This Day in Philosophy — 21 August: the death of Alexander of Hales

Alexander of Hales, the English-born theologian and philosopher, died in Paris on 21 August 1245. He is generally taken to have been born around 1185 in the district of Halesowen.

The man who changed the textbook#

Alexander's place in the history of philosophy has less to do with any book he wrote than with the way he taught.

At the beginning of the thirteenth century, theology in Paris was taught directly from Scripture. Alexander was among the first masters to set Peter Lombard's compilation, the Sentences (Sententiae), as a regular textbook. The choice looked like a technical one; its consequences were anything but.

The Sentences arranged its material heading by heading. Making the text a textbook arranged the teaching in the same way: a question for each heading, opposing views on each question, then a resolution. For the next three hundred years theology and philosophy were taught in that mould in the universities of Europe. The structure of Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae is itself a product of the tradition.

The first Franciscan chair#

At the height of his career, around 1236, Alexander joined the Franciscan order. He was by then a well-known master of theology at the University of Paris, and he took his chair with him. In this way the Franciscans acquired their first chairs of theology in the university.

The consequences of that decision spread through the history of thought. Bonaventure was his pupil; the Franciscan intellectual tradition — the line running on to Duns Scotus and Ockham — grew out of that chair.

The question of the Summa#

The Summa Theologica attached to his name, also known as the Summa fratris Alexandri, did not come wholly from his pen. It is taken to be a collective work, put together with contributions from his students and from later Franciscan masters. Such cases are common in medieval texts, and they show how differently the notion of an author once worked: a summa is less the product of a single mind than the accumulated learning of a school.

Why it matters#

The scholastic method is often recalled today as a form of hair-splitting. What it actually did was this: state a question, assemble the strongest counter-answers that might be given to it, then establish one's own position by answering those objections.

That is still the structure of an academic paper. And what Alexander of Hales did was precisely to turn that structure into an order of teaching.