Sawyer Seminar, “Disputation: Arguing In and Out of the University”
Sessions and Reading Materials
In advance of each seminar date, readings for each session are posted online at www.cmrs.ucla.edu/disputation_readings/index.html. You will need to obtain the user name and password from the Center's office to access these files. Please call us at 310-825-1880 or email cmrs@humnet.ucla.edu for the login information. Summaries of each session are posted on the readings page as well after the meeting date.
The topics to be addressed (listed chronologically by session below) show how the Seminar will approach the subject of disputation. The plan is to begin with the roots of disputation in antiquity and end with a notable modern event. In keeping with the mission of CMRS, however, the concentration will be on the eleventh through the seventeenth centuries.
October 18, 2007
“Disputation: Greek Roots”
Royce Hall Room 306, 3:30-6:30 pm
With Catherine Atherton (UCLA), David Blank (UCLA), Sean Kelsey (UCLA). The sophist wants to win by an art of speaking, the philosopher wants to find truth by an art of questioning. This is a philosopher’s version, at any rate, of the ancient struggle between philosophy and rhetoric, recorded by Plato in the Gorgias, the dialogue in which Socrates confronts the famous sophist of that name. Already in antiquity, both kinds of discourse, rhetorical and philosophical, were governed by rules that became formal and elaborate and then shaped the later development of disputation. Readings available.
October 22, 2007
“Qu’ranic Roots: Jadal and Disputation in Islam”
Royce Hall Room 314, 3:30-6:30 pm
With Tony Street (University of Cambridge), Hossein Ziai (UCLA).
Public disputation played a central role in natural theology (kalam) and jurisprudence (fiqh) in the Islamic world. The verb jadala (to dispute or argue) is common in the Qu’ran, and various derivatives of the verb have been used to cover a range of disputational forms, from the structure of Aristotle’s Topics to Al-Jazeera’s presentation of the news. A long tradition of works called Kitab al-Jadal emerged not only within the philosophical tradition (an early work by al-Farabi, for example) but also within the legal tradition (a text by al-Hanafi, for instance). Many of these Arabic works give rules for public disputation. A Latin treatise On the Way of Opposing and Responding that purports to be a translation of a Kitab al-Jadal is probably a thirteenth century forgery, but the forgery itself indicates the prestige of the Arabic disputational tradition in Latin Christendom. Readings available.
November 6, 2007
“Biblical Roots: Talmud, Disputation and the Torah”
Royce Hall Room 306, 4-7 pm
With Elliot Dorff (American Jewish University), William M. Schniedewind (UCLA), Howard Wettstein (UC Riverside).
Reasoned debate was the core of Talmudic methodology, the Rabbinic method par excellence of discerning the Bible’s real meanings. The early Rabbis thought of the written Torah recorded by Moses as less extensive than the oral Torah known to the prophets and handed down to themselves. Debate over the oral Torah and its relation to the Bible was also summarized in the written Mishna and later Talmudic texts. Disputes about these texts and the oral traditions behind them generated great heat, but it was heat in the service of light. Strikingly, the Talmud says of divergent, even contradictory, teachings that ‘these and also these others are the words of the Living God,’ a principle that guided the early Rabbis as they developed methods of analyzing God’s words while holding sacred their own disputes about the meanings of those words. Readings available.
November 13, 2007
“Gilbert Crispin, The Disputation of a Jew with a Christian”
Royce Hall Room 306, 3:30-6:30 pm
With Steven Kruger (Queens College and Graduate Center, CUNY), Howard Wettstein (UC Riverside). The Abbott of Westminster after 1085 was Gilbert Crispin, a follower of Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury. Before 1100, Gilbert wrote The Disputation of a Jew with a Christian About the Christian Faith, an early survivor from a series of literary versions of debates about religion between Christians and Jews – debates in which Jews were often forced to participate. Gilbert presents his text as the record of a real event or events, and he describes the Jew’s arguments as ‘consequent and logical.’ ‘He explained with equal consequence his former objections,’ Gilbert writes, ‘while our reply met his objections foot to foot.’ Gilbert adds that the disputation led to the conversion of another ‘of the Jews who were then in London, with the help of God’s mercy.’ Readings available.
