Work Project 3
Invention of Method. Medieval Philosophy and Genealogy of Modern Reason
Mario Meliadò
The project reconstructs the legitimization process of modern models of rationality through the historiographical rediscovery of medieval thought. In particular, it investigates how the concept of method came to define the birth and specific identity of modern reason and, simultaneously, to constitute the theoretical and teleological criterion for reinterpreting the philosophical past. The 18th and 19th-century scholarly colonization of the Middle Ages gave rise to two fundamental notions: on the one hand, the historiographical creation of the “scholastic method” as the antithetical model that defines the otherness of medieval thinking; on the other hand, the elaboration of genesis narratives, discovering in the Middle Ages the root, presupposition, or anticipation of specific modern conceptions of knowledge, such as the notions of “experimental”, “geometrical”, and “psychological method”.