Scholasticism

Scholasticism is the intellectual method and institutional system that dominated European universities from the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries, producing a synthesis of Aristotelian logic, Christian theology, and natural philosophy that functioned simultaneously as an epistemology, a pedagogy, and a social technology for managing disagreement. The Scholastics did not merely comment on Aristotle. They constructed a formal system in which theological claims could be subjected to logical analysis, contradictory authorities could be reconciled through distinction-making, and knowledge could be organized into hierarchical trees of increasing specificity.

The method is often caricatured as sterile hair-splitting — how