Abstract
At Paris in the middle years of the thirteenth century the tendency towards harmonising philosophy and theology reached its perfection, one could say, in the scholasticism of Aquinas which implied the harmony of faith and reason. The beginning of the decline of scholasticism has been attributed to the doctrines of Duns Scotus (d. 1308) and William of Ockham (d. 1349), both of whom reintroduce the dualism between faith and reason which for centuries scholasticism had tried to overcome. After the fifteenth century, it is sometimes said, scholasticism ceased in effect to exist, except perhaps in its lone, late champion, Suarez.
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Notes
The section ‘Scholasticism’ draws on Leff, Pringle-Pattison, Cranston, White, Costello and Kearney, to whom much of this and the next section is indebted. All are cited in the bibliography. L. Jardine, ‘The Place of Dialectic Teaching in Sixteenth-Century Cambridge’, Studies in the Renaissance, 21 (1974) 61–2, disagrees with Kearney that sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century Cambridge was conservatively Aristotelian after a brief embracing of Ramism.
Keckermann, Praecognitorum Logicorum Tractatus III (Hanoviae, 1606) p. 109
cited in E. J. Ashworth, Language and Logic in the Post-Medieval Period (Boston: D. Reidel, 1974) p. ix.
This is not Keckermann’s popular Systerna Logicae (1606).
Printed with English trans. in L. M. Quiller Couch (ed.), Reminiscences of Oxford by Oxford Men 1559–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892) pp. 14–17.
Robert Sanderson, Logicae Artis Compendium (Oxford, 1615); other eds in 1618, 1631, 1657, 1664, 1672, 1680, 11th ed. 1741.
For a discussion of Sanderson’s logic see W. S. Howell, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric (Princeton University Press, 1971) pp. 16–21.
A. de Jordy and H. F. Fletcher (eds), A Guide for Younger Schollers, by Thomas Barlow (c. 1655) (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1961)
G. C. Moore Smith in The Eagle, 40 (1919) 98–115.
M. H. Curtis, Oxford and Cambridge in Transition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959) pp. 109–13
H. F. Fletcher, The Intellectual Development of John Milton, vol. II (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1961) pp. 84–8: appendix 2 (vol. II pp. 624–55) prints the entire ‘Holdsworth’ MS. From evidence in Bodleian MS Rawl. D. 200, Kearney (p. 198) says the ‘Directions’ is the work of John Merryweather, BA (Cantab.); see also Kearney pp. 102–5.
Trinity College, Cambridge, MS O. 10A. 33, ed. G. M. Trevelyan in The Cambridge Review, 44 (1943) 328–30; see Costello pp. 9–10 and Curtis pp. 113–14.
For the influence of Ramus on logic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries see W. S. Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500–1700 (Princeton University Press, 1956) pp. 210, 280, 299–309
The ‘Advice’ was printed piratically in 1729; a 2nd ed. came out in 1730 and another ed. in 1740; rpt. in Christopher Wordsworth, Scholae Academicae. Some Account of the Studies at English Universities in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1877) app. 3 pp. 330– 7.
William Duncan, The Elements of Logick (London, 1748); other London eds 1752, 1754, 1759, 1764, 1770, 1776, 1787; Edinburgh eds 1776, 1807.
Also popular at the universities in the eighteenth century was the book of Isaac Watts, Logick, or the Right Use of Reason in the Enquiry after Truth (London, 1725)
Nicholas Amhurst, Terrae-Filius: or, The Secret History of the University of Oxford (London, 1726) vol. I p. 110
Ch. 7 was probably written by Arbuthnot, possibly with help from Swift and Parnell; see C. Kerby-Miller (ed.), Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1950) pp. 50–60.
Richard Cumberland, Memoirs of Richard Cumberland, Written by Himself (London, 1806) p. 81.
And those insufficiently appraised. See A. B. Cobban, The King’s Hall within the University of Cambridge in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 1969) p. 2.
However, since K. M. Burton said ‘Our knowledge of Cambridge education in the seventeenth century is still in rather an elementary stage’ (‘Cambridge Exercises in the Seventeenth Century’, The Eagle, 54 [Jan. 1951] 248), several books like those of Costello, Kearney and Fletcher have made up some of the deficiency.
