The purpose of this study is to focus on the coexistence, during the transmission of the doctrine on the Topics in the early Middle Ages, of two different interpretations: although both emerge from two commentaries on Cicero’s Topics, however, they gave rise to two different readings: the one transmitted by Marius Victorinus who thought the topics almost exclusively in the service of Rhetoric, the other conceived by Boethius who intended to restore the centrality that the Topics had in the Aristotelian (...) Logic, by subordinating the rethorical Topics to dialectical Topics. My conclusion is that the Early Middle Ages can be considered, from an epistemological point of view, as a long boetiana aetas. Although the corpus of Boethius’s logical writings was not yet available until the second half of the 11th century, Boethius’s methodological approach on the Topics somehow continued to support the slow but constant absorption of the topical doctrine into the new Christian sensibility. (shrink)

Logic is usually thought to concern itself only with features that sentences and arguments possess in virtue of their logical structures or forms. The logical form of a sentence or argument is determined by its syntactic or semantic structure and by the placement of certain expressions called “logical constants.”[1] Thus, for example, the sentences Every boy loves some girl. and Some boy loves every girl. are thought to differ in logical form, even though they share a common syntactic and semantic (...) structure, because they differ in the placement of the logical constants “every” and “some”. By contrast, the sentences Every girl loves some boy. and Every boy loves some girl. are thought to have the same logical form, because “girl” and “boy” are not logical constants. Thus, in order to settle questions about logical form, and ultimately about which arguments are logically valid and which sentences logically true, we must distinguish the “logical constants” of a language from its nonlogical expressions. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the structure and the defeasibility conditions of argument from analogy, addressing the issues of determining the nature of the comparison underlying the analogy and the types of inferences justifying the conclusion. In the dialectical tradition, different forms of similarity were distinguished and related to the possible inferences that can be drawn from them. The kinds of similarity can be divided into four categories, depending on whether they represent fundamental semantic features of the (...) terms of the comparison or non-semantic ones, indicating possible characteristics of the referents. Such distinct types of similarity characterize different kinds of analogical arguments, all based on a similar general structure, in which a common genus is abstracted. Depending on the nature of the abstracted common feature, different rules of inference will apply, guaranteeing the attribution of the analogical predicate to the genus and to the primary subject. This analysis of similarity and the relationship thereof with the rules of inference allows a deeper investigation of the defeasibility conditions. (shrink)

The studies that make up this book were written and brought together to honor the memory of Jan Pinborg. His unexpected death in 1982 at the age of forty-five shocked and saddened students of medieval philosophy everywhere and left them with a keen sense of disappoint ment. In his fifteen-year career Jan Pinborg had done so much for our field with his more than ninety books, editions, articles, and reviews and had done it all so well that we recognized him (...) as a leader and counted on many more years of his scholarship, his help, and his friendship. To be missed so sorely by his international colleagues in an academic field is a mark of Jan's achievement, but only of one aspect of it, for historians of philosophy are not the only scholars who have reacted in this way to Jan's death. In his decade and a half of intense productivity he also acquired the same sort of special status among historians of linguistics, whose volume of essays in his memory is being G. L. Bursill-Hall almost simultane published under the editorship of ously with this one. Sten Ebbesen, Jan's student, colleague, and successor as Director of the Institute of Medieval Greek and Latin Philology at the University of Copenhagen, has earned the gratitude of all of us by memorializing Jan 1 in various biographical sketches, one of which is accompanied by a 2 complete bibliography of his publications. (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)

In 1898 C. S. Peirce declares that the medieval doctrine of consequences had been the starting point of his logical investigations in the 1860s. This paper shows that Peirce studied the scholastic theory of consequentiae as early as 1866–67, that he adopted the scholastics’ terminology, and that that theory constituted a source of logical doctrine that sustained Peirce for a lifetime of creative and original work.

