What Is Scholasticism? Origins and the 14th-Century Turn

Scholasticism takes its name from the schools where it was born: first the monasteries and cathedral schools of Latin Europe, between the 9th and 11th centuries, then the universities that start taking shape around 1200. Paris becomes its center over the course of the 12th century, partly because the cathedral authorities allow several competing schools instead of running a single one. Within a few decades, those schools become a full-fledged university. An Oxford university emerges around the same period.

The method: the disputatio

What sets scholasticism apart from other ways of doing philosophy isn’t a subject matter but a way of arguing. In the disputatio, or disputed question, a precise question opens the discussion, arguments for and objections are laid out, and the answer closes by refuting the objections one by one. It’s the pattern Thomas Aquinas follows in every article of his major works, treating each as a question to be answered yes or no.

Worked example: in a disputed question, the teacher first states the question (“Does God exist?”), then lays out the arguments against it as if arguing them himself, then gives his own answer, and finally returns to each initial objection to show where it goes wrong. The reader sees the whole path of the reasoning, not just the conclusion.

How Aristotle arrives

Much of the material scholasticism works from comes from outside Latin Europe. In the 12th and 13th centuries, the works of Aristotle that Boethius had not yet made available are translated into Latin, including the non-logical writings and the Posterior Analytics. In the same period, mainly in Toledo and Sicily, a wide range of Arabic texts is translated into Latin: among them, portions of Avicenna’s great encyclopedic work on Aristotle (including sections on the soul and on metaphysics) and numerous commentaries by Averroes on the same philosopher. Avicenna is regarded as the foremost Arabic philosopher, influential within the Islamic tradition and also on Jewish and Latin philosophy; Averroes’s commentaries, read in translation, prove valuable for Jewish and Christian scholars alike. Readers who want to revisit the Greek starting point can compare this path with the Recap on Aristotle and Plato. The wider picture of these centuries, including patristics and medieval Arabic and Jewish philosophy, is in the Recap on medieval philosophy.

Thomas Aquinas and the synthesis

Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican priest and theologian of Scripture who lived until 1274, is the figure in whom this convergence of sources becomes a system. He decides to join the Order of Preachers during his university studies in Naples, a choice not without controversy; once his talent is recognized, his Dominican superiors send him to study under Albert the Great at the University of Paris, from 1245 to 1248. In Albert the Great he finds a steady guide, among the first to bring Christian theology into sustained dialogue with Greek and Arabic philosophy. The sciences of his time were advancing quickly once the Aristotelian corpus became available in Latin, and Aquinas took them in with remarkable breadth; he follows Avicenna’s lead in giving the senses real weight in human knowledge, and openly criticizes Averroes on the question of the possible intellect as a single faculty shared by all human beings. The method that results, the disputed question, is the same one met above: a question posed at the start of the treatise, answered only after working through the opposing arguments.

The 14th-century turn

The 1300s don’t close the story of scholasticism: they open a phase of internal transformation, made up of condemnations, new schools of thought, and finer distinctions.

In 1277 the bishop of Paris issues an edict targeting, among others, the philosophers Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia. Duns Scotus, shortly after, rejects the Aristotelian account of modality and locates in divine will what determines good and evil. William of Ockham, who died on the night of April 9-10, 1347, at around sixty, pushes this critical line all the way to nominalism: for him, the only universals worth talking about are concepts in the mind and terms in language, and a label like “catness” remains just a way of referring to individual cats. From this view follows the principle known as Occam’s razor: don’t introduce more elements than are needed to explain a phenomenon.

The story of university philosophy running out of steam by the mid-1300s circulates often; the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes instead that this way of doing philosophy stayed alive at universities for at least another three centuries. Readers who want to trace how this crossroads is reached from the side of earlier Christian theology can turn to the Recap on Augustine of Hippo and on those who carried his legacy forward; for the wider frame of the period, the Middle Ages summary is also useful.