Opposed to scholasticism, the medieval philosophical approach of reasoning based on religious texts and formal logic.
From anti- (against) + scholastic (from Latin scholasticus, relating to schools, from schola meaning 'school'). Scholasticism was the dominant philosophy of medieval universities, and antischolastic emerged as a reaction against its rigid methods during the Renaissance and Enlightenment.
Medieval scholastics would argue about how many angels could dance on a pin using pure logic—Renaissance thinkers labeled this 'antischolastic' as they demanded observation and experimentation instead. This word marks the intellectual revolution that killed medieval abstract reasoning and gave birth to modern science.
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