November 20, 2007
“Ancient Church Councils: How formal were they, and was there discussion?”
Royce Hall Room 306, 3:30-6:30 pm
With Thomas Graumann (University of Cambridge). In the ancient church, the meeting of bishops in synods or councils became an increasingly frequent occurrence. Often fundamental theological topics were on the agenda, in particular questions about the Trinity and Christology. One expects these to be the object of intense discussion. However, it is not straightforward to assess how bishops debated the issues in hand, or whether they “discussed” them at all. Of the earliest councils only indirect news and patchy documentation survives, from which evidence of discussion has to be extrapolated. Of later and better-documented councils, in particular the so-called “ecumenical” councils, extensive records are extant. Yet these appear to have little interest to reveal openly what discussions took place. They require scrupulous analysis to uncover how substantive theological debate was conducted, and which other factors influenced decisions. To understand such purported debates, it is further necessary to inquire into analogies and possible models for conciliar formats and conduct of business and to consider social conventions. Readings available.
November 27, 2007
“Disputing Love: Abelard, Heloise, and Bernard of Clairvaux”
Royce Hall Room 306, 3:30-6:30 pm
With Constant Mews (Monash University).
Abelard, in 1115 the most celebrated logician of his day, fell in love with a brilliant and beautiful young student named Heloise. Their story of tragic love, starting with bad judgment, causing Abelard to be castrated, and ending in conventual solitude, was all the more dramatic because they were passionate debaters about despair, salvation and personal obligation in and out of wedlock. A current of disputation runs not only through the late letters that they exchanged after events tore them apart but also through an anonymous exchange of letters (preserved at the abbey of Clairvaux) that, it is argued, they wrote during the affair. The seminar will consider disputation about love as a consistent theme of their relationship from its earliest phases, comparing what they both had to say about love, with the reflections on the subject of Abelard’s famous adversary, Bernard of Clairvaux, whom Heloise once welcomed to the Paraclete. Readings available.
December 4, 2007
“The Owl and the Nightingale: Philosophy and the Female Voice”
Royce Hall Room 306, 3:30-6:30 pm
With Christopher Cannon (New York University). The Owl and the Nightingale, a Middle English poem of nearly 1800 lines, was probably written in the early thirteenth century. Its Latin title calls the poem an argument (altercacio), but the quarreling birds follow rules of debate used by medieval orators and lawyers. In an agile range of styles, the owl’s unlovely philosophy contends with the nightingale’s blissful song on contentious topics that include lust, love, misogyny and innovations in worship. The absence of a conclusion may reflect doubts about the role of dialectic inside and outside the schools. Readings available.
January 29, 2008
“John Trevisa v. Lord Berkeley: Controlling the Language of Dispute”
Royce Hall Room 306, 3:30-6:30 pm
With Rita Copeland (University of Pennsylvania). Under the patronage of Lord Thomas Berkeley, a powerful aristocrat, John Trevisa (1342-1402) translated important Latin texts into English at a time when English itself could be seditious, when people were arrested just for carrying the Wycliffite Bible in English. One of the works that Trevisa translated is a dispute, the Dialogue between a Knight and a Clerk. And in the prologue to his version of a universal history, Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon, Trevisa stages a debate between a lord (his master, Berkeley) and a clerk (Trevisa himself), raising questions of linguistic access against hermeneutic control, English insularity against Latin internationalism. The lord finally wins when proto-national political prestige prevails against the claims of an international ecclesiastical class. Readings available.
February 5, 2008
“After the Condemnations of 1277: Confining Disputation”
Royce Hall Room 306, 3:30-6:30 pm
With Alex Novikoff (St. Joseph’s University), Hans Thijssen (Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen). The Condemnations of 1277 in the University of Paris, which involved Thomas Aquinas before he became a saint, were the most famous of many such efforts to confine and control debate in the university. At least fifteen condemnations are recorded for thirteenth and fourteenth century Paris alone. But official repression was the mother of disputational invention: disputants developed devices of speech and writing to signal acceptance of a condemned thesis in ways that were formally covert yet well understood within the disputational context. When John Buridan discussed the condemned view that the soul is a material thing, for example, he explicitly rejected it in a way that probably indicated assent. Because most condemnations were local affairs, their authority beyond the place of their promulgation was unclear, requiring officials who wanted to invoke them elsewhere to set the stage carefully. Readings available.
