scholastic

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. adj. Of or relating to schools; academic.
2. adj. Of, relating to, or characteristic of Scholasticism.
3. adj. Adhering rigidly to scholarly methods; pedantic. See Synonyms at pedantic.
4. n. A Scholastic philosopher or theologian.
5. n. A dogmatist; a pedant.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. Pertaining to or suiting a scholar, school, or schools; like or characteristic of a scholar: as, a scholastic manner; scholastic phrases.
2. Of, pertaining to, or concerned with schooling or education; educational: as, a scholastic institution; a scholastic appointment.
3. Pertaining to or characteristic of scholasticism or the schoolmen; according to the methods of the Christian Aristotelians of the middle ages. See scholasticism.
4. Coldly intellectual and unemotional; characterized by excessive intellectual subtlety or by punctilious and dogmatic distinctions; formal; pedantic: said especially of the discussion of religious truth.
5. n. A student or studious person; a scholar.
6. n. A schoolman; a Christian Aristotelian; one of those who taught in European schools from the eleventh century to the Reformation, who reposed ultimately upon authority for every philosophical proposition, and who wrote chiefly in the form of disputations, discussing the questions with an almost syllogistic stiffness: opposed to Biblicist.
7. n. One who deals with religious questions in the spirit of the medieval scholastics.
8. n. A member of the third grade in the organization of the Jesuits. A novitiate of two years' duration and a month of strict confinement are prerequisite to entrance to the grade of scholastic. The term consists of five years' study in the arts, five or six years of teaching and study, a year of final novitiate, and from four to six years of study in theology. The scholastic is then prepared to be admitted as a priest of the order.

Wiktionary

1. n. philosophy a member of the medieval philosophical school of scholasticism; a medieval Christian Aristotelian
2. adj. Of or relating to school; academic
3. adj. philosophy Of or relating to the philosophical tradition of scholasticism

GNU Webster's 1913

1. adj. Pertaining to, or suiting, a scholar, a school, or schools; scholarlike.
2. adj. Of or pertaining to the schoolmen and divines of the Middle Ages (see Schoolman).
3. adj. Hence, characterized by excessive subtilty, or needlessly minute subdivisions; pedantic; formal.
4. n. One who adheres to the method or subtilties of the schools.
5. n. (R. C. Ch.) See the Note under Jesuit.

WordNet 3.0

1. adj. of or relating to schools
2. n. a person who pays more attention to formal rules and book learning than they merit
3. adj. of or relating to the philosophical doctrine of scholasticism
4. n. a Scholastic philosopher or theologian