Abstract

From the start the better logicians found much to take exception to in Prantl. Peirce, for example, describes him as "a writer of little judgment and over-rated learning, whose useful history of logic is full of blunders, misappreciations, and insensate theories, and whose own Billingsgate justifies almost any tone toward him". As is indicated in this comment, Prantl attempted to judge and assess the value of the logical achievements that he made the object of his study. However, he himself had little logical acumen. If not justified, this is to some extent excused by Heinrich Scholz, the first comprehensive historian of logic after Prantl. In his Abriß der Geschichte der Logik, which first appeared in 1931 and has now been translated, he maintains that no trustworthy conception of the history of logic was possible until modern and mathematical logic provided a precise criterion for formal logic. In particular he maintains that logic in the course of its history has assumed different Gestalten, which must be distinguished if sense is to be made of it. He is especially concerned to distinguish formal logic, whether in its ancient Aristotelian or its modern mathematical Gestalt, from its non-formal extensions into psychology, epistemology, and metaphysics. It is certainly true that the rise of mathematical logic has also witnessed a renewed interest in the history of logic. Scholars using the means provided by modern analysis have found much in the past of great logical interest, which had previously been dismissed as worthless extravagance. The logic of the Stoics and of the 14th-century scholastics are prime examples.