Why the Bias against Scholasticism?

[StMartinTours]

I have before me a book published in 1953 called “The Story of Philosophy” by Will Durant. The jacket is adorned with this motto: “A liberal education in itself - one of the best-loved books of our time”. The timeline of the book jumps from Aristotle to Francis Bacon, with a brief chapter called “from Aristotle to the Renaissance”. Here is how he sums up the situation:

“in the thirteenth century all Christendom was startled and stimulated by Arabic and Jewish translations of Aristotle; but the power of the Church was still adequate to secure, through Tomas Aquinas and others, the transmogrification of Aristotle into a medieval theologian. The result was subtlety, not wisdom …] Sooner or later the intellect of Europe would burst out of this shell.”

And that’s it.

The author says this in the Preface to the Second Edition:

“Many of the criticisms [of the first edition] were disagreeably just. The Story of Philosophy was, and is, shot through with defects. First of all, it was incomplete. The total omission of scholastic philosophy was an outrage, forgivable only in one who had suffered much from it in college and seminary, and resented it thereafter as rather a disguised theology than an honest philosophy”.

So why the hate? Why is what my education led me to believe was a mighty edifice of thought not even considered by some people to be philosophy at all? Why was this author apparently considered an authority, his book a definitive study of philosophy, when it was so blatantly biased?

 

[midori]

My copy’s from 1926, and from the library of a deceased priest.

The To the Reader bit goes like this:

This book is not a complete history of philosophy. it is an attempt to humanize knowledge by centering the story of speculative thought around certain dominant personalities. Certain lesser figures have been omitted in order that those selected might have the space required to make them live. hence the inadequate treatment of the half-legendary pre-Socratics, the Stoics, and Epicureans, the Scholastics, and the epistemologists. The author believes that epistemology has kidnapped modern philosophy, and well nigh ruined it; he hopes for the time when the study of the knowledge-process will be recognized as the business of the science of psychology, and when philosophy will again be understood as the synthetic interpretation of all experience rather than the analytic description of the mode and process of experience itself. Analysis belongs to science, and gives us knowledge; philosophy must provide a synthesis for wisdom.

(The author would like to thank… blah, blah, blah)
Will Durant
New York, 1926

I don’t know if that helps, but I thought it might be useful for you to read the author’s excuse/reasoning for his deliberate omission in the first edition.

 

[yablabo]

So why the hate? Why is what my education led me to believe was a mighty edifice of thought not even considered by some people to be philosophy at all? Why was this author apparently considered an authority, his book a definitive study of philosophy, when it was so blatantly biased?

In my limited experience, people hate Scholasticism because it demands that we temper our philosophy by the articles we believe by faith and not the other way around. Most people believe that we should delete all revelation from the equation and build a philosophy from the ground up based upon only what we can know by sense. This is absurd in my mind since revelation is so key to everything in human existence.

The author and his book that you say were considered an authority and definitive, respectively, were probably considered such by those who were supported in their spiritual investments by what he had to say.

– Nicole

 

[Shike]

Perhaps many people dislike scholasticism as a method because it, as said above, uses revelation for inspiration.

The real fun, however, comes when one can show, with regards to Aquinas for instance, that the arguments rely on reason alone and do not make any appeal to faith.

 

[James224]

I have before me a book published in 1953 called “The Story of Philosophy” by Will Durant. The jacket is adorned with this motto: “A liberal education in itself - one of the best-loved books of our time”. The timeline of the book jumps from Aristotle to Francis Bacon, with a brief chapter called “from Aristotle to the Renaissance”. Here is how he sums up the situation:

“in the thirteenth century all Christendom was startled and stimulated by Arabic and Jewish translations of Aristotle; but the power of the Church was still adequate to secure, through Tomas Aquinas and others, the transmogrification of Aristotle into a medieval theologian. The result was subtlety, not wisdom …] Sooner or later the intellect of Europe would burst out of this shell.”

