The 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 history of philosophy.net.

Today's episode, The Prague Spring, Scholasticism across Europe.

When I took up my job teaching philosophy at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, there

were three things I wanted to know.

Who was Ludwig?

Who was Maximillian?

And where is my new office?

The answers stretched back over the last half millennium and more.

The university was originally founded by Duke Ludwig the ninth in 1472

which as it happens was exactly 500 years before my own birth. I'll just pause here to let you work out how old I am. Okay. At the start it was based in

English dot, not Munich. From there the institution was moved to Lansut

Lansut in 1800 by King Maximillian, the first of Bavaria.

Only in 1826 did it come to Munich.

Thanks to another Ludwig, King Lutwig the first of Bavaria, which is why my office is

conveniently located here and not in Englishat or Lansut.

It's a long and storied history, yet by the standards of German universities, you could argue

that the LMU is a late-comer.

The University of Heidelberg was founded about a century earlier in 1386,

part of a movement that swept across Europe in the 14th century.

Between the years 1300 to 1425, no fewer than 32 universities were founded, which is about one every four years.

The older scholastic centers at Oxford, Cambridge, Paris, and Bologna faced competition from these brash new arrivals.

A telling, though admittedly not unbiased, remark, was made by Henry of Langenstein, a theologian who trained and taught at Paris before moving to the new university at Vienna.

...