Thomas Aquinas is light-years more difficult to teach than Anselm, even controlling for the fact that I’m more familiar and comfortable with Anselm. In fact, I would even theorize that the only major body of Western thought that might be more difficult to teach than scholasticism is German Idealism, though I have not yet attempted the latter.

Tuesday, November 9, 2010 at 3:27 pm
Would you chalk that up to 1) the format of the scholastics, or 2) the utterly foreign nature of their assumptions to most students?
Tuesday, November 9, 2010 at 3:30 pm
I would go with both, maybe even moreso the second point — I can give a brief rundown of how the format works, but there’s a limit to how much good “background lecturing” on the underlying intellectual architecture of scholasticism can do.
Tuesday, November 9, 2010 at 9:12 pm
I find the best method is just to flog them with it.
Sunday, November 14, 2010 at 10:54 am
I am not being in any way sarcastic when I confess that I get my philosophy students to set up scholastic disputations in order to get them to think through a subject consistently. They find it really useful to have such a structured discussion. I do of course follow it with a Q&A sesh each time.