Word Finder - disputation

definition

The act of disputing; a dispute or argument

definition

A rhetorical exercise in which parties reason in opposition to each other on some question proposed.

He remained a year in Rome, but the disputation he proposed was never held.

After a brief stay in the grammar school of Colmar he went to Strassburg in 1651, where he devoted himself to the study of philology, history and philosophy, and won his degree of master (1653) by a disputation against the philosophy of Hobbes.

In this public discussion the " disputation " of the middle ages survives in its least changed form.

He hid himself in the Dominican convent at Leipzig in fear of popular violence, and died there on the 4th of July 1519, just as Luther was beginning his famous disputation with Eck.

In Oxford he was allowed to hold a disputation with some learned doctors on the rival merits of the Copernican and so-called Aristotelian systems of the universe, and, according to his own report, had an easy victory.

After a public disputation in which the Catholics were weakly represented, and a popular demonstration in favour of the new doctrines, the council of Geneva rather reluctantly sanctioned the abolition of the Mass.

In 633 he was one of the party of Sophronius of Jerusalem (the chief original opponent of the Monothelites) at the council of Alexandria; and in 645 he was again in Africa, when he held in presence of the governor and a number of bishops the disputation with Pyrrhus, the deposed and banished patriarch of Constantinople, which resulted in the (temporary) conversion of his interlocutor to the Dyothelite view.

In January 1528 Oecolampadius and Zwingli took part in the disputation at Berne which led to the adoption of the new faith in that canton, and in the following year to the discontinuance of the mass at Basel.

The Anabaptists claimed Oecolampadius for their views, but in a disputation with them he dissociated himself from most of their positions.

He is at the same time the only Greek philosopher who clearly discriminated discovery and disputation, science and dialectic, the knowledge of a definite subject from its appropriate principles and the discussion of anything whatever from opinions and authority.

As early as the 28th of May 1403, it is true, there had been held a university disputation about the new doctrines of Wycliffe, which had resulted in the condemnation of certain propositions presumed to be his; five years later (May 20, 1408) this decision had been refined into a declaration that these, forty-five in number, were not to be taught in any heretical, erroneous or offensive sense.

He engaged twice in personal disputation with Arminius in the assembly of the estates of Holland in 1608, and was one of five Gomarists who met five Arminians or Remonstrants in the same assembly of 1609.

Lecturing on Isaiah he condemned current ecclesiastical abuses, and in a public disputation (loth of August 1523) was so successful that Erasmus writing to Zurich said "Oecolampadius has the upper hand amongst us."

However, we do hear of versions of Nestorian writers like Diodore of Tarsus being in circulation, and the Disputation of Archelaus proves that the current orthodoxy of eastern Armenia was Adoptianist, if not Ebionite in tone.

Monastic institutions were hardly introduced in Armenia before the 5th century, though Christian rest-houses had been erected along the high-roads long before and are mentioned in the Disputation of Archelaus.

Melanchthon was first drawn into the arena of the Reformation controversy through the Leipzig Disputation (June 27 - July 8, 1519), at which he was present.

After some six months more the licentiate took part " in a peculiarly solemn disputation known as his `Vespers,' " then gave his formal inaugural lecture or disputation before the faculty, and was received into the faculty as master.

But the theses posted somehow touched heart and conscience in a way unusual in the common subjects of academic disputation.

This Leipzig Disputation was perhaps the most important point in Luther's career.

As usual he wrote out and published an account of the Disputation, which was an appeal to his fellow Germans.

The Disputation made him see that his protest against the abuses of Indulgences was no criticism of an excrescence on the medieval ecclesiastical system, but an attack on its centre of existence.

The reformer had been expecting it ever since the Disputation at Leipzig, and had resolved to answer it by one striking act which would impress the imagination of every man.

In this polymath we see at once the degradation of the sophistry of culture and the link which connects Protagoras and Prodicus with the eristics, who at a later period taught, not, like Hippias, all branches of learning, but a universally applicable method of disputation.

While the sophistry of rhetoric led to the sophistry of politics, the sophistry of culture led to the sophistry of disputation.

In other words, they cultivated skill in disputation.

Now skill in disputation is plainly a valuable accomplishment; and, as the Aristotelian logic grew out of the regulated discussions of the eristics and their pupils, the disputant sophistry of the 4th century deserves more attention and.

But when men set themselves to cultivate skill in disputation, regarding the matter discussed not as a serious issue, but as a thesis upon which to practise their powers of controversy, they learn to pursue, not truth, but victory; and, their criterion of excellence having been thus perverted, they presently prefer ingenious fallacy to solid reasoning and the applause of bystanders to the consciousness of honest effort.

