[Obtido em: COYNE, George V., e HELLER, Michael, A comprehensible universe: the interplay of science and theology, Springer, 2008, pp. 53-60 (Chapter 8 The medieval contribution - 3 The Method).]Scholacticism is not a philosophical system but a method of philosophizing and learning. This method was often ridiculed as purely verbal and sterile, but unjustly so. Even if its later incarnations were indeed less productive, its original version was a step towards critical thinking.
We should remember that medieval culture (including science, philosophy and theology) laboriously emerged from the ashes of the Greek and Roman world left by wars and the invasions of barbarian tribes. Medieval thinkers started almost from nothing, and had enormous reverence for anciente writers. This is why the medieval culture was "of the overwhelmingly bookish and clerkly character" (9): "Every writer, if he possibly can, bases himself on an earlier writer, follows an auctor, preferably a Latin one. [...] In our own society most knowledge depends, in the last resort, on observation. But the Middle Ages depended predominantly on books." (10)
Our literature often shows a medieval hero as a wanderer and dreamer, but "at his most characteristic [...] he was an organizer, a codifier, a builder of systems. He wanted a place for everything and everything in the right place. Distinction, definition, tabulation were his delight." (11) He formalized war by the art of chivalry, passions by the code of love, and learning by strict rules of leading disputations and analysing texts.
Medieval people were very credulous of books. They inherited a "non-consistent" set of books: Judaic, pagan, Patristic and philosophical of various kinds and provenience. Among them there were chronicles, poems, visions, philosophical treatises, and so on, some in fragments, sometimes in the form of quotations by other authors. Inevitably there were disagreements and contradictions among them. "If, under these conditions, one has also a great reluctance flatly to disbelieve anything in a book, then here there is obviously both an urgent need and a glorious opportunity for sorting out and tidying up." (12) The last sentence is a good description of the Scholastic method.
The principal goal of the Scholastic method was to resolve a contradiction or to answer a question. The first stage was to recognize the state of the question (status quaestionis), i.e. to formulate a thesis, establish points of disagreement, and prepare sources by selecting a book by a renowned auctor, and other related documents (such as biblical texts, decrees of Church councils, of papal letters). A much discussed text was the Sentences (full title: Libri quatuor sententiarum) by Peter Lombard, a philosopher of the 12th century. It was a systematic compilation of Scholastic theology. Lecturing on the Sentences was a condition for becoming a magister in a university.
When the point of disagreement had been established, the argument was made, usually in the form of a disputation between real or imaginary sides. There were quite strict rules for conducting such a discussion. For instance, before answering an objetion laid out by the opponent, one had to repeat his point in order to prove that the objection was understood correctly. The chain of objections and aswers constituted the core of the dispute. Clear traces of this strategy are found in written works of this period (for example in the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas).
The main tools of such a dispute were linguistic and logical analysis. The meaning of words were examined and subdivided and the rules of formal logic applied to find possible errors in the reasoning. No wonder that semantics and logic flourished in medieval schools. These two disciplines were combined into a sort of "practical knowledge", often called dialectics, as opposed to a more mystical approach to theology. The early period of Scholasticism was in fact marked by heated discussion between the defenders of both these trends. In fact, High Scholasticism was born out of this controversy. In this sense Scholasticism can be regarded as a rationalist reaction against the mysticism that distrusted reason as a correct way of doing theology.
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