Peter Harrison (2016) has suggested that the first reference to angels dancing on a needle's point occurs in an expository work by the English divine (minister), William Sclater (1575–1626). In point of fact, the question has never been found in this form… The question of how many angels can dance on the point of a needle, or the head of a pin, is often attributed to 'late medieval writers'. Lang, author of Aristotle's Physics and its Medieval Varieties (1992), says (p. 284): This is earlier than a reference in the 1678 The True Intellectual System Of The Universe by Ralph Cudworth. James Franklin has raised the scholarly issue, and mentions that there is a 17th-century reference in William Chillingworth's Religion of Protestants (1637), where he accuses unnamed scholastics of debating "whether a Million of Angels may not fit upon a Needle's point?" One theory is that it is an early modern fabrication, used to discredit scholastic philosophy at a time when it still played a significant role in university education. 1270, includes discussion of several questions regarding angels such as, "Can several angels be in the same place?" However, the idea that such questions had a prominent place in medieval scholarship has been debated, and it has not been proved that this particular question was ever disputed. Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica, written c.
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