The man of the world who had cultivated it in his youth regarded it in riper years as a foolish pedantry, or at best as a propaedeutic exercise; while the serious student, necessarily preferring that form of disputation which recognized truth as the end of this, as of other intellectual processes, betook himself to one or other of the philosophies of the revival.

Finding in the cultivation of " virtue " or " excellence " a substitute for the pursuit of scientific truth, and in disputation the sole means by which " virtue " or " excellence " could be attained, he resembled at once the sophists of culture and the sophists of eristic. But, inasmuch as the " virtue " or " excellence " which he sought was that of the man rather than that of the official, while the disputation which he practised had for its aim, not victory, but the elimination of error, the differences which separated him from the sophists of culture and the sophists of eristic were only less considerable than the resemblances which he bore to both; and further, though his whole time and attention were bestowed upon the education of young Athenians, his theory of the relations of teacher and pupil differed from that of the recognized professors of education, inasmuch as the taking of fees seemed to him to entail a base surrender of the teacher's independence.

There is less to be said for the teachers of rhetoric, politics and eristic, who, in limiting themselves each to a single subject - the rhetoricians proper or forensic rhetoricians to one branch of oratory, the politicians or political rhetoricians to another, and the eristics to disputation - ceased to be educators and became instructors.

Nevertheless, rhetoric and disputation, though at the present day strangely neglected in English schools and universities, are, within their limits, valuable instruments; and, as specialization in teaching does not necessarily imply specialization in learning, many of those who attended the lectures and the classes of a rhetorician or an eristic sought and found other instruction elsewhere.

In 1691 he took his medical degree, pronouncing an "inaugural disputation," De chylosi vitiata.

It yielded no fruit, was serviceable only for disputation, and the end it proposed to itself was a mistaken one.

On his return from Rome, Hildebert had a public disputation with Henry, in which, according to the bishop's Acta episcoporum Cenomannensium, Henry was shown to be less guilty of heresy than of ignorance.

After inviting Henry to a disputation, which he refused to attend, St Bernard returned to Clairvaux.

The king even inclined to him, till in a great disputation the Magians gained the predominance.

He had won laurels in a public disputation at Augsburg in 1514, when he had defended the lawfulness of putting out capital at interest; again at Bologna in 1515, on the same subject and on the question of predestination; and these triumphs had been repeated at Vienna in 1516.

Luther entrusted his defence to Carlstadt, who, besides answering the insinuations of Eck in 400 distinct theses, declared his readiness to meet him in a public disputation.

The challenge was accepted, and the disputation took place at Leipzig in June and July 1519.

At Baden-in-Aargau in May and June 1526 a public disputation on the doctrine of transubstantiation was held, in which Eck and Thomas Murner were pitted against Johann Oecolampadius.

At Oxford he first adhered to the conservative side, and defended the doctrines of the church against Hooper; but his confidence was somewhat shaken by another public disputation which he had with Peter Martyr.

He was present at the disputation held in Edinburgh in 1561, when Knox and Willox were his antagonists.

In 15 70 he sustained no fewer than three hundred and eighteen theses at a disputation in Mantua, with such applause that the duke made him court theologian.

He studied theology, with a view to the Christian ministry, at Strassburg, where the professors at the time (and especially Sebastian Schmidt) were more inclined to practical Christianity than to theological disputation.

In 1263 Nahmanides was forced to enter into a public disputation with a Jewish-Christian, Pablo Christiani, in the presence of King James of Aragon.

To the same class belong the treatise To Ablavius, against the tritheists; On Faith, against the Arians; On Common Notions, in explanation of the terms in current employment with regard to the Trinity; Ten Syllogisms, against the Manichaeans; To Theophilus, against the Apollinarians; an Antirrhetic against the same; Against Fate, a disputation with a heathen philosopher; De anima et resurrectione, a dialogue with his dying sister Macrina; and the Oratio catechetica magna, an argument for the incarnation as the best possible form of redemption, intended to convince educated pagans and Jews.

Of the troubles which arose from fanatical teachers, the chief proceeded from the efforts of the Anabaptists; a public disputation was held on the 26th and 17th of March 1537, and so excited the populace that the Council of Two Hundred stopped it, declared the Anabaptists vanquished and drove them from the city.

In virtue of this method of indirect argumentation he is regarded as the inventor of "dialectic," that is to say, disputation having for its end not victory but the discovery or the transmission of truth.

Here Luther in 1519 held his momentous disputation.

The unpopularity of Spain, patriotism, the greater predominance of national questions in public opinion, and weariness of both religious disputation and indecisive warfare, all these sentiments were expressed in the wise and clever pamphlet entitled the Satire Mlnippe.