 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, I'll Teach You Differences, British Scholasticism. Here's my favourite anecdote about Oxford University. In the middle of the 19th century, so the story goes, the beams in the roof of the New College dining hall needed to be replaced. The fellows of the college asked the forester whether he could help. He replied, we were wondering when you'd ask, and explained that a grove of trees had been planted 500 years earlier and protected by generations of foresters for exactly this purpose. Though it seems that this story isn't entirely accurate, it does convey a deeper truth about Oxford. As one of Europe's oldest universities, it is distinguished by tradition and very long-term planning. It is a place where change tends to happen slowly. When things have been done in a certain way for the last several centuries, why start doing things differently now? Yet as far back as the 16th century, the fellows of Oxford did start to do things differently, very differently in fact. Even this already long-lived institution could not remain untouched by the intellectual and spiritual upheavals of the Renaissance and Reformation. Some of the changes were at the institutional level. The establishment of grammar schools meant the universities were not the only place where the young could study. Thanks to this development and the rise of Protestantism with its focus on reading scripture for oneself, literacy became more widespread, at least among boys and men. The period also saw the emergence of other institutions of higher education. Notably, the Inns of Court in London, which had existed for some time, became an important center of legal study and general education in the 15th and 16th centuries. At the old universities, meanwhile, students increasingly took instruction directly from masters in an early version of the tutorial system that is, of course, still in use at Oxford and Cambridge to this day. They might even live in the homes of their tutors. Elite students would hire their tutors directly, often satisfying themselves with gaining general reading and mathematical skills without bothering to finish off their degree. Poorer students kept the wolf from the door by working as servants for their well-born classmates, as we saw Edmund Spenser do. And then there were the changes to the teaching curriculum. The schoolmen could not just keep reading ancient philosophy in medieval Latin translations and writing sophisticated and technical, some might say pedantic, logical treatises as they had been doing since the 14th century. The impact of humanism and Protestant polemics against the superfluous sophistry of the schools rendered all that obsolete. But as on the continent, scholasticism in Britain proved surprisingly resilient and able to adapt. Around the end of the 15th century, university masters were still working within the framework familiar to us from our look at late medieval philosophy, yet they were already innovating within that framework in ways that foreshadowed more radical changes to come. We'll be illustrating that with the thought of a Scottish philosopher who established himself at Paris named John Mayer or John Major. He wrote his name in both ways. He was born near Edinburgh in about 1467 and studied at Cambridge University, then Paris, where he rose to the level of teaching theology at the Sorbonne. His time in Paris made him a well-known figure, and Nuff so that Rabelais parodied him as the author of How to Make Puddings. Some of the students who would have seen him teach were well-known too, like John Knox, George Buchanan, and even Ignatius Loyola and John Calvin. Closer in approach to Mayer himself were a circle of fellow scholastics who were his students or students of his students. They included David Cranston, George Lockhart, Gilbert Crabbe, and William Manderson. This group helped to make scholarly connections between France and Scotland stronger than those between France and England. Both Lockhart and Manderson, for instance, held the post of rector at the University of St. Andrews. Mayer and his colleagues produced numerous treatises on logic, still the core of the arts curriculum provided to young students. Though they wrote in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, their methods were still broadly those of late medieval logicians. These were men who were refining and innovating within an established tradition. This means, for starters, that they wrote in a highly technical Latin that could be understood by trained schoolmen all over Europe, and nobody else. The Latin of these logical treatises was all but an artificial language. It was regimented to avoid ambiguity, unlike natural languages such as Scots, English, or French. The goal here is, in a way, exactly the reverse of the humanist enterprise. Here, Latin is not shaped for rhetorical excellence. Rather, all rhetorical and merely conventional features are stripped away to reveal pure logical form. The result was a Latin that might strike humanists as barbaric, but had the advantage of capturing perfectly the contents of the mind. For the Aristotelian schoolmen, the language of the mind is the same for everyone, regardless of what language they speak over dinner. To take a simple example, the logic of the schoolmen dealt extensively with propositions in which one term is predicated of