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Scholasticism is not a philosophy or a set of beliefs, but a technique or a method of learning. It arose in contrast to the prevailing method of the day monasticism. Scholasticism was significant because it was possible to determine the answer to a question through one's own reason, in contrast to monastic learning which found authority purely through what was written in ancient manuscripts, but not through one's own reasoning.
The primary purpose of scholasticism was to find the answer to a question or resolve a contradiction. It is most well known in its application in medieval theology but was applied to classical philosophy and other fields of study. It is not a philosophy on its own but a tool and method for learning.
The scholastics would choose a book by a renowned scholar, called auctor, as a subject of investigation, for example the Bible. By reading the book thoroughly and critically, the disciples learned to appreciate the theories of the auctor. Then other documents related to the source document would be referenced, such as Church councils, papal letters, anything written on the subject be it ancient text or contemporary. The points of disagreement and contention between these multiple sources would be written down. For example the Bible has apparent contradictions and these have been written about by scholars ancient and contemporary, so a scholastic would gather all the arguments about the contradictions, looking at it from all sides with an open mind.
Once the sources and points of disagreement had been laid out, through a series of dialectics the two sides of an argument would be made whole so that they would be found to be in agreement and not contradictory. This was done in two ways.
First, through philological analysis. Words were examined and it would be argued they could have more than one meaning, that the author could have meant the word to mean something else. Ambiguity in words could be used to find common ground between two otherwise contradictory statements. Second, through logical analysis which relied on the rules of formal logic to show contradictions did not exist, but were subjective to the reader.
Scholastics developed two different genres of literature. The first is called questiones or "questions" which is basically as described above, except rather than being confined to a single scholar, or auctor, the scholastic method would be applied to a question. For example "Is it ok to kill for self preservation?". From there any number of sources could be referenced to find the pros and cons of the question. The second genre was called a summa. A summa was a system of all questions so that it would answer every question about Christianity one could ever have. In this way any question could be found in the summa and would reference any other question that might arise. The most famous summa is by Thomas Aquinas called Summa Theologica, covering the "sum" total of Christian theology.
Scholastic schools had two methods of teaching. The first is the lectio . A teacher would read a text, expounding on certain words or ideas, but no questions were allowed, it was a simple reading of a text, the instructors explained, and silence for the students.
The second is the disputatio which is at the heart of the scholastic method. There were two types of disputatio's. The first was called the "ordinary" in which the question to be disputed was announced beforehand. The second was the quodlibetal in which the students would pop the question to the teacher without any prior preparation. The teacher would then have to come up with a response. Such as "Is it ok to steal?" The teacher would then cite from authoritative texts such as the Bible and prove his position. Students would then rebut the response and this would go back and forth often digressing into unruly affairs. During this haphazard exercise someone would be keeping notes on what was said, the teacher would then summarize the arguments from the notes and present his final position the next day answering all the rebuttals in a final answer.