February 12, 2008
“Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls and the Good Parliament of 1376”
Royce Hall Room 306, 3:30-6:30 pm
With W. Mark Ormrod (University of York), Henry Ansgar Kelly (UCLA). The term ‘parliament’ has become synonymous with an institutional locus of disputation and ‘parliamentary’ with certain specialized rules of debate. An early and momentous Parliament met in England in 1376, when the Commons were very disputatious and notably contentious in their requests to the King. For his part, Edward III was very old, and the ministers replying to Parliament in his name could produce only bland responses that would not appease the Commons. Shortly after these events, Chaucer produced his Parliament of Fowls to depict an avian parliament in disputation. The commoner birds in the assembly show themselves impatient with the high-level wrangling of their betters until a sovereign Nature intervenes to moderate the dispute. Readings available.
February 19, 2008
“Daring to Write Against Philosophers: The Prostitute as Disputant”
Royce Hall Room 306, 3:30-6:30 pm
With Karen Sullivan (Bard College). In the opening years of the fifteenth century, a group of Parisian litterati engaged in what is thought to have been the first debate in French literature. Christine de Pizan, the first professional woman writer, inveighed against Guillaume de Lorris' and Jean de Meun's Romance of the Rose, the most popular literary work in French of the late Middle Ages. As partisans of the romance sprang to its defense, the debate came to involve figures from the royal court, the chancellery, and the university. If this debate remains of interest today, it is both because of what it shows us about practices of reading and discussing vernacular literature in the late Middle Ages and because of what it suggests about the interactions of men and women in disputations of this time. In trying to understand Christine's role in this debate, her interlocutors turned back to the image of the ancient Greek hetairia, or courtesan, as she was represented in ancient Roman writings. What happens when (to quote these interlocutors) a woman, like the French writer Christine or the Greek courtesan Leontium, “dares to write against a philosopher?” What was the perceived link between a woman's entry into the public intellectual sphere, as a disputant, and her entry into a public sexual sphere, as a prostitute? To what extent was the quarrel about The Romance of the Rose (which Christine takes to task for its representation of women) inevitably a quarrel about the quarrel itself (and a woman's role in it)? A consideration of what happens to disputation when a woman engages in it may ultimately shed light upon the functioning of disputation in general. Readings available.
February 26, 2008
“Pico’s 900 Theses: Disputation Unbounded”
Royce Hall Room 306, 3:30-6:30 pm
With Giulio Busi (Institut für Judaistik, Freie Universität Berlin). Giovanni Pico, Count of Mirandola, offered to pay the expenses of anyone who would travel to Rome in 1486 to dispute with him in public on 900 theses of his choosing. Because Pico’s enemies in the papal court objected, the debate was quashed, but Pico unwisely published his grandiose collection of theses, which show him pushing against the limits of both reason and faith by using a medieval form to break the boundaries of medieval discourse. The most startling innovation in the published theses is that 119 of them are about Cabala, the Jewish mysticism which was then all but unknown to Christians and very controversial among Jews. Readings available.
March 11, 2008
“Latin v. Greek at the Council of Florence”
Royce Hall Room 306, 3:30-6:30 pm
With John Monfasani (State University of New York, Albany). In 1439 the Council of Florence brought about a historic union of the Greek and Latin Churches. But the union quickly fell apart after the Greek delegation returned home. What went wrong? Was the union doomed from the start? Did one or both sides misconceive the enterprise? After all, in theology one cannot achieve agreement by simply splitting the difference. Readings available.
