One Thousand and One Conjectures

Joins the chronology of Thomas Aquinas's writing career to the arrival curve of the new Greek-Latin Aristotle: early on, Aquinas met much of Aristotle through florilegia, commentary lemmata, and older versions, quoting at second hand; as William of Moerbeke's literal translations and…

in the scholastic classroom the objection-side authorities functioned as a memorized bank of classic difficulties — an objection had to be recognizable to master and audience to carry disputational force, so the same hard sayings of Augustine, Aristotle, and Jerome were recycled…

A scholastic article has a fixed anatomy: objections against the thesis, a short 'sed contra' authority for it, and the master's resolution. The conjecture is that this structure sorts authorities by age like a centrifuge: the sed contra, which must be unimpeachable,…

Connects the disputatio's argumentative architecture to the material sources of quotation: the objections a scholastic author stages are the tradition's stock counter-texts, harvested from commonplace collections and classroom memory, whereas the constructive respondeo forces the author back to the authority's actual wording…

writing a line-by-line commentary on an authority permanently converts a scholastic's citation channel to that authority from mediated to direct across his whole subsequent output. The commentary forces desk-level engagement with a complete exemplar; afterwards the master quotes from his own annotated…

the Paris condemnation of 1277 did not suppress the condemned theses, it anonymized them. Discussing a censured position under its author's name risked complicity, but the disputational machine could not run without its hardest objections, so masters kept the content and severed…

the Catena aurea project (begun 1263) was a supply shock to Aquinas's citation economy. Compiling it built him a personal bank of newly translated Greek patristic excerpts, so afterwards his Greek-father citation volume should jump discontinuously across all genres of his writing…

the Sentences-commentary genre drifted from pastoral coverage to speculative concentration on a measurable schedule. Disputational prestige, not curricular duty, set the incentives, and prestige lived in Book I's frontier problems — divine knowledge, future contingents, intension of forms — so between 1250…

Thomas Aquinas quotes the Bible constantly and Aristotle almost as much, and we assume the sacred text got the greater care. This conjecture predicts the opposite pattern in the letter of his citations: Aquinas's biblical quotations deviate from the Vulgate more than…

Every article of a scholastic disputation stacks objections, then plays one authoritative quotation as the sed contra — the citation that turns the argument — before the master resolves. This conjecture claims the two positions draw on different libraries: objections range across…

University quodlibets were open-microphone disputations held twice a year, in Advent and in Lent, where anyone could ask the master anything. The two sessions sat in different economic seasons: Advent fell at the close of the autumn term amid year-end accounting and…

Aquinas's Summa runs from God (Prima Pars) through human action and morals (Secunda) to Christ and sacraments (Tertia); Gratian's Decretum and the decretals were the Church's law books. The conjecture is that canon law enters the Summa almost entirely through one door:…

The verbal concordance built by the Dominicans of Saint-Jacques in the 1230s-1250s turned the Bible from a remembered flow into an alphabetically addressable database, and this conjecture claims the tool left a statistical residue in the texts written with it. Verses fetched…

A quodlibetal disputation was live theatre, with questions taken from the floor twice a year, while the Summa was composed at a desk surrounded by books; this conjecture joins the psychology of retrieval under time pressure to citation statistics. Live genres should…

The quaestio format requires manufactured disagreement: before a master can resolve anything he must first find authorities that seem to say the wrong thing, and apparent contradiction is rare and must be hunted in obscure texts, while agreement is abundant in the…

This conjecture joins the heresiology of the 1270s condemnations to plain citation counting: the density of authorities in a scholastic article tracks institutional risk, not intellectual difficulty. On topics where a determination might attract censure, such as the eternity of the world…

If citations tallied evidence, their count per article would be noisy and over-dispersed, swinging with how much support each conclusion happens to have; if the quaestio is a fixed-size packet, the counts should be clamped like lines in a sonnet. This conjecture…

This conjecture joins the liturgy-like fixity of the quaestio to network statistics: authorities held stable positional roles, some habitually opening the difficulty in the objections, others sealing the determination, and an authority's seat, not just its frequency, encoded its epistemic rank. Masters…

In an economy where authority accrued with age, an author dead a hundred years sat at maximum disadvantage: too dead to answer as a colleague, too recent to count as an auctor. This conjecture therefore predicts a bimodal age distribution of cited…

A good objection was hard capital: finding an authority who appears to contradict the received position took rare hunting, while supporting quotations lay everywhere, so the dialectical armory was small, curated, and long-lived. This conjecture claims the asymmetry is measurable as differential…

This conjecture claims scholastic diligence was tactically allocated: when writing against an opponent, a master re-verified the opponent's proof-texts in full copies, because a misquoted enemy loses the debate, while continuing to take his own side's supporting authorities on anthology trust within…

Everyone knows Aquinas synthesized Aristotle and Augustine; this conjecture claims the synthesis happened between articles, not within them. At the article level the two supreme authorities should behave like ions of like charge, repelling: an article argued in Aristotle's idiom rarely also…

Pagan moralists and pagan poets were equally available in the schools, and the poets were more heavily taught in the grammar classroom, yet this conjecture claims the arts-theology boundary worked as a genre firewall with a moral pass: prose moralists like Seneca…

This conjecture claims scholastic self-reference is directional in a way that maps intended curriculum rather than composition history: the occasional works, disputed questions and opuscula, point the reader elsewhere toward the systematic works, while the systematic works rarely point back down, so…