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Project

The Changing Face of Aristotle's Logic at Leuven University (1425-1797). Continuity and Innovation in the Student Notebooks and its European Context.

A major source for the history of the University of Leuven is the large collection of manuscripts containing notes taken by students during their lecture courses. For the period 1425-1797 more than 500 of these "student notebooks" are known to survive in the public domain, and that from the Arts Faculty alone. A number of notebooks also document the teaching at the faculties of Law, Medicine, and Theology. The student notebooks thus represent an unparalleled source of information about what was taught in Leuven, allowing us to trace in detail the transmission to Leuven students of new ideas connected with the Renaissance, the Reformation, the beginning of modern philosophy, and the scientific revolution. Moreover, the sheer number of surviving student notebooks from Leuven in especially the later part of the period means that we can often trace over time the changing reception of these broader European intellectual currents. In this way, the notebooks offer us a unique look a t Leuven as part of a wider European knowledge culture, transferring knowledge to students, and through them to the society of the Low Countries and beyond. It is the goal of the present research project to study all the extant student notebooks from Leuven dealing with the teaching of logic, integrating this source into the history of the Old University of Leuven and its relations with the broader European intellectual and institutional scene. The student notebooks are lecture notes, written down by various students and preserved in the original manuscripts. The largest number of the extant notebooks stem from teaching in the Leuven Arts Faculty. Students began their Arts education at Leuven normally when they were fifteen years old, and the program itself comprised two years of studying logic, physics, metaphysics and ethics. Many students continued their studies afterwards at one of the higher faculties (at Leuven, Medicine, Canon and Civil Law, and Theology). The notebooks were an integral part of the education at Leuven in the sense that in order to pass their exams the students were required to know the material delivered in their lectures. In this way, the notebooks can give us a good idea of what was being taught (and learned) in Leuven in the Early Modern Period. The student notebooks, therefore, have their origin in a very specific setting, and this has an impact on their physical characteristics and hence on their use as an historical source. Because they are written down on paper by young students during courses dictated in Latin by professors, the handwriting is quite varied. The Latin used in these notebooks, moreover, is of a technical genre, reflecting the long tradition of a specific scholastic Aristotelian language to be found in medieval philosophical writings and textbooks of the time. As such, reading the notebooks is demanding. As a consequence, it is a fact that for all their promise as historical sources, the Leuven student notebooks are understudied: despite recent work opening up several promising avenues of research, only the way the notebooks reflect the Leuven teaching of natural philosophy has been traced in detail. In this research project we intend to analyze the student notebooks dealing with logic. In conjunction with other sources like textbooks, student dissertations, faculty publications, and university and faculty documents this will allow us to study these notebooks in the broader context of university education. Moreover, it will reveal what these notebooks say about Leuven's relationship both with the European knowledge culture and with the broader society the University served. This perspective will therefore link the teaching in Leuven to the period's broader European social, political, and intellectual history, thus opening up an important new perspective on the history of the University of Leuven. The student notebooks can, for instance, help us to answer the question whether Leuven was a stodgy and conservative university resistant to intellectual change, or whether it was more open to new current in thinking than we might otherwise expect. From its beginning, Leuven University has been considered a typically "medieval" university. Teaching and learning were organized in the traditional way, transmitting Aristotleâs works and ideas as had been done for centuries by medieval Masters in various European universities such as Cologne and Paris. This general view, repeated time and again, needs revision and nuance. Hundreds of student notebooks, written by Leuven students during their courses and still preserved in manuscript, show different faces of the same Aristotle. It goes without saying that Aristotle's text, read in a medieval Latin translation, was central in all intellectual activities and teaching. The interpretation given by the Magister was normative and decisive. These interpretations were, however, always discussed in long public debates presided over by a Magister or a professor. Because students were expected to participate in such debates in order to prove their mastery of the Aristotelian corpus and its rich tradition of interpretations, their education was organized in a systematic way. In fact, the whole curriculum aimed at achieving the goals of the Liberal Arts education: to produce a virtuous, knowledgeable, and articulate person trained and skilled in the seven liberal arts. Like all other medieval and Early Modern universities, the very first course to be taken by Leuven students entering university, was intended to initiate them into Aristotelian logic. Moreover, since all subsequent education in other faculties demanded this background, the course had to cover the whole of Aristotle's Organon, the standard collection of Aristotleâs six works on logic. The order in which Aristotle's logical treatises had to be taught was regulated by academic authorities. As a consequence, there were no innovative shifts in format, but only in the content . Traces of Cartesian thought, for instance, often to be found in Leuven student notebooks on physics, are also present in some 17th-century Leuven courses on logic.Yet, whereas some Aristotelian treatises, dealing with demonstration, definition, and scientific knowledge, received much less attention in Leuven teaching, the question that still calls for attention is whether the Topics were read and commented on at Leuven university. If the answer is negative, as it appears to be, then the further question that needs to be asked is "why?". An answer to these questions will only be possible when a nuanced study of the student notebooks is connected to an in-depth examination of printed handbooks and textbooks used during these courses of logic. If Aristotle's Organon remained foundational, again, the question arises: which Aristotle was being taught? And why that Aristotle? The long tradition of scholastic teaching and learning at Leuven University, so it appears, is not mono lithic. On the contrary, the general assumptions about Leuven University as a "scholastic bulwark" have to be nuanced, and maybe even revised. In order to facilitate this revisionary task, this research project will focus on two topics. (1) First an up-to-date inventory â based on the newest 'inventory' offered in VANPAEMEL et al. (2012) and HIRAUX â MIRGUET (2003) â will be made of the extant student notebooks with courses of logic at Leuven University, anno 1426- 1797. A second important step in this heuristic phase is to identify the textbook(s) used in each course. This will enable a proper understanding of which text of Aristotle had been commented on and to grasp how text and commentary relate to one another. This content study is entirely new and will refute or adjust general views on the history of the Leuven Faculty of Arts in general and the teaching of Aristotelian logic at Leuven University between its foundation in 1425 until 1797. (2) In a second stage, this research project will enable us to compare Leuven teaching with other European universities. Moreover, and important to a deeper understandi ng of the transmission of knowledge, it will shed new light on the question of which Aristotle has been taught at Leuven University. In which period can we detect changes? And what factors brought about the change? The ever evolving and shifting methodology applied in the teaching of logic is revealing and opposes the general view that logic courses were merely elementary, and thus not subject to any degree of original thought or rethinking. In addition, it will reveal how Aristotle was read at different European universities in the Early Modern Period, and how Leuven University positioned itself in a European context of learning, teaching and transmitting knowledge.
Date:1 Oct 2014 →  30 Sep 2018
Keywords:Neo-Latin Studies, History of Universities, History of Philosophy, Aristotle
Disciplines:Language studies, Literary studies, History, Theory and methodology of philosophy, Theory and methodology of literary studies