Written c. 1420. Parts of these stylised disputations are printed in app. C. pp. 643–7 of Statuta Antiqua Universitatis Oxoniensis, ed. S. Gibson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931).
Amhurst, Terrae-Filius, speech no. 21 (28 March 1721) vol. I p. 113.
See also C. Wesley, A Guide to Syllogism, or, A Manual of Logic; Comprehending an Account of the Manner of Disputation Now Practiced in the Schools at Cambridge (Cambridge, 1832) p. 112.
MS Dc. 8. 17, p. 18; MS Dc. 7. 91, pp. 13–14. A Collège de Sorbonne statute of 1344 required that the master impose silence if the disputants seemed ‘to contend for vanity rather than truth’: L. Thorndike, University Records and Life in the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944) p. 198.
G. Peacock, Observations on the Statutes of the University of Cambridge (Cambridge, 1841) pp. 8–10; app. B, pp. lxix–lxxii, lxxxi.
For a concise general description of disputations see E. Porter, Cambridgeshire Customs and Folklore (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969) pp. 273–4.
For a brief description of how a disputation was carried out between master and student, see A. Perreiah, ‘Humanistic Critiques of Scholastic Dialectic’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 13 (1982) 18–20.
Aristotle on Dialectic: The Topics. Proceedings of the Third Symposium Aristotelicum, ed. G. E. L. Owen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968) pp. 277–311.
Whewell’s On the Principles of English University Education (London, 1837) pp. 7–8
and Of a Liberal Education in General; and with Particular Reference to the Leading Studies of the University of Cambridge (London, 1845) pp. 150–1 comment on the disputation as a teaching device
H. D. P. Lee, Zeno of Elea, A Text, with Translation and Notes (Cambridge University Press, 1936) pp. 113–19
wand C. L. Hamblin, Fallacies (London: Methuen, 1970) pp. 54–66, provide discussions of the dialectical background of disputations.
L. Jardine, ‘Lorenzo Valla and the Intellectual Origins of Humanist Dialectic’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 15 (1977) 143–64, provides a good discussion of the origins of the kinds of dialectical contest one finds in the seventeenth century, those based on probability rather than certainty.
N. Bernard, The Life and Death of Dr. James Usher (London, 1656) pp. 31–2.
Of the many accounts of this particular Act, several modern ones are those of J. B. Mullinger, in Cambridge Characteristics in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1867) pp. 50–3
See W. B. S. Taylor, History of the University of Dublin (London, 1845) pp. 235–6
D. C. Heron, The Constitutional History of the University of Dublin (Dublin, 1847) p. 51.
He had a similar success in the seven remaining arguments, to the amazement and delight of an audience who had not expected the young undergraduate to defeat the older man. Cumberland, Memoirs (1806) pp. 74–6.
G. P. Mayhew, ‘Swift and the Tripos Tradition’, Philological Quarterly, 45 (1966) 86–7.
B. Smith and D. Ehninger, ‘The Terrafilial Disputations at Oxford’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 36 (1950) 333.
J. Heywood and T. Wright (eds), Cambridge University Transactions During the Puritan Controversies of the 16th and 17th Centuries (London: Bohn, 1854) vol. II pp. 228 and 31; Maii 8, 1626.
C. W. Scott-Giles, Sidney Sussex College: A Short History (Cambridge University Press, 1951) p. 52.
[J. H. Marsden], College Life in the Time of James the First, as Illustrated by an Unpublished Diary of Sir Symonds D’Ewes … of St. John’s College, Cambridge (London: Parker, 1851) pp. 84–9; the quotation is from ‘Mr. Buck’s Book’ (1665), Queens’ College, Cambridge, Library Archives MS 89, quoted in Peacock, Observations on the Statutes, app. B p. lxix.
G. Dyer (ed.), The Privileges of the University of Cambridge; Together with Additional Observations on Its History, Antiquities, Literature, and Biography (London, 1824) vol. I pp. 328–9.
