Hi, I'm Peter Adams, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at Kings College London and the LMU in Munich, online at HistoryofLosby.net.

Today's episode will be an interview about scholasticism from the medieval to the early modern era with Calvin Normand, who is professor of philosophy at UCLA.

Hey, Calvin, hi, Peter.

Well, 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 Hanselm, 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?

Well, I actually think it is still a significant force, so let me play 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 Hanselm, it's well established that commenting on texts is a way of doing it, but Hanselm 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 text 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 to 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.

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