Although Book 11, Chapter 6 of Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws has been credited with offering a definitive statement of the doctrine, his account still bore the hallmarks of its origins in the system of mixed government not least because of its being based on an analysis of the British parliamentary system and the respective roles of monarch, lords, and commons within it.
Those who had expected Pope Francis to make a clear and definitive break with past doctrine on issues related to gay marriage, divorce, and contraception are understandably disappointed.
Buddhaghosa's commentaries thereby became the standard method by which the Theravada scriptures were understood, establishing Buddhaghosa as the definitive interpreter of Theravada doctrine.
Not definitive, just definite.
If we were discussing a politically neutral subject, the evidence here would long since have been considered definitive: expansionary austerity is a doctrine that failed.
Despite his goal of promoting harmony between the faiths, Pope Benedict stuck firmly to what he saw as a gift of truth that he had been born into in his native Bavaria - namely that the Roman Catholic Church was founded by Jesus Christ and despite all its human imperfections, had the authority to define doctrine and make definitive statements about truth and falsehood.
It is necessary here to mention only the three distinctive Roman Catholic doctrines that achieved definitive formulation during the 19th and 20th centuries: the infallibility of the pope, the immaculate conception, and bodily assumption of the Virgin Mary.
The Triumph of Orthodoxy, the celebration of true doctrine over heresy and the definitive restoration of the icons are joyously commemorated by the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church on the first Sunday of Great Lent.
John Paul II was untroubled by that sort of distinction, and, curiously, Benedict did very little to discourage his conflations of doctrine and what the Church calls "definitive teachings" — perhaps because, during the last years of the Pope's long illness, those teachings were "guided" by Benedict himself.
As the obscurities in Aristotle's various reports indicate, the doctrine cannot ever have reached a definitive stage, for at one point he complains that Plato's theory relied on too few numbers (Met. 1084a10 27), while elsewhere he objects that, 1073a20: "they speak of numbers now as unlimited, now as limited by the number 10".
