UCLA Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies

The UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CMRS) has been awarded a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a year-long John E. Sawyer Seminar, to study disputation—formalized argument—in a historical, comparative, and interdisciplinary framework. The seminar will take place at UCLA during academic year 2007–08.

Effective government in the United States, and in other countries, requires peaceful and productive public debate, but the possibility of such debate is no longer secure, as witness the notoriously bitter divisions that now disrupt the US Congress. Only twenty years ago, in a time of strong political differences, a nominee for the Supreme Court as sharply defined as Antonin Scalia won 98 votes in the Senate, the only nays coming from Senators Garn of Utah and Goldwater of Arizona. In 1993, the Senate vote on Ruth Bader Ginsburg was roughly the same: 96 to 3, with one Senator, Riegle of Michigan, not voting. The negatives were Senators Helms of North Carolina, Nickles of Oklahoma and Smith of New Hampshire. Many might now find these few dissenters heroic and the lopsided results troubling, seeing the latter as symptoms of lax or expedient conscience. But nothing like these votes or the debates surrounding them seems possible in current circumstances. Our much greater danger is not excessive accommodation but dysfunctional hostility in the public square.

What is Disputation and Why Study It?

Disputation is formalized argument. In the Western tradition, the process of formalizing argument among educated people, having begun with rhetoric and philosophy in antiquity, culminated in the disputations of the medieval university, where disputation was the governing practice of teaching and learning. From their first year on, students were required to dispute weekly, and the masters of every faculty – arts, law, medicine and theology – were also expected to dispute regularly. What professors do now by testing students and publishing books and articles, their medieval ancestors did with disputations.

Two forms of disputation were the most common. In one form, called obligatio, a respondent defended a claim against an opponent, who sought to force the respondent into contradiction by advancing other statements. The respondent was obligated to accept any statement entailed by the claims which he had initially presented and to reject anything inconsistent with them, otherwise treating all claims on their merits. The other prominent medieval form of disputation was the quodlibet – literally, a disputation about anything. As the name suggests, a quodlibetal disputation required a master to settle difficult questions from the floor on any topic within his field. Quodlibets were often public confrontations in which a master, accompanied by advanced students, would face off against other masters and their students.

So effective and enduring were these practices that disputation not only ruled the faculties of the medieval university but also shaped countless conversations and textual forms after that period and outside the university – in art, science, medicine, literature, law, politics and other cultural domains. Moreover, the imprint of disputation on Western culture is still evident: even now, highly formalized debates between candidates, regulated by third parties, affect such momentous decisions as presidential elections. Disputation is certainly worth studying, especially from an interdisciplinary and comparative point of view and à la longue durée. If we consult the past and thereby come to understand better how and why our ancestors disputed, might we learn to use this powerful tool of human culture more wisely in contemporary affairs? This is the key question that motivates the Seminar’s study of disputation.

Like other problems of large cultural scope, which need solutions on the same scale, this one has deep historical roots, some of them in the ancient universities of medieval Europe, specifically in the practice of disputation. CMRS, with the generous support of the Mellon Foundation, will therefore examine disputation in a historical, comparative and interdisciplinary framework through a year-long and public John E. Sawyer Seminar, “Disputation: Ways of Arguing In and Out of the University."