- Middle Ages: Scholasticism was the dominant theological-philosophical current of medieval thought, after the patristic of late antiquity, and was based on the coordination of faith and reason, which in any case always implied the clear submission of reason to faith (Philosophia ancilla theologiae - philosophy is a slave of theology-). But it is also a method of intellectual work: every thought had to be subject to the principle of authority (Magister dixit -the Master said it-), and teaching could be limited in principle to the repetition or gloss of the ancient texts, and above all of the Bible, the main source of knowledge, because it represents the divine Revelation; In spite of all this, scholasticism encouraged speculation and reasoning, since it meant submitting to a rigid logical framework and a schematic structure of the discourse that had to be exposed to refutations and prepare defenses. From the beginning of the 9th century to the end of the 12th the debates focused on the question of universals, which opposes the realists headed by William de Champeaux, the nominalists represented by Roscelino and the conceptualists (Pedro Abelardo).
- The Renaissance: The Renaissance was the result of the dissemination of the ideas of humanism, which determined a new conception of man and the world. The term "Renaissance" was used claiming certain elements of classical Greek and Roman culture, and was originally applied as a return to the values of Greco-Roman culture and the free contemplation of nature after centuries of predominance of a more rigid type of mentality and dogmatic established in medieval Europe. In this new stage, a new way of seeing the world and the human being was proposed, with new approaches in the fields of arts, politics, philosophy and sciences, replacing medieval theocentrism with anthropocentrism.
- The Baroque: Culturally, the Baroque was a time of great scientific advances: William Harvey proved the circulation of blood; Galileo Galilei perfected the telescope and strengthened the heliocentric theory established the previous century by Copernicus and Kepler; Isaac Newton formulated the theory of universal gravitation; Evangelista Torricelli invented the barometer. Francis Bacon established with his Novum Organum the experimental method as the basis of scientific research, laying the foundations of empiricism. For his part, René Descartes led philosophy towards rationalism, with his famous "I think, therefore I am"
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