Preface

It is well known that the core values of the modern university can be traced to the emergence of a number of European universities in the Middle Ages, some of which continue to thrive to this day. Some historians suggest that the impetus driving the development of these universities was the new method of inquiry emphasizing rational analysis and debate of key concepts and practiced through the discussion of "disputed questions" in which the best arguments for and against an important proposition would be presented and pursued. The method, which came to be known as the "Scholastic method," is best known today through the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, but the first important step toward the development of this method seems to have been a work titled Sic et Non (Yes and No) by Peter Abelard, written in 1120. Motivated in part by charges directed against Christianity by Islamic scholars who claimed that Christianity was incoherent because contradictions on important points could be found in the writings of various Church fathers, Abelard set out 158 questions on fundamental issues (for instance, "That faith is based upon reason, et contra") ¹ and collected quotations from the Church Fathers in support of each side of the question. It became immediately evident that the authority of the Fathers as established by individual statements from their writings could not be relied upon to determine the truth sought by each question, so that the reader was called upon to pursue the truth through reasoning, recognizing, as Abelard wrote in the prologue, that "the obscurity and contradictions in ancient writings may be explained upon many grounds, and may be discussed without impugning the good faith and insight of the fathers." ²

Abelard successfully converted the impasse produced by seemingly contradictory statements of authority into the energy of rational inquiry, and the stimulation of such energy was his purpose: "These questions ought to serve to excite tender readers to a zealous inquiry into truth and so sharpen their wits. The master key of knowledge is, indeed, a persistent and frequent questioning." Such a conversion of intellectual energy, such a release of intellectual energy through questioning, might properly be called "dramatic," and we could suggest that it was the reintroduction of a kind of drama into intellectual life that explains the power of this new method of inquiry to stimulate the emergence and development of universities. Those scholars who could most fully arouse the minds of students through powerful ways of posing and responding to important questions attracted students from great distances who wished to participate in a "zealous inquiry into truth," and the institution and structure of the university developed around this dramatic core.

We find surprising support for this characterization of the new method as "dramatic" in some of the complaints that were leveled against the Scholastic practice of the disputation after it had become a routine component of university life over several centuries, complaints alleging that practitioners when they became interested only in impressing others with their sagacity and intellectual power played to the crowd with flair and flattery, thereby obscuring the fundamental purpose of pursuing truth. The vital energy of intellectual conflict could degenerate into intellectual showmanship: drama is always in danger of being supplanted by melodrama. When scholar Deborah Tannen points to the weaknesses of what she terms the contemporary "argument culture," she would seem to have in mind the degeneration of rational discussion into posed shouting matches in which the competitive aspect of argument as a battle to determine a winner takes the place of rational inquiry as a communal search for truth.

That the pursuit of truth is inherently dramatic was recognized in the origins of the Western philosophical tradition. The Platonic dialogues can properly be described as a dramatization of the thought and action of Socrates, and the urgency in many of the dialogues comes to light when one recognizes that the veiled threats made against Socrates by some of the interlocutors...