Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

404 GLOSSARY
Remonstrants:
resolutio:
scepticism:
scholasticism:
semantics:
sublunary:
schemes. For example, a philosopher might argue that
propositions about societies can be ‘reduced’ to
propositions about the individuals who constitute
them; that, in other words, a society is nothing but a
collection of individuals.
see ‘Arminianism’.
a Latin term for the Greek word ‘analysis’. See
‘analysis and synthesis’.
if one says of a man that he is sceptical about (say)
the existence of Robin Hood, one means that he does
not go so far as to assert that there was no such person,
but rather that he holds that the evidence brought to
support the assertion that Robin Hood existed does
not satisfy the required standards. Philosophical
scepticism is distinguished by the fact that the
philosophical sceptic casts doubt on a whole range of
assertions. For example, a philosophical sceptic
might say that the evidence brought to support any
assertion about the past can never be adequate.
a term sometimes used to mean Western medieval
Christian philosophy as a whole. In a more precise
sense, however, ‘scholasticism’ refers to only a part
of such philosophy, namely the philosophical
movement that began in cathedral schools in the
eleventh century AD and reached its peak in the
universities of Paris and Oxford in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries. Such philosophy relied heavily
on ancient thought, and especially (though by no
means exclusively) on the philosophy of Aristotle.
the study of meaning, often regarded as one part of
‘semiotics’, the general theory of signs. Other parts
of semiotics are syntactics, namely the study of the
grammar and syntax of language, and pragmatics, the
study of the purposes and effects of language.
the Aristotelian universe was a system of concentric
spheres, with a spherical earth at rest in the centre.
Around the earth there rotated invisible spheres,
carrying the Sun, Moon, planets and stars. The region
within the sphere of the Moon was known as the
‘sublunary’ world. It consisted of the four elements
(earth, air, water and fire), which constantly pass into
each other. It was distinguished from the
‘superlunary’ world of the heavens, the matter of
which is of a distinct type, the so-called