“The problem of universals” in general is a historically variable bundle of several closely related, yet in different conceptual frameworks rather differently articulated metaphysical, logical, and epistemological questions, ultimately all connected to the issue of how universal cognition of singular things is possible. How do we know, for example, that the Pythagorean theorem holds universally, for all possible right triangles? Indeed, how can we have any awareness of a potential infinity of all possible right triangles, given that we could only (...) see a finite number of actual ones? How can we universally indicate all possible right triangles with the phrase ‘right triangle’? Is there something common to them all signified by this phrase? If so, what is it, and how is it related to the particular right triangles? The medieval problem of universals is a logical, and historical, continuation of the ancient problem generated by Plato's (428-348 B.C.) theory answering such a bundle of questions, namely, his theory of Ideas or Forms. (shrink)

This dissertation examines the way Philip Melanchthon, author of the Augsburg Confession and Martin Luther's closest co-worker, sought to establish the relationship between faith and reason in the cradle of the Lutheran tradition, Wittenberg University. While Melanchthon is widely recognized to have played a crucial role in the Reformation of the Church in the sixteenth century as well as in the Renaissance in Northern Europe, he has in general received relatively little scholarly attention, few have attempted to explore his philosophy (...) in depth, and those who have examined his philosophical work have come to contradictory or less than helpful conclusions about it. He has been regarded as an Aristotelian, a Platonist, a philosophical eclectic, and as having been torn between Renaissance humanism and Evangelical theology. An understanding of the way Melanchthon related faith and reason awaits a well-founded and accurate account of his philosophy. Having stated the problem and finding it inadequately treated in the secondary literature, this dissertation presents an account of Melanchthon's philosophical development. Finding that his philosophy was ultimately founded upon his understanding of and method in rhetoric and dialectics, this dissertation explicates his mature accounts of these arts. It then presents an account of Melanchthon's philosophy as both humanistic (i.e., rhetorically based and practically rather than speculatively oriented) and fideistic (i.e, skeptical about the product of human reason alone, but finding certainty in philosophy founded upon, and somewhat limited by, Christian faith). After a final assessment of claims about Melanchthon's philosophy from the secondary literature, this dissertation considers how such a humanistic, fideistic philosophy might be helpful for Christians in a philosophically post-modern situation. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to present a typology of argument schemes. In first place, we found it helpful to define what an argument scheme is. Since many argument schemes found in contemporary theories stem from the ancient tradition, we took in consideration classical and medieval dialectical studies and their relation with argumentation theory. This overview on the main works on topics and schemes provides a summary of the main principles of classification. In the second section, Walton’s theory is (...) briefly explained to introduce the schemes classification and its different levels. At least, the final part shows the main application of the schemes in computing and AI. -/- . (shrink)

In the summer of 1980, I was privileged to be on the teaching staff of the Summer Institute on Medieval Philosophy held at Cornell University under the direction of Norman Kretzmann and the auspices of the Council for Philosophical Studies and the National Endowment for the Humanities. While I was giving a series of lectures on supposition theory, I went to my office one morning, and there under the door some anonymous wag from the Institute had slid the pen and (...) ink drawing you see in the graphic. It represents "Supposition" as a dragon, making a rude face at the viewer. The tail of the dragon is divided — not entirely accurately, as it turns out — into the various branches and subbranches of supposition. If the details are not altogether correct, the spirit is certainly understandable. I have absolutely no idea who the inspired artist was, but I have the original framed on the wall in my office. (shrink)

The “dragon” that graces the cover of this volume has a story that goes with it. In the summer of 1980, I was on the teaching staff of the Summer Institute on Medieval Philosophy held at Cornell University under the direction of Norman Kretzmann and the auspices of the Council for Philosophical Studies and the National Endowment for the Humanities. While I was giving a series of lectures there (lectures that contribute to this volume, as it turns out), I went (...) to my office one morning, and there under the door some anonymous wag from the Institute had slid the pen and ink drawing you see in the picture. It represents “Supposition” as a dragon, making a rude face at the viewer. The tail of the dragon is divided — not entirely accurately, as it turns out — into the various branches and subbranches of supposition. If the details are not altogether correct, the spirit is certainly understandable. (shrink)