Scholastic Humor: Ready Wit as a Virtue in Theory and Practice

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articlepeer-review

  • Boaz Faraday Schuman
Scholastic philosophers can be quite funny. What’s more, they have good reason to be: Aristotle himself lists ready wit (eutrapelia) among the virtues, as a mean between excessive humor and its defect. Here, I assess Scholastic discussions of humor in theory, before turning to examples of it in practice. The last and finest of these is a joke, hitherto unacknowledged, which Aquinas makes in his famous Five Ways. Along the way, we’ll see (i) that the history of philosophy is not so hostile to humor as is commonly supposed; and (ii) that the competing theories of humor like the Incongruity Theory and the Release Theory are not altogether incompatible. We’ll also see (iii) at least one example of an apparent attempt by modern translators to excise humor from a medieval text. These considerations open a window into what oral discussion and debate at medieval universities was actually like, and how we should understand the relationship between the texts we have now and the exchanges that actually occurred then.
Original languageEnglish
JournalHistory of Philosophy Quarterly
Volume39
Issue number2
Pages (from-to)113-129
ISSN0740-0675
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022

    Research areas

  • Faculty of Humanities - Aristotelian ethics, The Five Ways, Aquinas, Buridan, Bonaventure, Humor

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