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Philosophy Then

Philosophy for the Young, Medieval Style

Peter Adamson on battles over the trivium and quadrivium.

Around the world, teenagers are taking philosophy classes. For instance, French students take a philosophy exam at the end of their secondary education, and in 2008, Federal law in Brazil made the discipline compulsory for high school students. Forward thinking though such measures may be, they are also quite literally medieval. The forerunners of today’s French students at the early University of Paris, as well as their contemporaries in cities such as Bologna and Oxford, studied the ‘liberal arts’. You might know that these arts included three linguistic disciplines – the trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic (logical discussion) – and four mathematical topics called the quadrivium, namely arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.

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