Though Arthur Prior is now best known for his founding of modern temporal logic and hybrid logic, much of his early philosophical career was devoted to history of logic and historical logic. This interest laid the foundations for both of his ground-breaking innovations in the 1950s and 1960s. Because of the important rôle played by Prior's research in ancient and medieval logic in his development of temporal and hybrid logic, any student of Prior, temporal logic, or hybrid logic should (...) be familiar with the medieval logicians and their work. In this article we give an overview of Prior's work in ancient and medieval logic. (shrink)
Introduction Since my work in medieval logic has concentrated on dialectic. I have tried to trace scholastic treatments of dialectic to discussions of it in ...
The Conciliatory Character of Jaina Logic. In the previous pages there has been given an indication of the services rendered by the Jainas and N° Brihrna^1 H,e the Buddhists in the formation of the Mediaeval School of Indian Logic. Since the ...
Terence Parsons presents a new study of the development and continuing value of medieval logic, which expanded Aristotle's basic principles of logic in important ways. Parsons argues that the resulting system is as rich as contemporary first-order symbolic logic.
Medieval Modal Logic & Science uses modal reasoning in a new way to fortify the relationships between science, ethics, and politics. Robert C. Trundle accomplishes this by analyzing the role of modal logic in the work of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, then applying these themes to contemporary issues. He incorporates Augustine's ideas involving thought and consciousness, and Aquinas's reasoning to a First Cause. The author also deals with Augustine's ties to Aristotelian modalities of thought regarding science and (...) logic, reassessing the commonly held belief in Augustine's Platonism to not be a mistake as much as a simplistic view of his philosophy. Trundle links contemporary issues in epistemology, morality, theology, and logic, making several useful connections between ancient and medieval studies in modal logic and modern concerns. These applications of modal theory illuminate many puzzles in the works of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Whitehead, and Kuhn. (shrink)
PART ONE ELEMENTS OF SCHOLASTIC LOGIC I THE LEGACY OF SCHOLASTIC LOGIC "\ T 7E MAY safely describe the initial scholastic contri- VV bution to logical ...
This chapter deals with medieval logic from the time when it first had full resources for systematic creative contributions onward. It focuses on the era when the ancient heritage was available and medieval logic was able to add something substantial to it, even to surpass it in some respects. The chapter explains that characterization such as this cannot be adequately expressed with years or by conventional period denominations; however, it is hoped that the grounds for drawing boundaries will (...) become clearer during the course of the story. (shrink)
HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION Although many of the details of the development of logic in the Middle Ages remain to be filled in, it is well known that between ...
Medieval logicians advanced far beyond the logic of Aristotle, and this book shows how far that advance took them in two central areas. Broadie focuses upon the work of some of the great figures of the fourteenth century, including Walter Burley, William Ockham, John Buridan, Albert of Saxony, and Paul of Venice, and deals with their theories of truth conditions and validity conditions. He reveals how much of what seems characteristically twentieth-century logic was familiar long ago. Broadie has extensively (...) revised his text for this second edition, while preserving the character of the first. There are now fuller accounts of supposition, of intentional contexts, and of medieval syllogistic, and the conclusion has been substantially expanded. (shrink)
One of the founding myths of analytic philosophy is that the predicate logic developed in the late nineteenth century was far more powerful than its predecessors. This ambitious book argues that, on the contrary, medieval philosophers developed "a system of logic that is similar to the predicate calculus in richness and power" – or that, as Parsons put it in his presidential address to the American Philosophical Association, "the core of medieval logic is as accurate and as expressive (...) as the core of contemporary logic.". (shrink)
