Transcript: 431. Calvin Normore on Scholasticism

A discussion of the history and philosophical significance of scholasticism from medieval times to early modernity, and even today.

Transcript: History of Philosophy 431. Calvin Normore on Scholasticism

Note: this transcription was produced by automatic voice recognition software. It has been corrected by hand, but may still contain errors. We are very grateful to Tim Wittenborg for his production of the automated transcripts and for the efforts of a team of volunteer listeners who corrected the texts.

Peter Adamson: We're going to talk about scholasticism, and this is a broad and long running phenomenon. And I thought actually we could start by talking about how long running it is. People think of it as going back to maybe the 12th century, like the time of Abelard, or maybe even further to a character like Anselm. But maybe let's not worry too much about where it starts. Let's think about how long it lasts. How long do you see scholasticism as being a significant force in European philosophy?

Calvin Normore: Well, I actually think it is still a significant force. So let me explain a little bit about why. So the way I think of scholasticism is that it's a way of doing philosophy. It's a way of doing philosophy by commentary on a set curriculum of texts. Right. So and I think it probably actually began in antiquity. People say, for example, that Porphyry proposed a curriculum that began with Aristotle and had in its higher reaches the divine Plato. And I don't really know whether it was the universal custom in the schools at that point to proceed by having the students work on the texts and the teachers write commentaries on them. But I suspect it was. And so by the time you get to Anselm, it's well established that commenting on texts is a way of doing it. But Anselm himself, for example, doesn't do that. And really, Abelard does. And you're right that I think in the 12th century, people began to think of this as the way of doing philosophy, rather than just a way of doing philosophy. And of course, once the universities get going, by say, the middle of the 13th century, there's a set curriculum which involves the texts of Aristotle, beginning with logic, continuing sometimes with physics, sometimes with stuff on the soul, but always treating one of those and then the other. And then finally, metaphysics. And the texts are taken from Aristotle. And so the way that a teacher would proceed is by lecturing on the texts, by commenting on them. And that developed its own way of proceeding, too, because the custom came to be to look for particular questions that you could take up that were suggested by the text. So I think this really continued well into the 17th century as a normal way of proceeding, even into the 18th. And we do it, too. So, for example, when I teach, I often have a syllabus, which is a set of texts, and I comment on them and raise questions and so on. So we really are, for the most part, scholastic. Now, in the 17th century, of course, we saw something else. And in parts of the 20th and 21st century, too, where people who weren't lecturing on set texts would write essays or books or treatises and so on. And they weren't commenting on anything. So they weren't doing scholastic philosophy. But in the universities, I think it probably never really died and is still with us.

Peter Adamson: I like that idea of scholasticism as a way of doing philosophy, because something I've thought about a little bit is that in other traditions, for example, in the Islamic world, but I think you could say the same thing about India. There's a very similar pattern where a certain body of text becomes like the standard set of texts, the kind of canon or the basis of a curriculum. And then philosophy gets done by commenting on it. It might be Avicenna or it might be Buddhist literature or Vedic texts of various kinds in India. But I think you're definitely right that scholasticism is a mode of philosophy, which doesn't need to be tied to any particular historical context. I think it's really insightful way of thinking about it. Let me ask you something about something you actually just said, which is that they start with logic, at least in the medieval period, the scholastic project starts with logic. So at least the students are starting to study logic and they're doing this as teenagers. Sometimes that's all they do, right? They leave the university before getting onto the other topics. And so this is a really core part of the scholastic projects in the period we've been looking at, the medieval period up to the 16th century. Would you think that this is an area where much progress was made after, say, the 14th century? Like in say, 15th, 16th, 17th century, are they actually getting anywhere in terms of thinking about logic and Aristotelian logic, or are they just retreading what's been achieved by the end of the high scholastic period?