Anthony à Wood, Athenae Oxoniensis, ed. P. Bliss, 3rd ed. (London, 1813) vol. I p. xci, under the entry for 9 July 1681.
D. Neal, The History of the Puritans, or Protestant Non-Conformists, from the Reformation to the Death of Queen Elizabeth, ed. J. Toulman, vol. IV (Bath, 1793) p. 442 n., quoted in Smith and Ehninger, p. 334 n. 7.
Anthony Wood, The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, Antiquary, of Oxford, 1632–1695, Described by Himself, Collected from His Diaries and Other Papers, ed. A. Clark (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894) pp. 105–6.
Costello pp. 27–30; K. M. Burton, ‘Cambridge Exercises in the Seventeenth Century’, The Eagle, 54 (Jan. 1951) 248–58.
William Wotton, Observations upon The Tale of a Tub (1705), printed in part in app. B of the Guthkelch-Smith ed. of the Tale: see 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1958) pp. 318, 326.
Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis, ed. H. Denifle and A. Chatelain, vol. I (Paris, 1889) pp. 27–9, trans. Thorndike, University Records and Life in the Middle Ages, p. 16.
Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society (1667), ed. J. I. Cope and H. W. Jones (St Louis, Mo.: Washington University Studies, 1959) p. 338; see also pp. 15–16, 325–7, 332, 430.
Concerning laws like those of gravitation and of motion: ‘Have we any reason, assuming that they have always held in the past, to suppose that they will hold in the future? … All arguments which, on the basis of experience, argue as to the future or the unexperienced parts of the past or present, assume the inductive principle; hence we can never use experience to prove the inductive principle without begging the question.’ Bertrand Russell, ‘On Induction’, ch. 6 of The Problems of Philosophy (1912; London: Oxford University Press, 1959). For a defence of scientific conclusions as necessary or conclusive, see S. Toulmin, The Uses of Argument (Cambridge University Press, 1958) p. 168. Were they conclusive, however, there might be fewer or no (what our world calls) advances in the sciences.
p. 33. When Webster complained that the scholastic disputations were about ‘Notions and paper Idols’, Seth Ward of Wadham College, Oxford, replied in his Vindicae Academicarum (Oxford, 1654) p. 41, ‘Was there ever, or can there be, a Disputation about anything else but Notions?’ Quoted in J. B. Mullinger, The University of Cambridge, vol. III (Cambridge University Press, 1911) p. 465.
Roger North, The Autobiography of the Hon. Roger North, ed. A. Jessopp (London: Nutt, 1887) p. 16.
Vicesimus Knox, Essays Moral and Literary, vol. I (London, 1782) pp. 332–3
Blake, ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, Complete Writings of Blake, ed. G. Keynes (London: Oxford University Press, 1966) p. 157: ‘in the mill was Aristotle’s Analytics’, etc.; ‘Jerusalem’, ch. 1 plate 10 11. 7–17, 20–1 and ch. 1 plate 15 11. 9–20; ibid., pp. 629 and 635–6. Keats, Lamia, pt II ll. 227–30, 234–7; letter to B. Bailey, 22 Nov. 1817: ‘I have never yet been able to perceive how any thing can be known for truth by consequitive [sic] reasoning’.
Immanuel Kant, Logic, trans. J. Richardson (London, 1819) pp. 17–18.
Angus De Morgan, ‘Mock Disputations’, Notes and Queries, 2nd Series, 8 (3 Sept. 1859) 191; Wordsworth, Scholae Academicae, pp. 41–2, 61, 218.
In addition to works cited above, the section on ‘The tripos or prevaricator speeches’ draws in order on John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, under the entry for 10 July 1669; Henri d’Andeli, ‘La Battaille des VII Ars’
quoted in part in S. E. Morison, The Founding of Harvard College (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935) p. 10
Benjamin Hoadly, ‘Dedication to the Pope’, An Account of the State of the Roman-Catholick Religion Throughout the World (London, 1715) p. xliv
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Rembert, J.A.W. (1988). Dialectic since the Sixteenth Century. In: Swift and the Dialectical Tradition. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19072-0_4
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