And that’s it.

The author says this in the Preface to the Second Edition:

“Many of the criticisms [of the first edition] were disagreeably just. The Story of Philosophy was, and is, shot through with defects. First of all, it was incomplete. The total omission of scholastic philosophy was an outrage, forgivable only in one who had suffered much from it in college and seminary, and resented it thereafter as rather a disguised theology than an honest philosophy”.

So why the hate? Why is what my education led me to believe was a mighty edifice of thought not even considered by some people to be philosophy at all? Why was this author apparently considered an authority, his book a definitive study of philosophy, when it was so blatantly biased?

Well, as most modern philosophers, he probably hadn’t read St Thomas’ philosophy. Not really. From Ockham, and especially after Descartes, they simply pushed Thomistic Philosophy off the table. They never disproved it but simply asserted that it was false. The environment had a lot to do with it. For example, after the Protestant Revolution, Fideism was on the rise. The philosophers did away with Universals,First Causes and Final Causes. St Thomas’ Philosophy was not a disguised Theology. It was solidly based on classical philosophy in the greek philosophers such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Matter of fact, the Catholic Church at Vatican I declared that God’s existence could be proved from reason alone! They did this to distance the Church from fideism which is what modern philosophers were trying to say at the time about Christianity. God’s existence and the immortality of the soul can be proved by reason alone.

 

[MindOverMatter2]

“Why the Bias against Scholasticism?”

They didn’t like the name perhaps? I’m thinking that they felt the name to be a brutalisation of the English language, tantamount to food poisoning? They pleaded to the pope to change it because the mere sound of it might cause a holy war, but their begging fell on death ears?

yeah…I think that’s the answer.

That’s the best I can do at the moment, I am still waiting for my new brain to come through the post.

 

[Fr_of_Jazz]

I have before me a book published in 1953 called “The Story of Philosophy” by Will Durant. The jacket is adorned with this motto: “A liberal education in itself - one of the best-loved books of our time”. The timeline of the book jumps from Aristotle to Francis Bacon, with a brief chapter called “from Aristotle to the Renaissance”. Here is how he sums up the situation:

“in the thirteenth century all Christendom was startled and stimulated by Arabic and Jewish translations of Aristotle; but the power of the Church was still adequate to secure, through Tomas Aquinas and others, the transmogrification of Aristotle into a medieval theologian. The result was subtlety, not wisdom …] Sooner or later the intellect of Europe would burst out of this shell.”

And that’s it.

The author says this in the Preface to the Second Edition:

“Many of the criticisms [of the first edition] were disagreeably just. The Story of Philosophy was, and is, shot through with defects. First of all, it was incomplete. The total omission of scholastic philosophy was an outrage, forgivable only in one who had suffered much from it in college and seminary, and resented it thereafter as rather a disguised theology than an honest philosophy”.

So why the hate? Why is what my education led me to believe was a mighty edifice of thought not even considered by some people to be philosophy at all? Why was this author apparently considered an authority, his book a definitive study of philosophy, when it was so blatantly biased?

Oddly enough Durant has a large section on Medieval intellectual life in his work The Story of Civilization, volume 4 The Age of Faith chapters XXXIV-XXXVII. It is a fairly sympathetic and informative treatment considering the source.

To your larger point: the treatment of scholasticism is not always biased and hostile.

See
Marcia L. Colish, Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition: 400-1400. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. --in the Yale Intellectual History of the West series. This is very fair and informative period.
amazon.com/Medieval-Foundations-Western-Intellectual-Tradition/dp/0300078528/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1314299787&sr=1-1

also re science
Edward Grant, Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages. NY: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
amazon.com/Foundations-Modern-Science-Middle-Ages/dp/0521567629/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1314299843&sr=1-1

David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992.
amazon.com/Beginnings-Western-Science-Philosophical-Institutional/dp/0226482057/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1314299868&sr=1-1