Scholasticism, Enlightenment, and the Problem of Print: The Mediality of the Debate about Benito Jerónimo Feijoo’s Teatro crítico universal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Benito Jerónimo Feijoo, the major proponent of the Enlightenment in Spain, straddled two worlds and two traditions of intellectual discourse–the Enlightened public sphere and the traditional scholasticism of the university–and this had implications for how he addressed his opponents and ordered his thoughts. In this article, I will show that while appearing to break with traditional protocols, he subtly played with some of their core notions. At the same time, I will link his concept for his Teatro crítico universal as a theatre of errors to Pierre Bayle’s plans for his Historical and Critical Dictionary . In the debate that raged about the Teatro for almost a quarter of a century, it was Feijoo’s opponents who held him to the standards of dialectical debate, in particular to honouring the status controversiae . Finally, I will show that one of the most surprising features of this debate is that the supposedly conservative and progressive sides concurred in its most salient (meta-)issue: the legitimacy of new ideas. Both did not shy away from forfeiting traditional philosophical privileges.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".