Locus ab auctoritate est debilissimus

Abstract

This lecture note argues that epistemic authority has no lesser significance in our times than it did in the famously “authority-driven” Middle Ages, except in our fragmented culture it is a much “riskier business” to find the genuinely reliable authorities. The conclusion of the lecture, therefore, gestures toward a remedy of this situation in terms of forging a both synchronically and diachronically coherent system of fundamental ideas and principles, based especially on the historical understanding of the conceptual developments that led Europe, and eventually the entire world, from the European Middle Ages into modernity. In such a coherent system of ideas modern authorities will find their proper places by properly fitting (or not) into the still ongoing and developing historical narrative.