Calvin Normore: Well, I think the first thing we have to keep in mind is that what they meant by logic is broader than what we mean by it. I mean, so if you look, for example, at Isidore of Seville's encyclopedic etymologies in the sixth century, he goes back and forth between dialectic and logic. And dialectic, of course, I mean, the very word itself suggests some kind of interchange with people in a way that logic from Logos doesn't. So they, I think, had this broader conception of logic. And that meant that what we call philosophy of language is often part of what they would treat as logic. The way I see this history goes something like this. Aristotle and Cicero and others had written various kinds of books. I mean, Aristotle had his analytics and topics and Cicero wrote topics, and there were various kinds of things like that. And so in antiquity, there were broader conceptions of logic where you dealt with various possible kinds of fallacies and you dealt with various kinds of ways of carrying on dialogue with people and so on. When Boethius set about translating the works of Plato and Aristotle into Latin, he only got as far as the early parts of Aristotle's logic and bit of Cicero. Right. So that's really all that the Latin folk in the Middle Ages had right up until probably nearly the 12th century anyway, when they finally did get things like, as you said, bits of Avicenna and they got bits of Aristotle. So that shaped the picture early on, the fact that they only had these texts. But then something happens and I don't know when it happens. I suspect the 12th century, but I don't know. And that is this. If you look at Aristotle's logical work, he has a term logic, right, his so-called syllogistic. He does not have what we think of as a propositional logic. But the Stoics did. And in the 12th century, you begin to get marriages of Aristotelian syllogistic and Stoic logic. Perhaps it was a lot earlier, but I know it best from the 12th century. And so what you begin to get at that point is a new expansion beyond anything Aristotle had done that looks rather familiar to us. 
Now, Abelard, for all of his genius, really tried to do this, but he also tried to develop an account of what validity was, which is more like what people nowadays think of as relevance logic. That is, in order for an argument to be valid, there had to be a deep semantic connection between the premises and the conclusion, not merely that it was impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false. And a man about whom we know relatively little, Albrecht of Rheims, showed that Abelard's development of this was inconsistent. And so suddenly you began to get a new way of thinking about logic, what we now think of as classical logic, right? The propositional calculus that we have now would have been completely familiar, I think, to an early 13th century person if they learned the symbolism. OK, so that went on, as you say, into the 14th century. And what's more, people began to develop new techniques. They developed what we call a theory of consequences, which is a theory of something of kinds of inference that you can't capture in syllogistic. But it all happened against this background of the fact that Abelard's relevance logic had been proved inconsistent. And so we were now looking at a kind of validity that we would find very familiar. At the end of the 13th century, the way I see it, people began to try to go back to stronger conceptions of validity that required a tighter connection between the conclusion and the premises. And slowly, slowly, slowly, they began then to re-emphasize Aristotelian syllogistic. So many of the technical developments that you'd find in the 14th century started to go by the wayside. But this conception of validity and the notions, for example, of formal validity versus some kind of semantic validity and so on, those were developed. And I think they continued to be developed for some time after the 14th century. 
But the other thing that happened, going back to this thought that logic was much broader subject for them, was a new emphasis on discovery. So Cicero, for example, had been interested in how you might come up with arguments, not just how you might evaluate them. And Aristotle in the topics had the same idea. And so what you find in the 15th and 16th centuries is not really the development of what we would now call logic, but a development of a kind of theory of discovery. People call it method. And so you find in people like Zabarella and Ramos and so on, an emphasis on this kind of method. And that continues well into the 17th century. So in that area, I think there's new development, but not in what we would now call logic.

Peter Adamson: Is that an influence from the humanist tradition? Because in rhetoric, they would have been very interested in the project of finding arguments. And so they naturally came to be interested in the problem of discovery.

Calvin Normore: Yeah, I think there was a real influence there from rhetoric. And in a way, the new emphasis on what Cicero was doing fit that perfectly. I think you're right.

Peter Adamson: Maybe we can just say a little bit more about that very interesting idea you mentioned about, as you put it, how tight the connection in the logical inference needs to be, because I think that's really interesting. So I just want to make sure that listeners understand what we're talking about: you could have an inference like if two plus two equals four, then brown is a color, but two plus two is equal to four. Therefore, brown is a color. So if all you're interested in is something like truth preservation, right? Like if the premises are true and it's valid, then you get a nice argument and it's okay. But someone who was more interested in relevance will say, well, that's not really a good inference because two plus two being equal to four doesn't have anything to do with whether or not brown is a color. Is that basically the idea?