April 8, 2008
“Luther and the Leipzig Disputation: Dissent Disseminated”
Royce Hall Room 306, 3:30-6:30 pm
With Erika Rummel (Emmanuel College, University of Toronto), Debora Shuger (UCLA). In 1519, Martin Luther, assisted by Andreas von Karlstadt, debated Johann Eck on free will, penance and the authority of the pope. In a speech inaugurating the debate, later published as The Method of Disputing, Petrus Mosellanus presented a humanist critique of scholastic disputation. We also know that procedural wrangles on the use of written aids disturbed the debates, but these altercations also shed light on scholastic disputational practice. The most important outcome of the Leipzig Disputation, however, was Luther’s decision to use the new print media to broadcast his ideas, thus shifting authority away from university theologians, the traditional arbiters of doctrinal disputation, to a large and unruly reading public. Readings available.
April 15, 2008 “Healing from History: Psychoanalytic and Sociological Considerations on Disputation and Reconciliation in the Modern Context” -- (formerly titled “Community Repair, Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Political and Sociological Considerations”)
Royce Hall Room 306, 3:30-6:30 pm
With Jeffrey Prager (UCLA). This discussion shifts focus on disputation from various early modern expressions to a contemporary one. This presentation focuses on institutions of Truth and Reconciliation, describing these commissions or tribunals, convened in various national contexts, as uniquely modern practices of dispute settlement intending to transform existing enmities between perpetrators and victims into forms of civic friendship. Even in these modern settings, these institutions are also distinctly novel, subordinating conventional legal procedures aimed to determine guilt and to exact punishment to the offering of forgiveness in exchange for apology and truth-telling. Applying psychoanalytic insights concerning the process by which individuals overcome traumatic pasts, relevant social, political and interpersonal features are identified that promote this form of dispute-settlement and also describe the inherent challenges to its realization. Readings available.
April 22, 2008
“Raphael’s Disputa: Adoration and Disputation”
Royce Hall Room 306, 3:30-6:30 pm
With Marcia Hall (Temple), Franco Mormando (Boston College), Joanna Woods-Marsden (UCLA). In 1509-10, Raphael painted the four walls of Pope Julius II's personal library (now the Stanza della Segnatura) in the Vatican with subjects reflecting the organization of medieval libraries into four faculties of Jurisprudence, Poetry, Philosophy (represented by the image now known as the School of Athens), and Theology (represented by the Disputa), the last two on opposing walls. Presided over by the Trinity, Saints, Prophets, and Fathers of the Church, the various figures of the Disputa discuss the central sacramental mystery of Christianity, the doctrine of the Eucharist, which had been contentious philosophically for three centuries. On the opposite wall, the School of Athens shows an ideal assembly of the great philosophers of pagan antiquity, led by an otherworldly Plato and an earthbound Aristotle. Christianity and pre-Christianity open complementary paths to truth, one by way of faith and revelation, the other by reason and observation — the choice between the two ways stimulating moral, theological and philosophical argument. Readings available.
April 29, 2008
“The Valladolid Junta of 1550-51: Rights of Native Americans Disputed in Spain”
Royce Hall Room 306, 3:30-6:30 pm
With José M. Hernández (UNED), Carole Goldberg(UCLA), Anthony Pagden (UCLA). Juán Ginés de Sepúlveda, a minister of the Spanish crown, and Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican missionary bishop, met in Valladolid in 1550-51 in a disputation about the rights of people conquered by Spain across the Atlantic. Las Casas successfully contested Sepúlveda’s claims that violence against Native Americans was justified because of their immoral behavior, idolatrous worship and sub-human nature. The dispute echoed earlier juntas or consultations, going back to 1504, in which lawyers, theologians and other experts advised the Spanish monarchy on its policy in the New World. Prominent in these discussions was Aristotle’s doctrine of ‘slavery by nature,’ which, as long as Aristotle’s authority remained beyond dispute, had enormous implications for law, morality and politics both in theory and in practice. Readings available.
