Scholastic Background Research Articles

Francis Bacon's idea of science and the maker's knowledge tradition

Part 1 Introduction: Bacon's philosophy and the technocratic view of the meanings of Baconianism historiographic approaches ingredients of science as hermeneutical tools maker's knowledge. Part 2 Forma: historiographic approaches substantial forms Bacon's forms, the scholastic background and his construal of primary/secondary quantities distinction ontological presuppositions of Bacon's forms as conditions of operation forms as rules of action and the constructivist criterion of truth recapitulation - Bacon's forms and laws of nature. Part 3 Opus: Opus and utility in Bacon's idea of propositional and operative knowledge in the maker's knowledge tradition contrasting responses to the constructivist stance - Boyle, Locke, Hobbs and Vico. Part 4 Inductio: Aristotelian background medieval and Renaissance background characterization of Bacon's Inductio criticism of the Popperian Bacon. Conclusion.

A description of the personal social and scholastic background of new students first admitted to the Department of Nursing Science at Medunsa in 1986, and their expectations regarding this university.

In the past few years the comprehensive biographical questionnaire completed by all students newly admitted to MEDUNSA at the beginning of the academic year, provided valuable information regarding students of the Department of Nursing Science. The main purpose of this study is to obtain a profile of nursing students, enrolling at Medunsa for the first time, regarding — their demographic data — the sociological, economical and educational tendencies in their homes — their school achievement and — their expectations of Medunsa.

Mathematics and Self-Esteem: Implications for Women's Career Choice

The relationship of math participation and success to self-esteem and career goals is examined in a sample of 64 women and 52 men college students at the end of their sophomore year. No gender differences were found in math anxiety or perceptions of the usefulness of mathematics, but women were less likely to select a math-related career goal. Among the men students, math participation and self-assessments of math ability were positively related to more general self-estimates of competence; among women, these variables were not related significantly. Women's choices for math-related careers were more closely associated with scholastic ability and math background than were men's career choices. These results are discussed in the context of societal pressures and supports for men and women in regard to math participation.

Locke, and: Locke, and: The Politics of Locke's Philosophy (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 973 ity that various intellectuals held views in private that were different from what was acceptable in public from 166o onward, and that their writings have to be reexamined with this fact in mind for clues as to what they actually believed. And this reconsideration may give us a better history of the emergence of "new" views at the beginning of the eighteenth century. RICHARD H. POPKIN Washington University John Dunn. Locke. Past Masters. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Pp. xii + 97. Cloth, $12.95. Paper, $3.95. R. S. Woolhouse. Locke. Philosophers in Context. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Pp ix + 198. $35.oo. Neal Wood. The Politics of Locke's Philosophy. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983. Pp. xiv + 241. $~6.5o. All three of these tides manifest strong interest and first-hand research in the historical context of Locke's thought and a wide knowledge of recent secondary literature. Allowing for the different levels at which they are pitched, all are good, useful, stimulating books, which agree more than they disagree on the topics they have in common and usefully complement each other on other topics. Mr. Dunn's book is for historically aware readers coming to Locke's writings for the first time. Dr. Woolhouse provides a selective commentary for students concurrendy working with some seriousness through the text of the Essay. Professor Wood's study is for readers who already have a basic knowledge of that text. The first two of Woolhouse's four chapters are devoted to Books I and IV of the Essay, with emphasis on Locke's role as a representative of the Baconian "moderns" countering the obscurantism of the scholastic "ancients." Within this framework, chapter 3 explores the relations and differences between the different kinds of complex ideas (substances, modes, relations) in Locke's scheme of things, a subject whose centrality and importance Woolhouse has long recognized better than most scholars. Chapter 4 picks up on two other topics in corpuscularianism's response to scholasticism : primary/secondary qualities and mind/matter dualism. It is, in short, a discussion in reasonable historical depth of one particular family of problems which forms an important thread through one of Locke's major works. Woolhouse himself has no delusions about the modesty of his ambitions, which have been blown up disproportionately by pretentious promotion. Woolhouse offers students the best exposition now available of the scholastic background to the debates of Locke's daymthough some of the things said about axioms or common notions, and about the major premises of demonstrations, may cause readers to confuse these. I think, however, that the anti-scholasticism theme, while legitimate in itself, may be carrying too much freight, particularly since both 274 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Woolhouse and Wood labor it in association with one side in the ancients vs. moderns debate. This association was certainly part of the superficial rhetoric of the age, something that Locke & Co. wanted us to believe, but the historian should not he so easily kidded. Woolhouse has original things to say about Locke's attack on innatism, though he may be unduly sympathetic to Locke's side. But in arguing for a scholastic target he has to concede that innatism was certainly not Aristotelian: he fails to bring out that innatism was actually commonplace among apologists for the "moderns," like Glanvill and Boyle, .and that the language in which it was typically cast derived less from the schools than from the Bible. Baconianism is especially associated with the experimental method, however that is construed and however it is traced out in Locke's thought; the philosophical reflections associated with its scientific application owed just as much, clandestinely, to the ancients (through Epicureanism and scepticism ) as did scholastic orthodoxy. More seriously out of balance, I think, is the positive theme (sec. 9 and elsewhere) that opinion, which Locke distinguished from sensitive knowledge and investigated extensively as a field of human disagreement, is tO be assimilated to the modern concept of a posteriori knowledge. But Woolhouse cautions against various common misreadings of Locke, and I have no wish to minimize the amount of accurate, informative , lucidly presented...