Both ways of looking at the history of logic as well as some of the issues that plague contemporary disputes over the nature of logic are illustrated in three recent books. Henry Veatch's Intentional Logic turns to a medieval Aristotelian philosophy as providing the framework for an adequate account of logical subject matter. Ernest Moody's Truth and Consequence in Mediaeval Logic borrows from the technical apparatus of present-day logicians in an endeavor to reassess what was once dismissed as fourteenth (...) century logic-chopping. Benson Mates' Stoic Logic is a similar study in the logic of an earlier period. (shrink)
Recent students of late medieval intellectual history have treated Oxford theologians' Sentences lectures from the 1320s to 1330s as revealing the interface of the theological, logical, and scientific thinking characteristic of a historically momentous ‘New English Theology’. Its conceptual achievement, historians generally concur, was the casting off of the speculative metaphysics of such thirteenth-century authors as Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon; its methodological novelty made it akin to twentieth-century analytic philosophy and seminal for the early Scientific Revolution. Yet the (...) metaphysically cast thirteenth-century sciences of perspectiva and astrologia persisted among scholars long into the early modern period. To show how this apparent paradox may be dissolved, this article details the intersection of thirteenth-century metaphysics and fourteenth-century analysis in the lectures of a controversial and influential proponent of the Oxford theology of the 1330s. (shrink)
A critically important development in the tradition of philosophy, as understood by Arabic authors, was the inclusion of both rhetoric and poetics within logic. While these writers' conception of the logical Organon gave appropriate place to the theory of demonstration as found and defined in Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, they added to it the syllogism not only of dialectic, but of rhetoric and poetry as well. By attaching the latter two arts to logic, the Arabic philosophers created a contextual claim about (...) rhetoric and poetry which tended both to weaken the status of either one as a mode of nonlogical discourse and yet potentially to enhance their importance as tools of cognitive activity by recognizing in them some form of syllogistic reasoning. (shrink)
_ Source: _Volume 56, Issue 3-4, pp 201 - 221 This paper summarizes medieval definitions and divisions of consequences and explains the import of the medieval development of the theory of consequence for logic today. It then introduces the various contributions to this special issue of _Vivarium_ on consequences in medieval logic.
While the formal treatment of arguments in the late medieval modi arguendi owes much to dialectic, this does not remove the substance and function of the argumentative modes discussed from the realm of rhetoric. These works, designed to teach law students skills in legal argumentation, remain importantly focused on persuasive features of argumentation which have traditionally been strongly associated with a rhetorical approach, particularly in efforts to differentiate from it dialectic as a more strictly scientific and logical form of (...) reasoning. This also sheds some light on the relative roles logic and rhetoric play in the legal discourse of our own time. In their approach to persuasive legal discourse, the modi arguendi stand between the argumentative rhetorics of Antiquity and the rhetoricized dialectics of the Renaissance, and by linking the minute technicalities of professionalized law with broad general considerations of justice, utility, nature, and emotion, they mediate between the modem trend towards atomized field-specific rhetorics and the classical idea of a unified civic rhetoric. (shrink)
“The expression ‘free logic’ is an abbreviation for the phrase ‘free of existence assumptions with respect to its terms, general and singular’.”1 Classical quantification theory is not a free logic in this sense, as its standard formulations commonly assume that every singular term in every model is assigned a referent, an element of the universe of discourse. Indeed, since singular terms include not only singular constants, but also variables2, standard quantification theory may be regarded as involving even the assumption of (...) the existence of the values of its variables, in accordance with Quine’s famous dictum: “to be is to be the value of a variable”. (shrink)
William of Auvergne and His Treatise De Anima I. Introduction William of Auvergne, Bishop of Paris from until his death in, is of interest to us chiefly ...