Calvin Normore: Yeah, that's right. And if you look at Aristotle's syllogistic, all of the valid inferences in that have a real connection between the meanings of the terms and the premises and the meanings of the terms in the conclusion. And if you insist that you have that sort of connection, then you give up, for example, the idea that from an impossibility, anything follows or that what's necessary just follows from anything. Right. And so when Albrecht of Rheims showed that Abelard's picture was inconsistent, people began to hunt around for a conception of validity. And I think they did settle upon the one that we now use, namely that an argument is valid if it's truth preserving in the sense that it's impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false. Now, what I think happened at the end of the 14th century in particular is that people began to think, as you were just suggesting, that somehow that's not a good argument. I mean, just by simply proposing something that turns out to be impossible and discovering that, well, then if that were true, anything would be true. You haven't established anything of philosophical or any other interest. And so they began to look for these tighter connections of validity and to give up some of the ideas that had been circulating earlier.

Peter Adamson: It really gets at the question of what logic even is. Right. Because you think relevance is important, then you're sticking with this ancient idea that logic is the so-called instrument or "organon" of philosophy. So it's really for something to be put to using real philosophical reasoning or other kinds of reasoning. Whereas if you think it's merely about truth preservation, then it becomes almost more like mathematics, like in a formal system. Right.

Calvin Normore: Yeah, I mean, of course, most of the cases in which you're going to preserve truth probably will turn out to be cases in which there's some kind of semantic or formal connection. One of the things that appears probably for the first time in the late 12th, early 13th century is a clear conception of logical form. That is the idea that you're looking at the syntax of an argument to see whether or not it's a good argument. Of course, that had been present earlier, but not the reflection on it, I think, had not been present earlier. And so what we now call formal logic, for example, which depends on this idea that there's a form to the argument, I think that is probably a late 12th or early 13th century development. People point to people like Robert Kilwardby, and that, of course, is an idea that gets developed much when once we see a connection between mathematics and logic, which they didn't really emphasize at all.

Peter Adamson: Yeah, I mean, the only reason in this period where they might be comparable is that they're both, so to speak, formal systems.

Calvin Normore: Yeah. Formal in our sense, right? I mean, they didn't think of it, I think, as in that way formal. They did look to see which arguments would be, say, by the late 13th century, certainly, even by the early 13th century, they were looking to see which arguments were good arguments in virtue of their form, but they never developed a kind of reflective theory of formal argument the way that you find in, say, late 19th century, 20th century logics.

Peter Adamson: By the way, let me just mention that one of my favorite examples of this dispute, which goes back to antiquity, is that the Stoics observed that it's a good rule of logic that if P, then P. So everything applies itself. And then the Aristotelian said, well, that's not useful. So we don't need that.

Calvin Normore: Right. Here's an even more interesting one, actually. If P, then if not P, then P. Or if not P, then P, then P. Right. Look at that one. If not P, then P, then P. That's a theorem of contemporary logics. Whether they would have thought it a good argument is a good question.

Peter Adamson: Okay. So you've just given us quite a magisterial picture of logic over something like a thousand years. So it seems almost greedy to ask for more, but I'm going to do it anyway. Where would be other areas of philosophy where the moves that they're making in logic have some kind of consequences? Because I mean, sort of imagining, okay, they're starting off all of these university students with logic. And then presumably they keep referring back to logic when they reach, you know, natural philosophy. Or epistemology or theory of the solar metaphysics or even theology. How do you think that their moves in logic then feed into other areas of philosophy? Sorry, that's a big question.

