastic would gather all the arguments about the contradictions, looking at it from all sides with an open mind.

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Once the sources and points of disagreement had been laid out, through a series of dialectics the two sides of an argument would be made whole so that they would be found to be in agreement and not contradictory. This was done in two ways.

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First, through philological analysis. Words were examined and it would be argued they could have more than one meaning, that the author could have intended the word to mean something else. Ambiguity in words could be used to find common ground between two otherwise contradictory statements. Second, through logical analysis which relied on the rules of formal logic to show contradictions did not exist, but were subjective to the reader.

Related Topics:
Philological - Logic

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