In 1980 L. M. de Rijk edited some texts connected with medieval disputation ( Die mittelaterlichen Traktate De modo opponendi et respondendi ), towards which he showed a strikingly contemptuous attitude. The reason for his contempt was that the treatises did not fit the obligationes and sophismata tradition. In this article I focus on the original version, the Thesaurus Philosophorum , to highlight the distinction of this family of treatises with respect to the “modern“ tradition. First, I study the (...) features of the disputation that can be recognised through the collection of fallacious arguments contained in the Thesaurus . Second, I briefly examine the contents of the treatise and their arrangement, showing that they are closely related to the kind of disputation in question. I hope to support the idea that neither the technique of disputation nor the contents and their arrangement deserve a straightforward rejection. (shrink)
The framework of conceptual realism provides a logically ideal language within which to reconstruct the medieval terminist logic of the 14th century. The terminist notion of a concept, which shifted from Ockham's early view of a concept as an intentional object to his later view of a concept as a mental act , is reconstructed in this framework in terms of the idea of concepts as unsaturated cognitive structures. Intentional objects are not rejected but are reconstructed as the objectified (...) intensional contents of concepts. Their reconstruction as intensional objects is an essential part of the theory of predication of conceptual realism. It is by means of this theory that we are able to explain how the identity theory of the copula, which was basic to terminist logic, applies to categorical propositions. Reference in conceptual realism is not the same as supposition in terminist logic. Nevertheless, the various "modes" of personal supposition of terminist logic can be explained and justified in terms of this conceptualist theory of reference. (shrink)
This paper determines the state of mind, logic and language in medieval philosophy. It also exhibits the journey from medieval to early modern philosophy. In medieval philosophy, concept of mind was intimately connected soul or spirit with its harmony with religious tradition. Logic and language as well were corresponding with religion and faith. However in early modern philosophy the schema of mind, logic and language were different. These concepts were bailed from the clutches of religious dogmatism and (...) faith towards the mechanical correspondence. Mind was treated as non-modular. Logical truth which includes mostly inductive and deductive in medieval and modern period has been explained clearly. This paper shows the evolution of these concepts in the tradition of Rationalists, Empiricists and Critical Philosophers. In this paper I would as well show the interrelation between mind along with language and logic. This write up further shows the development of language in medieval period to early modern philosophy. it also demonstrates the footprints for the analytical study and international study in contemporary philosophy. (shrink)
The topics is a theory of argumentation based upon topoi or in Latin loci. The medieval logicians used works by Aristotle and Boethius as their sources for this doctrine, but they developed it in a rather original way. The topics became a higher-level analysis of arguments which are non-valid from a purely formal point of view, but where it is none the less legitimate to infer the conclusion from the premiss. In this connection the topics give rise to a (...) number of discussions about the form and the matter of arguments. Further the topic contribute to the elaboration of the important doctrine of the second intentions, i.e. higher-level concepts of the particular things. In some respects the topics may be said to form a link between formal and informal logic. The topics vanished as a part of logic at the end of the Middle Ages, perhaps because the medieval logicians never got rid of Boethius' claim to have compiled a complete list of the loci, which was an unlucky one. The topics does not have an exact parallel in modern formal logic, but some reflections on non-formal argumentation by recent authors contain certain resemblances to it. (shrink)
Formal dialogue systems model rule-based interaction between agents and as such have multiple applications in multi-agent systems and AI more generally. Their conceptual roots are in formal theories of natural argumentation, of which Hamblin’s formal systems of argumentation in Hamblin (Fallacies. Methuen, London, 1970, Theoria 37:130–135, 1971) are some of the earliest examples. Hamblin cites the medieval theory of obligationes as inspiration for his development of formal argumentation. In an obligatio, two agents, the Opponent and the Respondent, engage in (...) an alternating-move dialogue, where the Respondent’s actions are governed by certain rules, and the goal of the dialogue is establishing the consistency of a proposition. We implement obligationes in the formal dialogue system framework of Prakken (Knowl Eng Rev 21(2):163–188, 2006) using Dynamic Epistemic Logic (van Ditmarsch et al. in Dynamic epistemic logic, Synthese Library Series. Springer, Berlin, 2007). The result is a new type of inter-agent dialogue, for consistency-checking, and analyzing obligationes in this way also sheds light on interpretational and historical questions concerning their use and purpose in medieval academia. (shrink)