The Role of the Traditional Sciences in the Encounter of Religion and Science – An Oriental Perspective

Whenever the discussion of the relation between religion and science or science and faith arises in circles imbued with various trends of modern thought, immediately the history of the confrontation of the Church with Galileo or of Protestant theology with Darwinianism comes to mind and the problem is viewed from the particular vantage point of the West. Those who have kept pace with the most current speculations of certain scientists in quest of a new world view may point to the fact that there are more recent works which compare the movement of electrons with the Dance of Shiva or speak of the search for the Tao of modern science. But even in such works which are becoming popular, although reference is made to Oriental doctrines, these teachings are usually viewed in separation from the traditional universe to which they belong and the philosophical and scientific framework remain Western. In the modern world the usual background for the understanding of the relation between religion and science continues to be the Western experience from the revolt of modern science against its scholastic theological background during the Renaissance and the seventeenth century to the final abdication by religion from the domain of nature and its surrender to the scientific enterprise and the latter's particular methodology and philosophy for the study of the natural world. Even when certain works step outside the Western world view in search of a rapprochement with certain Oriental doctrines, science remains Western science and the suppositions made upon the nature of Reality do not change in an ultimate way.

St. Thomas and Dante

The legend of Dante’s ‘Thomism’ arose from the fact that a main component of his culture is obviously ‘scholastic’, and that until not so very long ago the authentic thought of St Thomas had not been clearly differentiated from its general scholastic background. A poet writing within a few decades of St Thomas’s death, and showing a great respect for him, and delighting to reason, even in verse, about form and matter, act and potency and so on, seemed plainly a ‘Thomist’; and when this designation began to be questioned there were not wanting those who went on insisting on it for the greater glory of the Dominican Order or of Catholic culture, which was thought to have reached its apex in the work of Aquinas. But now all that has changed. Since the pioneering labours of Bruno Nardi and Gilson’s brilliant book it has become increasingly evident that Dante cannot be called a Thomist in any strict sense of the term as denoting a body of doctrine characteristic of St Thomas.However there is, I think, a qualified sense in which one may speak of the poet’s Thomism, and which it is one purpose of these notes to indicate. But first a little more should be said about the question in general; and here I may be allowed to bring myself briefly into the picture. When, some years ago, I undertook to write the article ‘Tommaso d’Aquino’ for the Enciclopedia Dantesca, I naturally set about reading or re-reading all the relevant texts, beginning with Dante. My task, as I saw it, was twofold. First, on the abstract doctrinal plane—comparing ideas with ideas—I had to try to decide how far Bruno Nardi had been right in his lifelong effort to detach Dante from Aquinas by expounding the poet’s philosophy as a variant on the Neoplatonist tradition, with traces (especially in the Monarchia) of Averroism.

The physicist and the National Defense Education Act of 1958

For many years the college faculty has expressed a dissatisfaction with the scholastic background of college students. An unusual opportunity is presented to physicists now to help improve the science education of the youth of this country. This new opportunity is embodied in Title III of the National Defense Education Act of 1958. Our national security is so dependent on the upgrading of science education that it is imperative to respond fully to the provisions of this Act.

DANTE'S VISION OF GOD

AbstractA keen interest in the philosophy of the Middle Ages is not uncommon today, even among philosophers; and it has, fortunately, been prepared and nourished by a great deal of purely historical research. For half a century now historical scholarship, sometimes quickened by a more or less philosophical motive, has been busy with the great Schoolmen—with Aquinas and Bonaventure, Scotus and Siger—and with the cultural epoch which both fed them and was formed by them. A vast amount of manuscript material has been systematically sifted, and an immense network of developments and influences, especially in the thirteenth-century field, has been explored and elucidated. All this has naturally affected the study of Dante; and yet not as much perhaps as one might have expected. For the nineteenth-century cult of Dante—of which we are the heirs—was already active and productive long before the modern historical study of his scholastic background really got under way. Nor has this study fully caught up yet with ...