another. For instance, the giraffe is tall. Here, the subject term is the giraffe, the predicate is tall, and the verb is serves to connect them. A sentence like the giraffe runs doesn't look like it fits that structure, but the schoolmen force it to do so by understanding it to mean that the predicate running is asserted to hold of the giraffe. Even statements about existence are construed accordingly. If I say, there is a giraffe, or the giraffe exists, this means that existence is predicated of the giraffe. On the other hand, Mayer and his colleagues did not ignore linguistic complexity when it did seem to have consequences for reasoning and logical implication. One illustration is their handling of verb tenses. They did not just ignore this, pretending that it is only a feature of natural language, but they did say some pretty counterintuitive things about it. For instance, that we can take the following proposition to be true, a child was an adult. The reasoning here is that, unless otherwise specified, the word child should mean any person who is or was a child, and all adults have at some point been such a person. Other examples of propositions that come out true and for the same reason are, a living man is dead, and an old man will be a boy. These propositions, weird though they may be, still fit the predication structure preferred by the schoolmen, but it had been clear since antiquity that not all propositions can be translated into a subject, a predicate, and a connector, or copula. Already, the Stoics had devoted attention to conditional statements, which have the form, if A, then B. Long before Mayer and his group came along, conditionals had been integrated into Aristotelian logic. But there was still some work to do here, as when these schoolmen explored the implications of promises. A statement like, if you give me a giraffe, then I'll never say a bad word about you again, looks at first like it should behave the same as, if Socrates is standing, then he is not sitting. But it turns out that it doesn't, because Socrates is standing makes it impossible for him to sit, whereas you're giving me a giraffe does not make it impossible for me to badmouth you, it just means that I would be breaking my promise. At this point, you're quite likely sympathizing with those who saw the scholastics as practicing pointless pedantry. Like, for example, Philipp Melanchthon, who remarked of one work by Mayer, what wagonloads of trifles. If he is a specimen of the Paris doctors, no wonder they are unfavorable to Luther. But let's not be too hasty, because Mayer and his students were very interested in applying logic to important philosophical issues and concrete situations. Take, for instance, their handling of belief. Ideally, we should always build our beliefs on rock-solid foundations, which are the self-evident principles from which other beliefs are derived by the laws of logic. A paradigm of such reasoning would be geometry, where we start with axioms and use them to prove further propositions. For Mayer, this same structure is found in ethics. We start from obviously true rules of moral reasoning, which can look rather banal, like one should do whatever is good. Mayer uses the medieval term sinderesis for our grasp of these principles, whereas he calls conscience whatever we go on to infer from the principles. Given the complexity of ethical reasoning, it is always possible that we may make mistakes, but morally speaking, we should always do what we take to follow from the principles. It is a sin to do what you take to be sinful, even if it isn't in fact sinful. In many cases, though, Mayer seems to be skeptical about how far deduction can take us in the practical sphere. Reaching the right ethical decision could call for drawing analogies, working through concrete consequences, and the like. For this reason, it has been argued that his writings supply us with an early example of something we'll talk about soon when we get to the Jesuits, casuistry. This means engaging in moral reasoning on a case-by-case basis. We see Mayer do this, for instance, when he takes up the problem of paying for insurance. It may seem that someone who insures a shipment by boat is taking money from the merchant without performing any legitimate service. That looks uncomfortably close to the condemned practice of usury, where one person charges another for the service of lending them money. But Mayer argues that the insurer is more like a paid mercenary who protects the shipment, because they are taking money to share risk. This is the kind of argument we need to give when it is not possible to find ironclad arguments grounded in first principles. The uncertainty we often feel about our own beliefs also plays a significant role in religion. Mayer has an interesting treatment of the faith by which believers feel certainty about their religious commitments. He comes rather close to the modern-day understanding by saying that a person is performing an act of faith if they believe something for which they have insufficient evidence. If a giraffe is standing right in front of you, then you don't need to have faith in the giraffe, but your reasons for having faith in God's offer of salvation are not quite so compelling. On the other hand, Mayer thinks that faith does require some basis. You can't just decide to believe whatever you want for no