“Another of Burckhardt’s characterizations of the civilization of the Reneissance, the discovery of the world around man, was not one of the humanists’ primary aims. Yet, in their quest for the writings of antiquity, they also discovered the large corpus of the scientific work of the ancients and this they also proceeded to publish. the results were unexpected. Differences of opinion among the anciant philospohers and theologians were well known ever since Aberalrd had deliberately pointed to them. Men had tried to cope with such differencesaccording to their own philosophical inclinations. Not so with natural science in which Aristotle, Galen and the other relatively few ancient writers who were known in the Middle Ages had been regarded as unquestioned authorities. Now, with greater knowledge of the ancients, it became apparent that they, too, often contradicted each other. There was only one way around this problem: to find out for oneself. [...]

It was a this point that the efforts of the humanists became involved with the work of the late-medieval scholastic philosophers. These dominated the universities and continued to do so until the seventeenth century. The humanists usually attacked them for their rigid methods and the aridity of much of their philosophical discussions. It was they who smeared the scholastic philosophers with the story that they liked to argue about how many angels could dance on the point of a needle. (This problem had indeed, once been set, but as a deliberately humorous exercise in scholastic method for undergraduate student[s.])”

— H.G. Koeningsberger,
Mediveal Europe 400-1500, page 366f.