Between disputatio and Polemics: Dialectics as Production of Knowledge in the Middle Ages

Abstract

At the basis of the medieval production of knowledge, dialectics seems to be one of the primary keys of thought. Medieval thinkers were trained to express and to represent the world according to the disputatio, which is a question of research and a form of academic exercise. They were trained to discuss and to challenge. We can distinguish two kinds of dialectics: an irenic one, ritualized dialectics, as Habermas has shown on the one hand, and a more polemical dialectics, as theorized by Pierre Bourdieu, on the other. Our main aim is to establish that those dialectical techniques of disputatio or polemical treatises are tools to produce doctrines and thought. On the one hand, we analyze the typical scholarly disputationes produced in commentaries on Aristotle’s Ethics, within the Western university sphere. On the other, we focus on political and ecclesiological treatises in the time of the Great Schism, as a case study to understand the difference between irenic disputatio and polemical exchanges. The final thoughts in this article aim at contextualizing the self-awareness of the specialists of scholasticism within the saturation of polemics and the broadening of their audience through reaching a non-academic audience. The example of the well-known university theologian Jean Gerson is particularly relevant in the attempt to move beyond the world of the university.