<Overfiend> Don't come crying to me about your "30 minute compiles"!! I have to build X uphill both ways! In the snow! With bare feet! And we didn't have compilers! We had to translate the C code to mnemonics OURSELVES! <Overfiend> And I was 18 before we even had assemblers!
The living force in the spiritual life of the Roman empire was, after all, not philosophy, but religion, and specifically Christianity. With the extension of Christianity to the Gentile world it at length became necessary for it to orientate itself towards what was best in Greek culture. There is a Stoic element in the ethic of the Pauline epistles, but the theological affinity that the Johannine gospel, with its background of philosophic ideas, exhibits to Platonic and Neoplatonist teaching caused the effort at absorption to be directed rather in that direction. Neoplatonism had accepted the Aristotelian logic with its sharper definition than anything handed down from Plato, and, except the logic of the Sceptics, there was no longer any rival discipline of the like prestige. The logic of the Stoics had been discredited by the sceptical onset, but in any case there was no organon of a fitness even comparable to Aristotle's for the task of drawing out the implications of dogmatic premises. Aristotelian logic secured the imprimatur of the revived Platonism, and it was primarily because of this that it passed into the service of Christian theology. The contact of the Church with Platonism was on the mystical side. Orthodoxy needed to counter heretical logic not with mysticism, itself the fruitful mother of heresies, but with argument. Aristotelianism approved itself as the controversial instrument, and in due course held the field alone. The upshot is what is called Scholasticism. Scholasticism is the Aristotelianism of medieval orthodoxy as taught in the "schools" or universities of Western Europe. It takes form as a body of doctrine drawing its premises from authority, sometimes in secular matters from that of Aristotle, but normally from that of the documents and traditions of systematic theology, while its method it draws from Aristotle, as known in the Latin versions,[94] mainly by Boethius, of some few treatises of the _Organon_ together with the _Isagoge_ of Porphyry. It dominates the centres of intellectual life in the West because, despite its claim to finality in its principles or premises, and to universality for its method, it represents the only culture of a philosophic kind available to the adolescent peoples of the Western nations just becoming conscious of their ignorance. Christianity was the one organizing principle that pulsed with spiritual life. The vocation of the student could find fulfilment only in the religious orders. Scholasticism embodied what the Christian community had saved from the wreckage of Greek dialectic. Yet with all its effective manipulation of the formal technique of its translated and mutilated Aristotle, Scholasticism would have gone under long before it did through the weakness intrinsic to its divorce of the form and the matter of knowledge, but for two reasons. The first is the filtering through of some science and some new Aristotelian learning from the Arabs. The second is the spread of Greek scholarship and Greek manuscripts westward, which was consequent on the Latin occupation of Constantinople in 1204. It was respited by the opportunity which was afforded it of fresh draughts from the Aristotle of a less partial and purer tradition, and we have, accordingly, a golden age of revived Scholasticism beginning in the 13th century, admitting now within itself more differences than before. It is to the schoolmen of the two centuries preceding the Turkish capture of Constantinople that the controversial refinements usually associated with the name of Scholasticism are attributable. The _Analytics_ of Aristotle now entered quite definitely into the logical thought of Scholasticism and we have the contrast of a _logica vetus_ and _logica nova_. That other matters, the _parva logicalia_ and Mnemonics adapted from Psellus and possibly of Stoic origin, entered too did not outweigh this advantage. Confrontation with the historical Aristotle may have brought but little comfort to the orthodox system, but it was a stimulus to dialectical activity within the schools. It provoked the distinction of what was true _secundum fidem_ and what was true _secundum rationem_ among even sincere champions of orthodoxy, and their opponents accepted with a smile so admirable a mask for that thinking for themselves to which the revival of hope of progress had spurred them. The pioneers of the Renaissance owe something of their strength to their training in the developments which the system that they overthrew underwent during this period. The respite, however, was short. The flight of Byzantine scholarship westward in the 15th century revealed, and finally, that the philosophic content of the Scholastic teaching was as alien from Aristotle as from the spirit of the contemporary revolt of science, with its cry for a new medicine, a new nautical astronomy and the like. The doom of the Scholastic Aristotle was nevertheless not the rehabilitation of the Greek Aristotle. Between him and the tide of feeling at the Renaissance lay the whole achievement of Arab science. That impatience of authority to which we owe the Renaissance, the Reformation and the birth of Nationalism, is not stilled by the downfall of Aristotle as the _nomen appellativum_ of the schools. The appeal is to experience, somewhat vaguely defined, as against all authority, to the book of nature and no other. At last the world undertakes to enlarge the circle of its ideas. Entry: B
