Explorations in Late Scholasticism

¿Qué es la segunda escolástica?, ed. Simona Langella & Rafael Ramis Barceló, Madrid – Porto: Editorial Sindéresis (Colección Instituto de Estudios Hispánicos en la Modernidad, 23), 2023

It is commonly admitted that history of philosophy as an autonomous part of philosophy is a largely German and Protestant creation, associated with a figure such as Jakob Brucker. This paper argues that Catholic second scholasticism can be seen as a first attempt to historicize the earlier medieval scholastic tradition, by defending both a cumulative conception of history and a revisionist conception of knowledge.

2024

Universität Siegen, Guest Erasmus Lectures, 2-4 May 2024 – These lectures were intended to present a concise history of the development of the notions of ‘scholastic philosophy’ and ‘second scholasticism’, to expose their modern origins and biases, to demonstrate their criticalities and to warn against their inadequacy to express and describe the historical phenomena to which they are usually referred. Here I offer the texts I have read and commented on for this purpose.

The Irish Contribution to European Scholastic Thought, 2009

This essay attempts a sketch of what Neoscholastic thought could be if it were to take seriously both its own past and the challenges of post-modern thought. Arising as a Catholic response to modern rationalism, the Neoscholastic movement embraced the rationalist assumptions of its opponents, practicing what Foucault has termed "reverse discourse." Understood from its historical roots, however, Scholastic thought is open both to a diversity of truths and to the dynamism of history--both crucial aspects of post-modernism. I argue that Joseph Ratzinger's book "The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure" offers the conceptual resources to think the relationship between truth and time in a way that goes beyond traditional Neoscholasticism while remaining perfectly orthodox ("radically orthodox," one might say...).

Continue a fully development of author's ideas on the intersctices of scholasticism and hermeneutics in the paper under this name below (or above)

2011

Studia Neoaristotelica, 2009

American Catholic Philosophy Quarterly, 2019

Introduction to a special issue of the American Catholic Philosophy Quarterly, dedicated entirely to Baroque Scholasticism, with articles by Igor Agostini, Tomas Machula, Sydney Penner, Petr Dvorak, Lukas Novak, Jean-Pascal Anfray, Rudolf Schuessler and Tomas Nejeschleba.

in M. Longo - G. Micheli (eds.), La filosofia e la sua storia. Studi in onore di Gregorio Piaia, (La filosofia e il suo passato, 64), Padova: CLEUP, 2017, vol. 2, pp. 325-343., 2017

The historiographical notion of Second Scholasticism is used extensively today to indicate an indefinite group of thinkers whose common characteristics merely consist in the fact that they wrote their works between the second half of the fifteenth and the first decades of the eighteenth centuries and that they had a connection to some kind of institutional context. Interestingly, the vagueness of this notion is a key reason for its success. Moreover, although this notion is widely used, it does not seem that its genesis and the ideological presuppositions from which it stems are equally well-known. In this contribution, I focus on the latter subject: how, when and why this notion emerged.

Hungarian Philosophical Review. 64/4 197–214., 2020

Comparisons between late scholastic authors and seventeenth-century philosophers belonging to the “modern” camp are often limited to the analysis of their respective ideas either in terms of continuity and discontinuity or, in a more sociological vein, in relation to their methodology and social background. Taking another perspective, in this article I propose to analyze some literary and argumentative techniques employed by late scholastic writers to integrate new elements into traditional wisdom. The authors chosen for this study, Nicolás Martínez SJ (1617–1676) and Leonard Lessius SJ (1554–1623), illustrate how late scholastic writers treat the Patristic and medieval heritage when they use authoritative texts for innovative purposes. Although ecclesiastical "auctoritas" continues to serve as the basis for theological argumentation in their texts, the case studies highlight how making distinctions among meanings allegedly present in the tradition, along with other “techniques of alignment,” are employed to integrate new ideas and fulfil the need for conformity at the same time.

Metascience, 2014

This is a revised and enlarged edition of Ariew's well received 1999 collection, then entitled Descartes and the Last Scholastics. Ariew's introduction usefully details all the changes and additions he has made. Just as the first volume was required reading for Cartesian scholars, this second, fifty percent larger and even better edition should replace the original on their bookshelves. Obviously, the volume is not a monograph, and so there is some repetition among the chapters. But, there is an overarching rationale and interpretive strategy rendering the volume a highly satisfying unity: …before asking what philosophers hold and why, we need to familiarize ourselves with the philosophical options open to them and the language used to express such options. We need to understand the meaning those terms had in that particular culture, the significance of various philosophical views for the culture, and so on. (11) The 'options' and 'language' Ariew has in view are those derived from contemporary neo-Scholasticism. Ariew's procedure involves relating Descartes' views to their neo-Scholastic intellectual contexts (and doing this typically with more rigor than previously achieved). On this basis, he advances improved understandings of relevant debates between Descartes and his contemporaries, and among those late Scholastic contemporaries themselves. Of course, Descartes was not a deeply scholarly reader of scholastic texts, and as Ariew shows, the mature Descartes only returned to the study of some Scholastic texts late and as on occasion his own program and tactics dictated. However, Descartes' encounters with late Scholasticism are of the upmost importance as Ariew amply and repeatedly proves. No early seventeenth-century natural