Abstract
This paper is dedicated to the first universities and mendicant schools, where thousands of students began to converge during the thirteenth century. Logic played an unpreceded role in basic and higher education. A “Parisian logical model” of education was shaped at the University of Paris, adopted by mendicant Orders in their schools of logic (studia artium), diffused in all disciplines, and progressively spread in Southern Europe. Medieval education became heavily based upon logical, and even “logician” practices, with the “syllogization” of exegetical, disputational, and evaluation practices.
The notion of logical skill conveniently captures this unique situation for the discipline of logic, as well as the way medieval thinkers conceived of logic as a universal, transdisciplinary method, a natural operation of the mind, a modality of knowledge (modus sciendi), the very form of teaching and graduating, a “habitus,” a technique (ars) and a science.
The divisions of Aristotelian logic, the “artificial logic,” were for the first time naturalized and projected on the very structure of human mind, which was thereby “logicalized” and ascribed a “natural logic.” A strong anthropological dimension was bestowed on logic. The discipline of logic was deemed a necessary instrument in the philosophical “perfection” and the Christian “reparation” of man as an intellectual creature by a group of logically skilled, professional philosophers and theologians, whereas men deprived of logical education were described as “logically disabled,” and stuck into inferior forms of humanity.
The world of medieval intellectual elites displayed a variety of social uses of logic, beyond academic circles, especially in the performance of pastoral duties. The possible historical records of the social usefulness of logic are explored: for students, the majority in medieval universities, who left university without a degree, but with a solid logical education, for ordinary mendicant friars, dedicated to preaching and confession, who frequented logical schools, and for members of the parish clergy sent to the faculties of arts.
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Notes
- 1.
For the rites and rules of exams, see also [5].
- 2.
For more information about secondary logical education, logic for “children,” whether “terminist” or not, on the use, for elementary purposes, of a truncated version of the most influential logic textbook of the Middle Ages, the Tractatus by Peter of Spain, as well as on the teaching of logic in higher faculties, see [15], chapter “Logic urbi et orbi.”
- 3.
As Nathalie Gorochov has pointed out, the activities of the masters of arts of the generation corresponding to the years of the emergence of the University of Paris (1200–1210) were extremely varied ([18], p. 125 ff.).
- 4.
For a critical discussion of the notion, see Bianchi [8], pp. 4–8.
- 5.
See [8], chapter “From proscription to prescription,” p. 114, pp. 117–118, pp. 120–123, p. 124.
- 6.
- 7.
For the faculty of arts in Paris see [42]; for later periods and for universities other than Paris, see [43]. For disputes in the other faculties, see [41] and, for a recent overview [44]. See also [21]. For the disputed and quodlibetal questions in all faculties, see [45]. For a huge collection of disputed questions in law, see [46].
- 8.
“Without this art [i.e. the art of dispute contained in the Topics], one does not dispute according to the rules of art, but at random (nam sine eo non disputatur arte, sed casu)”, [49], p. 131).
- 9.
John MacFarlane criticizes this notion on the basis of the difficulties raised by the notion of logical form in today’s philosophy of logic. But it applies just quite well to the thirteenth-century situation, when what was the form of an argument was its substantial form, which various modes and figures were authoritatively listed by the Prior Analytics. On logical norms in the Middle Ages see also [65].
- 10.
Subiectum: in the Middle Ages, what is called the “subject” of a science corresponds to what we call the “object” of a science.
- 11.
The Latin verb scire refers more specifically to a type of knowledge, i.e. scientific knowledge.
- 12.
On the whole topic, too complex to be discussed here in detail, see [15], chapter 6.
- 13.
“It must be said that … what it is to be a man according to his ultimate perfection and his perfect substance is being perfected by speculative science, and this disposition is felicity and everlasting life for him […] It is obvious that the predication of the name ‘man’ said of the one perfected by the speculative science and of the one that is not, that is the one who doesn’t have such ability that he could be perfected, is homonymous, in the same way as the name ‘man’ said of the alive man and the dead man, or of the rational [being] and the one in stone” ([72], f. 1v. H-I). For this Averroist, elistist anthropological theory, see [73].
- 14.
I thank Kathryn Clairand and Christopher Goodey for their help with English.
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Brumberg-Chaumont, J. (2021). The Rise of Logical Skills and the Thirteenth-Century Origins of the “Logical Man”. In: Brumberg-Chaumont, J., Rosental, C. (eds) Logical Skills. Studies in Universal Logic. Birkhäuser, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58446-7_6
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