reason, like by deciding by a sheer act of will that the number of stars is even. So faith must be a cooperation between the intellect, which grasps reasons to believe something, and the will, which moves the person actually to believe it. Mayer had the chance to put his own beliefs on the line too. As Melanchthon's sarcastic remark implies, the doctors of Paris were significant public figures whose opinions mattered. Mayer was consulted on such questions as the validity of Henry VIII's first marriage, he rejected the king's attempt to set Catherine aside, and the notorious Reuchlin affair over the use of Jewish learning. He also wrote a History of Greater Britain to advocate for the Union of England and Scotland. On more abstract political questions, Mayer took views that can be counted as moderate for the time, comparable to French thinkers like Claude de Cézels. Like Cézels, he was a monarchist, but one who thought that the monarch's power is subject to some restrictions by his subjects. Mayer was certainly not enthusiastic about the prospect of tyrannicide, stating that the toppling of the much-criticized Richard II in England was a case of frivolous rashness. Still, in extreme cases, the people do have the right to depose their monarch, since monarchial power is based on appointment by the people. He drew a typical scholastic distinction here, explaining that the ruler is normally, in Latin, regularità, in authority over the subjects, but the people retain a dispositional, habitualità, authority. His views on church government were similar. The Pope, like the king, is an instrument by which the community secures its own welfare, but in spiritual instead of temporal affairs. As far as I know, no historian has ever thought to compare John Mayer to Marjorie Kemp, which is understandable enough. Mayer lived a few generations later and had almost nothing in common with her, except this. Both of them seemed to fit a late medieval rather than Renaissance context. Even if Mayer was ahead of his time on occasion, as when he pioneered casuistic methods and ethics, his writings on logic and other topics would, for the most part, have been immediately recognizable to 14th century schoolmen. Many of the ideas I just mentioned appear in his commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, which had, for centuries, been the standard occasion for theological discussion. It was this commentary that prompted Melanchthon's damning assessment, actually. His circle was already feeling the pressure of such criticisms. David Cranston began his own commentary on the same work with a dialogue where two speakers debate the value of scholasticism. Cranston distances himself from time-wasting technicalities, but emphasizes that, often, legitimate theological concerns do call for sophisticated and advanced reflection. Given the cultural forces arrayed against this approach, though, it could easily have died out, and John Mayer has sometimes been called the last scholastic. But he really wasn't. Certainly, there were cultural developments on the horizon that would pose a challenge to the approach taken by Mayer, which was both traditional and demanding in its technical sophistication. The religious and intellectual upheavals of the 1520s and 1530s looked like they would render that approach obsolete. As we can see from evidence like a list of books for sale in Cambridge around 1530, British thinkers were barely consulted, while humanists like Rudolf Agricola, Lefebvre de Tapst, and Philipp Melanchthon were flying off the shelves. Still, a couple of significant English publications came in the middle of the century, demonstrating that a need was still felt for at least introductory Texan-Aristotelian logic. In 1545, the Dialectic of John Seton provided just that, while also integrating material from the rhetorical tradition so beloved of humanists from authors like Cicero and Agricola. Then, in 1551, Thomas Wilson's Rule of Reason broke new ground by presenting the basics of scholastic logic in English. Wilson described his project as follows, I have assayed through my diligence to make logic as familiar to the Englishman as by diverse men's industries the most part of the other liberal sciences are. In terms of its content, the Rule of Reason was hardly innovative. The material covered is pretty much what was taught by professors of Aristotelian logic in 5th century Alexandria, 10th century Baghdad, or 13th century Paris. But Wilson's approach is unusually engaging. In Aristotelian dialectic, argument forms are called topics, which literally means places, from the Greek topos. So Wilson compares devising arguments to hunters looking for signs that might point to rabbits or foxes. He also shows how to apply logical tools by giving an extended example on the question of whether priests should be allowed to marry. More entertaining still, though unintentionally so, is Ralph Levers' 1573 work, The Art of Reason, which is again distinguished not so much for its content as its delivery. Levers tried to crowbar properly English terminology into Aristotelian logic, proposing such novel vocabulary as backset, say-what, foresay, and end-say to mean respectively predicate, definition, premise, and conclusion. But English authors were going to have to do more than come up with amusing neologisms to save Aristotelianism from irrelevance. Charles Schmitt