About 1140 the monk John Gratian completed his Concordia discordantium canonum ("Harmony of Contradictory Laws"), later called the Decretum Gratiani ("Gratian's Decree"); it became not only the definitive canonical collection of the entire preceding tradition but also a systematic application of the scholastic method to all legal material.
Gersonides is the first Jewish philosopher to use this analytic, scholastic method.
Was he an experimentalist (Settle 1961, 196, 1983, 1992; Palmieri 2008), a mathematical Platonist (Koyré 1939), an Aristotelian emphasizing experience (Geymonat 1954), precursor of modern positivist science (Drake 1978), or maybe an Archimedean (Machamer 1998), who might have used a revised Scholastic method of proof (Wallace 1992)?
Others, such as "Only any non-donkey c of any man except Socrates and another c belonging to this same man begins contingently to be black" (III, 40), are intended as a mockery of the futile quibbling he associated with scholastic method.
The quaestiones disputatae from those sessions survive, and illustrate his highly orthodox trinitarian views and his scholastic method.
The method of teaching at Oxford was transformed from the medieval Scholastic method to Renaissance education, although institutions associated with the university suffered losses of land and revenues.
He criticises many of Wallis' procedures and conclusions, saying that these alleged errors are "indicative of either a decline in scholastic method or are deliberate and malicious".
Because his commentary was focused on reading and understanding the meaning, intent, and cultivation message of the Four Books, critics generalized that Zhu and his method were essentially scholastic and would be myopic and stilted in facing real situations.
His thought witnesses to his own reading in a variety of predecessors, while side-stepping the methods of the medieval scholastic summae and their typical controversies and arguments.
His methods ranged from the traditionally scholastic to the boldly experimental he once had himself lowered into the crater of Vesuvius to observe its features soon after an eruption.