CASTILHO, ANTONIO FELICIANO DE (1800-1875), Portuguese man of letters, was born at Lisbon. He lost his sight at the age of six, but the devotion of his brother Augusto, aided by a retentive memory, enabled him to go through his school and university course with success; and he acquired an almost complete mastery of the Latin language and literature. His first work of importance, the _Cartas de Echo e Narciso_ (1821), belongs to the pseudo-classical school in which he had been brought up, but his romantic leanings became apparent in the _Primavera_ (1822) and in _Amor e Melancholia_ (1823), two volumes of honeyed and prolix bucolic poetry. In the poetic legends _A noite de Castello_ (1836) and _Cuimes do bardo_ (1838) Castilho appeared as a full-blown Romanticist. These books exhibit the defects and qualities of all his work, in which lack of ideas and of creative imagination and an atmosphere of artificiality are ill compensated for by a certain emotional charm, great purity of diction and melodious versification. Belonging to the didactic and descriptive school, Castilho saw nature as all sweetness, pleasure and beauty, and he lived in a dreamland of his imagination. A fulsome epic on the succession of King John VI. brought him an office of profit at Coimbra. On his return from a stay in Madeira, he founded the _Revista Universal Lisbonense_, in imitation of Herculano's _Panorama_, and his profound knowledge of the Portuguese classics served him well in the introduction and notes to a very useful publication, the _Livraria Classica Portugueza_ (1845-1847, 25 vols.), while two years later he established the "Society of the Friends of Letters and the Arts." A study on Camoens and treatises on metrification and mnemonics followed from his pen. His praiseworthy zeal for popular instruction led him to take up the study of pedagogy, and in 1850 he brought out his _Leitura Repentina_, a method of reading which was named after him, and he became government commissary of the schools which were destined to put it into practice. Going to Brazil in 1854, he there wrote his famous "Letter to the Empress." Though Castilho's lack of strong individuality and his over-great respect for authority prevented him from achieving original work of real merit, yet his translations of Anacreon, Ovid and Virgil and the _Chave do Enigma_, explaining the romantic incidents that led to his first marriage with D. Maria de Baena, a niece of the satirical poet Tolentino, and a descendant of Antonio Ferreira, reveal him as a master of form and a purist in language. His versions of Goethe's _Faust_ and Shakespeare's _Midsummer Night's Dream_, made without a knowledge of German and English, scarcely added to his reputation. When the Coimbra question arose in 1865, Garrett was dead and Herculano had ceased to write, leaving Castilho supreme, for the moment, in the realm of letters. But the youthful Anthero de Quental withstood his claim to direct the rising generation and attacked his superannuated leadership, and after a fierce war of pamphlets Castilho was dethroned. The rise of João de Deus reduced him to a secondary position in the Portuguese Parnassus, and when he died ten years later much of his former fame had preceded him to the tomb. Entry: CASTILHO
I. Praecognita disciplinarum, 4 books, hexilogia, technologia, archelogia, didactica, that is, on intellectual habits and on the classification, origin and study of the arts. II. Philology, 6 books, lexica, grammar, rhetoric, logic, oratory and poetry; book 5, lexica, contains dictionaries explained in Latin of 1076 Hebrew, 842 Syriac, 1934 Arabic, 1923 Greek and 2092 Latin words, and also nomenclator technologiae, &c., a classified vocabulary of terms used in the arts and sciences, in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, filling 34 pages; book 6 contains Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin and German grammars; book 10, poetica, contains a list of 61 Rotwelsch words. III. Theoretic philosophy, 10 books:--book 11, metaphysics; 12, pneumatics (on spirits); 13, physics; 14, arithmetic; 15, geometry; 16, cosmography; 17, uranometria (astronomy and astrology); 18, geography (with maps of the Old World, eastern Mediterranean, and Palestine under the Old and New Testaments, and a plate of Noah's ark); 19, optics; 20, music. IV. Practical philosophy, 4 books:--21, ethics; 22, economics (on relationships); 23, politics, with florilegium politicum, 119 pages of extracts from historians, philosophers and orators; 24, scholastics (on education, with a florilegium of 25 pages). V. The three superior faculties:--25, theology; 26, jurisprudence; 27, medicine (ending with the rules of the Salernian school). VI. Mechanical arts in general:--book 28, mathematical mechanical arts; book 29, agriculture, gardening, care of animals, baking, brewing, preparing medicines, metallurgy (with mining); book 30, physical mechanical arts--printing, dialling, &c. Under paedutica (games) is Vida's Latin poem on chess, and one by Leuschner on the ludus Lorzius. VII. Farragines disciplinarum, 5 books:--31, mnemonics; 32, history; 33, chronology; 34, architecture; 35, quodlibetica, miscellaneous arts, as magic, cabbala, alchemy, magnetism, &c., with others apparently distinguished and named by himself, as, paradoxologia, the art of explaining paradoxes; dipnosophistica, the art of philosophizing while feasting; cyclognomica, the art of conversing well de quovis scibili; tabacologia, the nature, use and abuse of tobacco, &c.--in all 35 articles in this book. Entry: I