has written that by 1565, medieval logic had virtually disappeared, humanist rhetoric had won the day, the cultivation of Greek had advanced on a broad front, and the medieval mainstays of natural philosophy and metaphysics had retreated from the central place they had once held in university curricula. Yet Schmitt made this remark to set the context for what he calls a second wind for scholasticism in the late Tudor period. The central figure who justifies this claim is John Case, who was starting out on his undergraduate degree at that same time, the mid-1560s. He would devote his energies to many of the same fields that Mayer and his colleagues had pursued a few generations earlier. Case held the line against the methods of Peter Rames, which were in danger of seducing the students of the English universities into a simplified and anti-Aristotelian approach to philosophy. Against this, Case proposed a simplified and pro-Aristotelian approach. His works were mostly introductory textbooks and expositions of Aristotle's logic, practical philosophy, and natural philosophy. This material was not demanding for the young readership Case had in mind, but it drew on his deep expertise and reading. His text on the Aristotelian physics, which bears the attention-grabbing title Philosopher's Stone, announces that it draws on no fewer than 23 earlier exegetes. His sources range from late ancient authors like Boethius to Renaissance scholars from across Europe like Zabarella down in Italy and the commentators of the Iberian Peninsula, whom we'll be learning about before long. It's especially noteworthy that he finds value in the medieval scholastics, writing at one point that, many today, when they hear the name of Thomas, immediately raise their eyebrows and purse their lips. But if these people would just read Aquinas's writings carefully, they'd discover that they are like gold that has been purified from dross. As for the greatest authority of all, he says this, since every philosophical compendium is a waste of time without Aristotle, let me put forth Aristotle as the only philosopher and leave aside the empty and wide-ranging opinions of the present time. Alongside Ramez, he aims particular invective against the novel and dangerous ideas of Machiavelli and Paracelsus. Both offer superficially appealing treatments that are in fact highly dangerous, in the case of Paracelsus to the human body, in the case of Machiavelli to the body politic. All this sounds very conservative, and perhaps it is, but Case was also a man of his time, a keen theatergoer who moved in the same circles as a man like Philip Sidney, a group who Schmitt describes as some of the most orthodox, most influential, and most highly placed figures of the period. We can tell this from the fact that Case's works included Latin verses written by his friends, some of whom similarly contributed to a memorial volume for Sidney after his untimely death. Case also cites Sidney in his discussion of marriage, which is found in his exposition of a work on household management, incorrectly ascribed to Aristotle. Case's awareness of humanist philology is shown by his discussion of its authenticity, which cites Lefebvre d'Etape in the course of rejecting the second part of the work. Given that context, Case's views are downright romantic. He insists that one should marry for love and not advantage, and that it is good for a husband to think his own wife the wisest, justest, and most beautiful, most greatly to be feared and venerated, even if she is not so. Though he admits, following Aristotle, that women are in general inferior to men, it is not wrong for a man to think that his wife is better than him, if only because it spurs him on to virtue so as to win her esteem and respect. A dimension of Case's thought that is apt to strike us as less convincing is his enthusiasm for what are sometimes called the occult sciences, alchemy and astrology. Not for nothing did he write a work called Philosopher's Stone and compare Aquinas' thought to gold purified from mixture with base metal. He argues that natural ends can be achieved by artificial means, as when the doctor restores health, the alchemist produces gold, or the sorcerer summons storms, a comment that irresistibly brings to mind Shakespeare's Tempest. Such things as magical talismans and astrological predictions are, he says, not tricks, nor are they deceptions of the demons, but truly natural things, as Plato and Plotinus hold. After our discussion of witchcraft, we can well understand why he is at pains here to distinguish natural magic from the sort that involves demonic aid. Case may have been a serious Aristotelian and trained scholastic, but that did not stop him from sharing the magical beliefs of his contemporaries. To the contrary, as far as he was concerned, the two sides of his thought fit together perfectly. And the same is even more true for the thinker we'll be exploring in a few weeks, yet another John, namely John Dee, without a doubt the most major case of philosophy being fused with the occult in Elizabethan England. But first I want to take a step back and use this opportunity to consider the survival and evolution of scholastic philosophy from the late medieval to the early modern period. For that purpose, I'll be joined by Calvin Normore next time here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.