Scholastic Humor: Ready Wit as a Virtue in Theory and Practice
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Scholastic Humor : Ready Wit as a Virtue in Theory and Practice. / Schuman, Boaz Faraday.
I: History of Philosophy Quarterly, Bind 39, Nr. 2, 2022, s. 113-129.Publikation: Bidrag til tidsskrift › Tidsskriftartikel › Forskning › fagfællebedømt
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Scholastic Humor
T2 - Ready Wit as a Virtue in Theory and Practice
AU - Schuman, Boaz Faraday
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - Scholastic philosophers can be quite funny. What’s more, they have good reason to be: Aristotle himself lists ready wit (eutrapelia) among the virtues, as a mean between excessive humor and its defect. Here, I assess Scholastic discussions of humor in theory, before turning to examples of it in practice. The last and finest of these is a joke, hitherto unacknowledged, which Aquinas makes in his famous Five Ways. Along the way, we’ll see (i) that the history of philosophy is not so hostile to humor as is commonly supposed; and (ii) that the competing theories of humor like the Incongruity Theory and the Release Theory are not altogether incompatible. We’ll also see (iii) at least one example of an apparent attempt by modern translators to excise humor from a medieval text. These considerations open a window into what oral discussion and debate at medieval universities was actually like, and how we should understand the relationship between the texts we have now and the exchanges that actually occurred then.
AB - Scholastic philosophers can be quite funny. What’s more, they have good reason to be: Aristotle himself lists ready wit (eutrapelia) among the virtues, as a mean between excessive humor and its defect. Here, I assess Scholastic discussions of humor in theory, before turning to examples of it in practice. The last and finest of these is a joke, hitherto unacknowledged, which Aquinas makes in his famous Five Ways. Along the way, we’ll see (i) that the history of philosophy is not so hostile to humor as is commonly supposed; and (ii) that the competing theories of humor like the Incongruity Theory and the Release Theory are not altogether incompatible. We’ll also see (iii) at least one example of an apparent attempt by modern translators to excise humor from a medieval text. These considerations open a window into what oral discussion and debate at medieval universities was actually like, and how we should understand the relationship between the texts we have now and the exchanges that actually occurred then.
KW - Faculty of Humanities
KW - Aristotelian ethics
KW - The Five Ways
KW - Aquinas
KW - Buridan
KW - Bonaventure
KW - Humor
UR - https://philpapers.org/rec/SCHSHR-3
U2 - 10.5406/21521026.39.2.02
DO - 10.5406/21521026.39.2.02
M3 - Journal article
VL - 39
SP - 113
EP - 129
JO - History of Philosophy Quarterly
JF - History of Philosophy Quarterly
SN - 0740-0675
IS - 2
ER -
ID: 305800783