Hi, I'm Peter Adams, and you're listening to the history of philosophy podcasts brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich.

Online at historyofilocerie.net. Today's episode will be an interview about Protestant philosophy with Helen Hatab, who is professor of philosophy at the University of Houston. Hello, Helen.

Hi, Peter. Thanks for having me on your show. Thanks for coming on. It's great to see you, albeit by the media of Zoom, as we're doing everything these days.

We're going to talk now about Protestant philosophy, which in a sense I've been talking about for many episodes now, but I wanted to kind of step back and talk about it as a broader phenomenon.

And I thought I would firstly ask you to just give the audience a sense of how extensive Protestant philosophy was, maybe especially how extensive Protestant scholasticism was.

How many universities are we talking about, how many figures are we talking about, how many texts are we talking about printed editions versus manuscripts, and maybe actually maybe to start out by just saying what kind of chronological period you want to focus on.

Yeah, so I think Protestant philosophy and Protestant scholasticism in particular, I think we're talking about a chronological period of about 1530 to 1800 that's somewhat arbitrary, but by 1530 I think we have a sort of distinct Protestant scholastic style philosophy emerging.

Let's continue for quite a while into the 19th century, but 1800 is a good cutoff point, because at that point, especially in Germany, theology and philosophy start parting ways as disciplines.

So the post-reformation digital library includes 726 works by Protestant philosophers from 1500 to 1800 versus 311 by Catholic philosophers.

It gives you some sense of how prolific they were. Now, not all of these would have been scholastic texts, right, philosophy is broader, but it does show that Protestant philosophy had a significant influence during this period.

When we're talking about the university context in Western Europe alone, you have anywhere from 35 to 40 universities for this whole period.

It's a bit hard to track because some of them switch back and forth from being Protestant to Catholic during the wars, but that's sort of the range.

And in the German speaking territories, you have at least 200 professors of philosophy during this period.

It's hard to get exact numbers on publications, some of them are very prolific. So Bartolomeus Kekerman, for example, published over 20 works as did Yakov Martin, the Lutheran philosopher, and many of these went through multiple editions, others only publish one work during their entire careers.

The other thing I want to highlight is that it's a mistake to focus just on the universities because in a lot of these Protestant territories, there was an entire educational structure built around the universities where you have preparatory studies occurring at Gimnasia and Protestant academies.

And very often there was a system in place whereby the students who performed best at these preparatory schools would get scholarships to go on and study at the university level.

And you also have the context of Eastern Europe where the reform took hold in the early period, but then very quickly the counter reformation we established with policies and the Orthodox week church.

And so you might have less universities there, but you have pockets of Protestant minorities where, you know, they're teaching Protestant philosophy, but it's often underground and less recognized.

So I would say yes, extensive.

Yeah, we're obviously talking about a really massive phenomenon here, which I think might surprise many listeners because, first of all, Protestants, Galastics are not famous usually.

And secondly, it seems to kind of fly in the face of what a lot of people think about Protestantism because there's all this emphasis on faith and taking truth solely from scripture.

And so as I said in a previous episode, you might almost think that Protestants, Galastic philosophy is a contradiction in terms because you often find the Protestants, you know, complaining about scholasticism, especially Luther, but really is quite a common phenomenon amongst the Protestants.

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