- iwpoe
- Member
Offline 
- From: Knoxville, TN
- Registered: 6/26/2015
- Posts: 1,080
Re: Common misconceptions about Scholasticism
I'm a fan of Sokolowski. Does everyone know Heidegger wrote a thesis on a pseudo-Scotus writing and initially planned to sit for a chair in Catholic philosophy?
Last edited by iwpoe (7/04/2015 5:50 pm)
Fighting to the death "the noonday demon" of Acedia.
My Books
It is precisely “values” that are the powerless and threadbare mask of the objectification of beings, an objectification that has become flat and devoid of background. No one dies for mere values.
~Martin Heidegger
- iwpoe
- Member
Offline
- From: Knoxville, TN
- Registered: 6/26/2015
- Posts: 1,080
Re: Common misconceptions about Scholasticism
I was taught the rationalist / empiricist dichotomy in my own education, which was very thoroughly grounded in the history of philosophy. It does help make sense of why Hume is so odd and what Kant is doing, but it would likely require the construal of Newton as some kind of rationalist and would make Leibniz's interest in fossils and any number of other natural phenomena quite queer.
So, ultimately, I'm not even sure what the division is supposed to track. The English thematized experience, but they're hardly somehow more grounded in empirical reality than the continentals are, who were precisely concerned with making sense of the world.
Last edited by iwpoe (7/05/2015 12:09 am)
Fighting to the death "the noonday demon" of Acedia.
My Books
It is precisely “values” that are the powerless and threadbare mask of the objectification of beings, an objectification that has become flat and devoid of background. No one dies for mere values.
~Martin Heidegger
- Tyrrell McAllister
- Member
Offline
- Registered: 7/07/2015
- Posts: 21
Re: Common misconceptions about Scholasticism
Here are a couple more misconception about Scholasticism. At least, these are things that I used to believe:
(1) One misconception is that scholastics were routinely fooled by pseudo-explanations like Molière's parody answer to "Why does opium cause sleep?" Namely, "Because of its soporific power."
(2) There is an exaggerated notion of the extent to which false beliefs about the natural world are logical consequences of scholastic metaphysics. For example, the fact that bodies throughout the universe don't tend towards the center of the Earth is thought to falsify something in scholastic metaphysics.