Calvin Normore: One way that it does is what we would now think of as thinking about critical thinking, i.e. somebody proposes an argument to you and now you have to evaluate the argument. Is it a good argument? And of course this can happen in epistemology, metaphysics, theology, right? And so if you've got that kind of training, which they all had in their first year of university study, then you can hone in on this question, right? You can look to see, okay, what am I committed to if I accept the premises that that went forward? And so what you find is a kind of clarity of argumentative structure that I think you don't find often later when people start to write essays where they don't have to explain in any detail why the argument works, right? So that's one thing. I mean, the methods that were used in other areas tended to be more technical in the sense that a master would say propose an argument and then try to show you how the argument actually worked. But there's also a kind of situation in which there were very puzzling issues that came up. Particularly in theology, which had to be evaluated logically. One of the classic cases is whether, for example, in Christian Trinitarian theology, the Latin Church held that the Holy Spirit was in some sense issued from both the Father and the Son, whereas the Greek Church held no, just from the Father. And so now the question was, if one adopted, say, the Greek position, if we're one of Latin, well, the Greek position from the Latin perspective was impossible. That is, the antecedent, you know, the Holy Spirit descends from the Father alone would have been regarded as an impossibility. So now the question is, what would follow? And this, of course, was important if you were trying to reconcile the churches. So one of the things that happened was that people develop these disputational techniques, which they called 'obligaciones,' where what you would do is you would accept a premise and a two person situation. The respondent would accept a premise and the opponent would try to show that if you accepted that premise, you would be led to a contradiction or an absurdity. And so you'd have these dialectical games, people think of them as games, but sometimes they were much more than that, in which people would try to work out what the consequences of accepting these premises would be, even if they themselves had no interest in the premises, just to see how this worked. And in theology, of course, displayed an important role. And this provided also a kind of training, which then got reflected in other sorts of philosophy.

Peter Adamson: Right. So part of the training here is, let's assume what my opponent believes, which is false. And now I see what follows from it. And maybe I can show that something else follows from it that even my opponent would think is false. And that's how I'd refute them with what's called modus tollens. So that seems to push in the direction of saying that logic is important for them in other areas, primarily because of method. I mean, that definitely seems right. So what you were saying about essays. I mean, someone we covered recently in the podcast, fairly recently, is Montaigne. He would be the ultimate example of someone who does not write like a scholastic. Right. He's sort of wandering around, musing, sort of sharing whatever ideas have come to his mind. And if you tried to press him and say, well, can you explain to me exactly how the argumentative structure is supposed to work that you were using? He would probably just laugh at you. And in general, we sort of think that humanists like this kind of meandering, musing style, maybe even in Erasmus, it's true. And they then say that the scholastics are being pedantic because they're so fixated on valid argument structure. But I guess it follows from what you're saying that in some ways, philosophically, we should think that the scholastics are onto something. Right. Because it's really good to know what follows from what you're assuming.

Calvin Normore: Yeah. So one of the things that I think happens with the curricular shifts at the end of the 16th and early 17th centuries is that there's a shift of interest. So remember, in the scholastic period, what you're doing is commenting on a set body of text. You're really trying to understand how that text works and what its consequences are. You're not trying to discover new things that go well beyond anything in the text. That's not part of the project. I mean, there may be people doing that, but they're not doing it in the universities as part of the project. So once you get this idea that, well, yeah, that's all well and good. Yes, we can evaluate, but we don't really care deeply about these texts anymore. What we care about is exploring something else. Right. And we don't have any reason to think the texts are closely connected with it. Then what you get is an emphasis not on tight argumentative structure, but on exploratory essays and things of that kind. Method, as you were saying, then becomes important. Is there a way that we can reason which will give us new discoveries, you know, beyond anything we've thought of before that becomes important and less important than to really grasp the structure of the argument that you've got and to check it to see if it actually is a good one.

Peter Adamson: Yeah, something else I think might have played a role is that in Aristotle, the criteria for knowledge in the strict and proper sense, which are laid out in the posterior analytics are so ambitious. We've talked about this in other episodes. You have to have necessary universal propositions as your premises. And that's just a very tall order. Right.

Calvin Normore: It is a tall order. Yeah.

Peter Adamson: In the medieval period, people also in Arabic, by the way, but in the Latin tradition, sticking with that, it seems that people started to have doubts about whether that was ever going to be satisfiable or certainly whether it could be satisfied in most cases. So you start retrenching to some kind of lower standard of knowledge or lower standard of demonstration or proof. Of course, that have gone hand in hand with this interest in rhetoric, you know, merely convincing arguments or just sort of explorations of a topic.

