Hi, I'm Peter Adams, and I'm 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 and Munich.

Online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Lords of Language, Northern Humanism.

In a satirical novel published in 1872 by Samuel Butler, a traveler visits a topsy-turvy utopia called Arawon.

At one point, the traveler learns about the universities of Arawon, which school their students in unreason on the grounds that living exclusively by reason,

and its hard and fast rules would be intolerable. Extremes are alone logical, but they are always absurd.

It would also be narrow-minded and constraining for the students to learn only about reality and to ignore all the things that might possibly be real.

So at these colleges, great attention is paid to hypothetics, and a whole hypothetical language has been developed to talk about things that don't exist but could.

The traveler comments, it appeared to me to be a want and waste of good human energy that men should spend years and years in the perfection of so barren and exercise, but people know their own affairs best.

The same sentiment was expressed hundreds of years earlier during the Renaissance, when humanists mocked the time-wasting disciplines being pursued at the universities of their own day.

One such humanist was Thomas Moore, author of the work whose title gave us the concept of utopia, a place that is nowhere. Arawon is, of course, an anagram of the word nowhere.

As Butler would later do, Moore made fun of the schoolmen and their preoccupation with hypotheticals, writing,

the following propositions are not less remarkable, but attractive also and plausible, since they are, of course, true.

The Virgin was a whore, and the whore will be a virgin, and the whore is possibly a virgin.

It is not easy to say which of the two, virgins or whores, are more indebted to such an obliging dialectics.

And in a letter addressed to the Senate of Oxford University, written in 1518, Moore lamented the way that a faction of scholastic theologians, who called themselves the Trojans, were attacking humanists at the university.

Unlike the original Trojan War, the conflict between scholastics and humanists went on for much longer than ten years.

University logicians and theologians sneered at the study of classical literature as an unserious topic fit only for schoolboys, and the humanists returned the favor by calling the university master's sophists.

As Moore noted in his letter, the conflict often involved academic politics. While humanist studies won adherence across Europe, the scholastics tenaciously defended the educational approach they had been using for generations.

They were largely successful for a time. By the turn of the 16th century, humanism had made only minor incursions in most German universities.

A statement issued in 1502 by masters in Leipzig rejected the humanists preferred subjects of poetry and rhetoric, asserting, whoever knows words is a grammarian, but is not therefore a learned man or a philosopher.

Steadily and surely though, the poets and rhetoricians managed to reform the curricula. In Germany, a breakthrough period was the second decade of the 16th century, as the universities at Wittenberg, Erfurt, and finally Leipzig all shifted towards humanist teaching.

As already mentioned two episodes ago, this helped to shape Martin Luther's approach to philosophy.

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