Abstract

John of Salisbury is an important figure when it comes to twelfth-century philosophy. Among other things, he is known for his educational philosophy. These views are mostly expounded in his Metalogicon, written as a defense of the arts of the trivium, namely grammar, dialectic (or logic) and rhetoric. His motivation for writing this treatise is to defend the teaching of these classical arts against those who believe that education should have the sole purpose of training people for certain professional occupations; these adversaries he subsumes under the name “Cornificans”. The purpose of this talk is to show how John of Salisbury’s humanistic approach to education is still relevant today, in a context where a classical conception of education as promoting human flourishing is being challenged by a more austere view of education, where the imperative of forming technicians suited to the needs of the market takes precedence.

About the Speaker Roxane Noël is a Gates scholar and PhD student in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. She specializes in medieval philosophy, with a special interest for the problem of universals. After working on Peter Abelard’s notion of nature for her M.A. thesis, she now focuses her PhD research on twelfth-century nominalism, a project she is undertaking with the supervision of John Marenbon.