Abstract

Being mainly concerned with the origins and development of formal logic, current “histories of logic” often devote scarce, if any, space to logic in the early modern period. In standard narratives, emphasis is put, on one side, on Aristotle’s Organon and on the Stoics’ logic of propositions, and on the other side, on the development of mathematical logic from Boole and Frege on. The picture often emerging from such reconstructions represents early modern philosophers—net of their criticisms of Aristotelian syllogism— as largely estranged from the discipline. It is true that, the medieval period’s concern with semantic and inference issues has been accounted...