Abstract

In this essay Martin Kintzinger takes as his starting point observations on the current debate regarding knowledge and asserts a lack of reflection on the status of knowledge in pre-modern societies. In Sebastian Brant’s work ‘Narrenschiff’ and other contemporary critical writings, Kintzinger finds evidence that the medieval critique of experts was not by necessity a critique of expertise per se. Rather, it often was a critique of an expertise based on purely theoretical book learning, deemed unpractical and inapplicable. Significantly, there existed a counter-conception of an expert who possessed both theoretical knowledge and practical experience and who was deemed practically able to cure disease, or give valuable legal advice etc. Of course, the term experientia was first used in this context only around 1600. But Kintzinger argues that experience-based knowledge, which is associated with inductive inference and the modern natural sciences, was not a product of the early modern period. Rather, the notion of experience as a warrant of true knowledge was heavily rooted in medieval thought. This essay subsequently traces the emergence of the notion of experience to Scholasticism, to the thought of Thomas Aquinas and Albert the Great and to the medieval debate on the dualism between the arts and science, and between empiricus and theoricus respectively.