Fennie pray a cost in the news

and there's to all of physical

and bless you all of physical.

He bless you, 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 Kings College London and the LMU in Munich,

online at www history of philosophy.net. Today's episode, Masters of the University, Latin of

heroism. Consistency, wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, is the Hobgoblin of

little minds. If so, it's much like the Hobgoblin who features as one of the

super villains pitted against Spider-Man, regularly defeated. Perhaps no one manages to speak and behave with complete consistency, and many people lead double

lives that require them to engage in double-think.

The anarchist who makes her living as a policewoman, the marriage counselor who cheats on his wife,

the physicist who researches the Big Bang during the week and prays to a Creator God on Sundays.

Philosophers normally hold themselves to a higher standard, though.

Any philosopher who was caught out maintaining two mutually contradictory propositions

can be expected to give up on one or both of those propositions,

not just out of embarrassment, but because consistency is a ground rule of proper reasoning.

Least of all, would we expect to find medieval schoolmen embracing inconsistency having been trained in logic from a young age.

How strange then that modern scholarship has associated a rather flagrant version of Double Think with the most convinced

rationalists of the late 13th century, Cijev Rabant, Boethius of Dacia, and whichever other

masters of the Paris arts faculty followed their lead.

Supposedly, C.J. and Boethius endorsed a doctrine of double truth.

They thought that one in the same question might receive two true answers, one provided

...