Calvin Normore: Yeah. And so you find, for example, in Descartes, the idea that if you can come up with a hypothesis that explains the phenomena that you've got in front of you, you're finished. The fact that somebody might propose an alternative hypothesis is not important. So that's this idea that we're looking for an explanation. We're not looking for the best possible explanation. Now, in the background, there might be some assumption that if you can get an explanation, it's the only possible one or something. But certainly they don't actually present it that way. So both Descartes and Hobbes make this move that let's try to find a hypothesis that will explain some phenomena that we're dealing with. And that's our task. From a scholastic perspective, that's not the task. Right. We're not looking for an hypothesis to explain something. We're looking for what must follow, given that you've accepted certain premises. And that is because, as you say, the test of knowledge is necessity. That's the criteria that you're looking for.

Peter Adamson: And also the scholastics think that what you're trying to do is investigate essences. Goes together with this idea about necessity.

Calvin Normore: By the late 17th century, you find people denying that you get any grip on essences.

Peter Adamson: Is that also connected to something else that people often connect to early modern philosophy? The scientific method. Because the scientific method, I mean, we'll be talking about this a lot in episodes to come. But one thing you can say about it is that you're just trying to see whether a hypothesis fits with a certain set of observations. Right. And so that's a lot like what you were just saying. Like, well, my hypothesis is compatible with what I'm seeing, but I haven't ruled out that there's any other hypothesis that could be compatible with the same observations.

Calvin Normore: Yep. And so you'll begin to get something you again don't get in, say, the period from the 12th to the late 15th century very much, which is a question of how you would adjudicate between hypotheses that currently account for the same phenomena. This shift, as you say, in the standard of knowledge, right, the abandonment of the idea that we can have an absolute certainty based on a necessity. I think might be a significant move.

Peter Adamson: Some of the examples we've just mentioned are kind of familiar in the sense that we have people like Descartes or Hobbes moving away from a scholastic approach. And of course, they're famous for polemicizing against scholasticism and saying 'this is all a waste of time.' But on the other hand, people like Descartes were trained in a scholastic setting. I mean, not just Descartes, but in general, like many early modern philosophers either were trained at universities or, you know, Jesuit academies or whatever, or they at least knew quite a lot about scholastic literature. So are there more kind of positive legacies or influences from scholasticism within early modern philosophy that you would pick out?

Calvin Normore: Most of the philosophical views that people articulate would have been relatively familiar to earlier thinkers. It's not as though people abandoned the whole framework and the controversies often revolved around ideas that had come up already, say, in the 13th, 14th centuries. You know, you get debates about, say, whether or not goal-directed reasoning can be reduced to what we would now call causal reasoning. The technical vocabulary, whether or not final causes can be reduced to efficient causes. You get debates about whether you can explain things just in terms of matter or whether you need to do it in terms of matter and structure, i.e. matter and form. So all of that is still very much there. I don't detect a kind of complete reversal or complete abandonment of the framework that people had used in earlier times. The methodology has begun to shift and slowly, slowly new ideas are, of course, being introduced. But it's not like it's a tsunami. I mean, as you say, all these folks were trained inside scholastic institutions and it left its mark on the wall. They tended to pick up one piece of what they learned and go with it and expand it beyond what anyone had done before, leaving other things behind. But it was one piece of what they learned.

Peter Adamson: Going back full circle to where we started, you mentioned that in a way, people who study philosophy now are still doing it in the scholastic way, right? There's a curriculum, you are trained on that curriculum, you're supposed to learn to comment on it critically and so on. And so in a sense, scholasticism is still with us in terms of the substantive teachings of the scholastics. It's not like most 21st century philosophers spend a lot of time thinking about medieval or early modern scholasticism. Do you think that this stuff has become kind of merely antiquarian interests or is it something that's really rewarding for us philosophically still?

Calvin Normore: Well, my own view about this is that to understand a concept, you have to understand how it came to be the way it is. And many of our contested concepts are concepts with complicated histories, and that's why they're contested. Notions like the self, for example, or person or even matter, what would count for something to be physical. All these are concepts that we don't really have a univocal picture of, and it's because they depend upon an earlier history. So to the extent that we're really going to get to understand them, we, I think, need to understand how they came to be that way. And that means understanding their history. And a good deal of that history was shaped in the period that we've been talking about.