Journal of the History of Philosophy

Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.2 (2003) 272-273

Matthew of Orléans. Sophistaria sive summa communium distinctionum circa sophismata accidentium. Edited by Joke Spruyt. Leiden: Brill, 2001. Pp. ix + 581. Cloth, $151.00.

Matthew of Orléans is not a famous author (indeed, even his name is given tentatively by the editor on the basis of the explicit of one manuscript). And the Sophistaria was apparently not one the most influential works of its time, the early thirteenth century (its full text is preserved only in a couple of manuscripts, and it has never been printed before). Yet, the Sophistaria of Matthew of Orléans is a fine example of a characteristic genre in the rich tradition of medieval logical literature. The genre itself is an interesting combination of two other characteristic genres: treatises on syncategoremata and sophismata. The sophismata treatises are discussions of problem-sentences (sophismata) usually grouped together to illustrate some logical doctrinal points, especially concerning the resolution of ambiguities caused by the logical behavior of syncategorematic terms in various contexts. The treatises on syncategoremata provide systematic discussions of the logical behavior of syncategorematic words, i.e., logical connectives, themselves. But these treatises also illustrate their doctrinal points by resolving the ambiguities of sophismata, mostly using some commonly accepted distinctions concerning how the function of the syncategoremata is to be construed in the contexts provided by these problem-sentences. The proper subject matter of the sophistaria treatises is the discussion of these common distinctions, dealing especially with ambiguities caused by (what we would describe as) the different possible scopes of the syncategoremata occurring in the paradigmatic sophismata.

For example, take the sentence "Someone seeing nothing is someone seeing something." This sentence can be regarded as ambiguous, if we analyze "nothing" into "not . . . a thing," yielding (1) "Someone not seeing a thing is someone seeing something," which can be taken to be ambiguous between (a) "Someone not seeing anything is someone seeing something" and (b) "Someone not seeing something is someone seeing something," depending on whether we take "not" in (1) to be operating (a) on "seeing a thing," or (b) only on "seeing." On this analysis, the ambiguous sentence is obviously false in the first sense, but may be true in the second, for it may be true of Socrates who does not see Plato but sees Coriscus.

To be sure, this is not the only possible way to account for the (genuine or putative) ambiguity of the original sentence. In fact, this is not the account considered by Matthew of Orléans or in a parallel passage by Peter of Spain in their analyses of the corresponding Latin sentence (Nihil videns est aliquid videns), although one of the arguments for the truth of the sophisma they reject would be a good argument for the second reading provided here (cf. Peter of Spain, Tractatus [Van Gorcum: Assen, 1972], 220, ll. 10-6, and Sophistaria, 88, ll. 16-20). In any case, the point of the sophistaria treatises is precisely the discussion of the merits and demerits of such possible accounts.

The Sophistaria of Matthew of Orléans is a well-organized, highly structured treatise, divided into eight chapters, corresponding to the eight groups of syncategorematic terms [End Page 272] it deals with. The first chapter is devoted to the discussion of common distinctions concerning negations (both propositional and term-negations, including privative negation), the second deals with exclusive words (such as "only"), the third with exceptive words ("besides," "except," "unless"), the fourth with the conditional sign "if," the fifth with the modalities "necessarily" and "contingently," the sixth with the verbs "begins" and "ceases," the seventh with the word "whether," and the eighth with the distributive sign "every," that is, the universal sign that causes the terms it is construed with to be distributed for everything that falls under it.

The discussion of these topics in the individual chapters is organized around typical scholastic questions raised concerning the validity of some common distinction in connection with typical sophismata, involving ambiguities in the operation...