DANTE'S VISION OF GOD

A keen interest in the philosophy of the Middle Ages is not uncommon today, even among philosophers; and it has, fortunately, been prepared and nourished by a great deal of purely historical research. For half a century now historical scholarship, sometimes quickened by a more or less philosophical motive, has been busy with the great Schoolmen—with Aquinas and Bonaventure, Scotus and Siger—and with the cultural epoch which both fed them and was formed by them. A vast amount of manuscript material has been systematically sifted, and an immense network of developments and influences, especially in the thirteenth-century field, has been explored and elucidated. All this has naturally affected the study of Dante; and yet not as much perhaps as one might have expected. For the nineteenth-century cult of Dante—of which we are the heirs—was already active and productive long before the modern historical study of his scholastic background really got under way. Nor has this study fully caught up yet with contemporary work on the poet. Despite the spade-work of Bruno Nardi, Busnelli and others, and the brilliant essay of Gilson, there is still no commentary on the Divine Comedy that would satisfy a specialist in medieval philosophy or theology. Such specialists are doubtless inclined to overrate their own importance; yet, certainly, Dante's poetry and the scholastic formation of his mind are so closely interrelated that either aspect of his personality may lead one into the other, and indeed must do so (I should say) for any but the superficial reader; and this even apart from those general questions about the relation of poetry to abstract thought to which the study of the Comedy tends to give rise.

Scholastic Background as Related to Success in College Physics

(1954). Scholastic Background as Related to Success in College Physics. The Journal of Educational Research: Vol. 47, No. 7, pp. 545-550.

A Note Concerning the Scholastic Background of Leibniz's Philosophy.

TheoriaVolume 19, Issue 3 p. 172-177 A Note Concerning the Scholastic Background of Leibniz's Philosophy. Johnny Christensen, Johnny Christensen CopenhagenSearch for more papers by this author Johnny Christensen, Johnny Christensen CopenhagenSearch for more papers by this author First published: December 1953 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1755-2567.1953.tb01015.xAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume19, Issue3December 1953Pages 172-177 RelatedInformation

Integration of Humanities and Social Studies

HoW can the humanities and the social studies be integrated in a college curriculum? Throughout the United States, administrators and teachers, interested in advancing the cause of general education, are working out varied solutions to this problem.' Taken together, these educational adventures constitute a significant trend in higher education. No two of these efforts are alike, for each has an individuality and originality of its own, depending upon the need of the particular institution or the scholastic background of the staff directing the project. The movement for integration has, however, been in progress long enough to permit the observation of certain trends concerning the extent to which integration has been carried out, the levels of the curriculum to which this policy has been applied, the methods of presentation, the reading materials employed, and the administration of such courses. In this study the humanities are considered as including literature, art, and music; and the social studies as embracing history, economics, government, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and geography; religion and philosophy are regarded as belonging to both groups. There is considerable variation in the extent to which integration is carried out. Some institutions limit their efforts to bringing related subjects either into a separate humanities or into a distinct social-studies sequence, making no effort to combine these two groups into a single unit. Other institutions merge the humanities and the social studies into a single sequence. One institution fuses humanities and social studies with the physical sciences. An illustration of integration within the humanities and within the social studies is to be found at Columbia University. The first year of the humanities sequence is a great books course covering a number of figures in world literature, from Homer to Goethe. In the second year a semester in the history and appreciation of music is followed by a semester in fine arts. As far back as I9I9, Columbia University began its contemporary civilization course, which was probably the pioneer effort at integration within the social studies. The first year of this course also treats 'This article presents some of the results of a study undertaken by the author as chairman of a committee on curricular integration for the New York Municipal Colleges. For this study, syllabuses and outlines in the humanities and social studies were analyzed, and additional information was obtained through correspondence.

The Scholastic Background of Marsilio Ficino with an Edition of Unpublished Texts

The traditional view which emphasized the contrast between the Aristotelianism of the Middle Ages and the Platonism of the Renaissance can no longer be maintained in the light of recent studies. Aristotelianism continued to exist throughout the Renaissance and afterwards, and on the other hand, Platonism, in the form of Augustinianism, dominated occidental thought up to the twelfth century and remained a powerful current even during the later Middle Ages. The attempt to ascertain the medieval sources of Renaissance Platonism thus assumes an increased significance. However, it would be quite wrong to conclude that Renaissance Platonism, because it was preceded by some kind of medieval Platonism, was merely a copy or continuation of that earlier phase of Platonism. The history of Platonism, like that of every living tradition, must not be conceived as an endless repetition of identical doctrines, but rather as a continual adaptation and transformation of certain basic ideas. “Platonism” is not a label that establishes a simple equation between various thinkers classified as Platonists, but a kind of general orientation which assumes a new meaning in each particular case, and each representative of Platonism must hence be understood in his own right before his dependence on, or his difference from, other, earlier Platonists can be properly evaluated. Moreover, in the process of its history, Platonism is always exposed to the direct and indirect influence of other, different currents or traditions, and the continual transformation of Platonism is due not only to the original thought of its various representatives, but also to the influence of outside sources. The study of the medieval sources of Renaissance Platonism thus cannot be separated from a genuine understanding of Renaissance Platonism itself, and on the other hand, the medieval background of Renaissance Platonism consists not only of the Platonism or Augustinianism of the earlier Middle Ages, but also of the Aristotelianism of the later Middle Ages.