The fourth and fifth volumes of the Global History of Philosophy are
designated The Period of Scholasticism in order to stress that the
scholastic method with its emphasis on thesis, antithesis, and attempts at
synthesis became universal throughout Eurasia. Scholasticism should not be
taken in the pejorative sense as the juggling of arguments by straw men,
but in the sense of a challenge even in our own era to work for consistent
and comprehensive systematic synthesis. All the "older traditions" need to
be reinteerpreted in terms of "modern conditions"--which, after all, is
what the Eurasian scholastics of these centuries were doing for their own
time.
The major developments of this period are "Monism in Many Moods" during the
ninth century, through "Exfoliation and Elaboration" of those seminal
systems in the tenth and eleventh centuries unitl the time of the "Great
Summas" in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It was during this time
that philosophy and theology developed a very highly sophisticated
technique of balancing arguments and refutations and counter-arguments and
counter-refutations.
As is true of the whole series, these volumes are a new way of exploring
the accumulative wisdom of mankind, and in the process explode many of the
ethnocentric stereotypes which still hinder intercultural communications
and world peace through intercultural understanding.
Review(s)
About the Author(s)
JOHN C.PLOTT received his B.A. degree with Phi Beta Kappa honors at the
University of Oklahoma and Ph.D. degree from Banaras Hindu University. He
is now teaching philosophy at Marshall University, U.S.A. He constantly
concerned for World Peace through Global Understanding and Social Justice
through Gandhian Practice.