The ideology of reform and changing ideas concerning Jews in the works of rupert of deutz and hermannus quondam iudeus
In 1965 Lea Dasberg postulated that one result of the Investiture Struggle was that the political and economic status of the Jews began to erode. Jews, as the perceived allies of the emperor, were cast in the role of the enemies of an increasingly assertive Church intent on establishing its freedom from all non-ecclesiastical interference.' This theory has not received widespread acclaim; nonetheless, there is an obvious appeal in the suggestion that one should investigate possible connections between the Gregorian Reform and changing twelfth-century attitudes of Christians to Jews. The religious revival toward the end of the eleventh century, which spilled over into the twelfth century, was marked by the attempt of the reforming popes to disengage the Church from lay authority. In the eyes of popes such as Gregory VII, only a Church unimpeded by temporal encroachment could play its allotted function to create in society iustitia, or justice. And that meant total compliance of all who lived in that society with the life ordained by Jesus Christ.2 Only a universal Church that was properly steered by Rome, through papal legates and bishops who looked to Rome for instruction, could effectively play this role. One side of the Reform movement thus concentrated on the structure which the Church needed in order to Christianize society.
Jewish-Christian disputations and the twelfth-century renaissance
An important aspect of the medieval debate between Christians and Jews was Jewish-Christian disputations. These disputations were either records of real discussions or academic treatises written in...
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.