May 8, 2008
“Galileo: Scientific Disputation as Courtly Performance”
Royce Hall Room 306, 1:00 - 4:00 pm
With Mario Biagioli (Harvard University). The scandalous end-game of Galileo’s condemnation by his church played itself out not in disputation but before a tribunal with exchanges of written documents. Earlier in his career, however, when the Starry Messenger of 1610 made Galileo a celebrity, fame won him a more visible place at the Medici court in Tuscany, and this new role soon found him disputing with a philosopher about Jupiter’s newly discovered moons. Treated by the Grand Duke like a patrician, Galileo had nonetheless entered a world where learned debates on science and medicine were often staged as entertainments for princes and courtiers. He soon saw the dangers lurking in facile rejoinders to witty questions about sensitive topics. Even after Galileo ceased to perform at court for his Medici patrons, the rules and conventions of courtly disputing still shaped the immortal literary expressions of his science. Readings available.
May 15, 2008
“The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus: Disputing What Hell Is”
Royce Hall Room 306, 3:30-6:30 pm
With David Riggs (Stanford University), Michael J.B. Allen (UCLA), Debora Shuger (UCLA). One of the masterworks of the Elizabethan stage, Christopher Marlowe’s Faustus leaves its audience with an unforgettable picture of the heroic individual struggling against moral rules, religious constraints and academic conventions which were still stronger than any single person, however daring and ambitious. The low-born Faustus uses his learning, including mastery of the technique of disputation, to climb to fame and power. Dissatisfied with the ordinary rewards of success, Faustus turns to magic and overcomes time itself. The play becomes a psychomachia, a spiritual battle, between forces like the Good and Bad Angels of the play, which turns into a disputation about knowledge and the nature of hell itself. Readings available.
May 20, 2008 CANCELLED
“Epilogue: Heidegger, Cassirer and the Fracturing of Modern Western Philosophy”
Royce Hall Room 306, 3:30-6:30 pm CANCELLED With Michael Friedman (Stanford University). After he had published Being and Time (1927) but before he joined the Nazi party and became Rector of Freiburg (1933), Martin Heidegger met Ernst Cassirer at Davos in 1929 to debate the future of philosophy after Kant. Cassirer, the first Jewish rector of any German university, was better known than Heidegger at the time, not so much for his recently completed Philosophy of Symbolic Forms as for two other accomplishments: Neo-Kantian responses to such new scientific problems as relativity; and major contributions to the history of philosophy. Observers judged Heidegger the winner of the Davos disputation, but Cassirer did not lose the attention of subsequent philosophical generations just by losing to Heidegger, the problematic patriarch of what Anglo-American philosophers call ‘continental’ philosophy – a name for what they often ignore. Although the prophets of Anglo-American analytic philosophy were Germans educated, like Cassirer, as Neo-Kantians, they largely repudiated Cassirer’s preoccupation with the past and thereby lost touch with his thinking, which was well embedded in history. CANCELLED
The topics to be addressed (listed chronologically by session below) show how the Seminar will approach the subject of disputation. The plan is to begin with the roots of disputation in antiquity and end with a notable modern event. In keeping with the mission of CMRS, however, the concentration will be on the eleventh through the seventeenth centuries.
The Abbott of Westminster after 1085 was Gilbert Crispin, a follower of Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury. Before 1100, Gilbert wrote The Disputation of a Jew with a Christian About the Christian Faith, an early survivor from a series of literary versions of debates about religion between Christians and Jews – debates in which Jews were often forced to participate. Gilbert presents his text as the record of a real event or events, and he describes the Jew’s arguments as ‘consequent and logical.’ ‘He explained with equal consequence his former objections,’ Gilbert writes, ‘while our reply met his objections foot to foot.’ Gilbert adds that the disputation led to the conversion of another ‘of the Jews who were then in London, with the help of God’s mercy.’ 
The scandalous end-game of Galileo’s condemnation by his church played itself out not in disputation but before a tribunal with exchanges of written documents. Earlier in his career, however, when the Starry Messenger of 1610 made Galileo a celebrity, fame won him a more visible place at the Medici court in Tuscany, and this new role soon found him disputing with a philosopher about Jupiter’s newly discovered moons. Treated by the Grand Duke like a patrician, Galileo had nonetheless entered a world where learned debates on science and medicine were often staged as entertainments for princes and courtiers. He soon saw the dangers lurking in facile rejoinders to witty questions about sensitive topics. Even after Galileo ceased to perform at court for his Medici patrons, the rules and conventions of courtly disputing still shaped the immortal literary expressions of his science. 