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 King's College London and the LM, online at historyof philosophy.net.

Today's episode, Changing by Degrees, French Scholasticism.

I'd like to start today's podcast with a shout out to my uncle Fred, who, in addition to

being a devoted listener of the podcast,

a song and danceman, and a fanatical theater goer, holds a PhD in history. He tells me that some

decades ago, he attended a talk by the British historian G.R. Potter, at which Potter raised what

was then already a cliched question. When did the Middle Ages end?

Potter joked that since he was a medievalist and was just working on a biography of

Ulrich Svingli, who died in 1531, the medieval period must have ended in 1531.

I think I can go him one better, though. Since the defining feature of medieval philosophy was scholasticism, it stands to reason

that the medieval period lasted as long as scholasticism did, which by my reckoning means

that it lasted at least until the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century.

On the eve of the revolution, people were still criticizing the university masters for clinging to the same

old theses which are daily attacked in the same way and with the same arguments.

And that was a complaint that came from colleagues within the university itself,

not from libertine free thinkers or partisans of the new science.

But we should not be too quick to assume that the scholastics were

irredeemably conservative, stubbornly repeating the verities of medieval aristotelianism for

generation after generation, even as the world changed around them. From previous episodes,

we know that there were plenty of changes already in the 16th century. Spanish scholastics

like Suarez and Molina displayed formidable sophistication and innovation, albeit within the broad

framework laid down by the Medevals, and from the same context came commentaries on Aristotle

...