v. 1. The Greek tradition -- v. 2. Greek texts and fragments of the Latin translation of "Alexander's" commentary -- v. 3. Appendices, Danish summary, indices.

In 1981 I published an article called Early Supposition Theory. Then as now, the magisterial work on the subject was L.M. de Rijk’s Logica Modernorum and then as now any discussion of the topic would have to rely to a great extent on the texts published there. This means that many of the problems that existed then still remain, but a couple of important new studies and several new texts have been published in the meantime, so it may be time (...) to try to take stock of the situation. I will first look at the origin of the term suppositio and then at the chronology of our source texts. (shrink)

pt. 1. Introduction and indices -- pt. 2. Catalogue.

Aristotle in the central chapters of his Sophistical Refutations gives advice on how to counter unfair argumentation by similar means, all the while taking account not only of the adversary's arguments in themselves, but also of his philosophical commitments and state of mind, as well as the impression produced on the audience. This has offended commentators, and made most of them, medieval and modern alike, pass lightly over the relevant passages. A commentary that received the last touch in the very (...) early 13th century is more perceptive because, it is argued, the commentator had lived in a 12th-century environment of competing Parisian schools that was in important respects similar to the one of Aristotle's Athens. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 53, Issue 2-4, pp 336 - 352 Edition and commentary on a 13th-century sophisma _Si tantum pater est, non tantum pater est_ found in partly overlapping versions in three manuscripts. The sophisma was not just one of several designed to investigate how exclusive operators work; it was also a tool for investigating the logical behaviour of relative terms.

This study contains three parts. The first tries to follow the spread of the study of the Prior Analytics in the first two centuries during which it was at all studied in Western Europe, providing in this connection a non-exhaustive list of extant commentaries. Part II points to a certain overlap between commentaries on the Prior Analytics and works from the genre of sophismata . Part III lists the questions discussed in a students' compendium from about the 1240s and in (...) six commentaries per modum quaestionis from the 1270s through the 1290s. (shrink)

Summary The presentation will proceed as follows: (§ 3:) For the truth of an affirmative present‐tensed proposition Boethius required that its terms have actual referents, he would not accept any uninstantiated essence as a verifier. He also denied that any proposition about corruptible beings can be strictly necessary. He thus had a problem explaining how a theorem of one of the natural sciences differs from an ordinary contingent proposition. His rejection of uninstantiated essences also (§ 4) raised the question how (...) words can stay significant independently of the existence of referents, and more generally, to which degree language mirrors external reality. After a sketch of his solution to the semantic problems, § 5 returns to the question about scientific propositions. It is claimed that the core of Boethius' solution is a substitution of causal relationships for ordinary things (existents or essences) as an answer to the question what scientific knowledge is knowledge of and what scientific propositions are about. Since (§ 6) to Boethius axiomatized geometry provided the model for all sciences, consistency of a science's set of theorems should be important for him. A preoccupation with consistency can be seen in the rules he lays down for the dialogical game of “obligation” that was used as an academic exercise. An analysis (§ 7) of his description of another such game, the dialectical disputation, shows that he operated with a notion of truth‐within‐a‐game (requiring only conformity with the rules) as as opposed to absolute truth. § 8 claims that Boethius operated with a similar notion of truth‐within‐a‐science as opposed to absolute truth, and that his reason for so doing was the inaccessibility to human minds of the totality of causes. Doing science, then, (§ 9) is much like participating in a scholastic disputational game, and there may be scientifically‐true theorems conflicting with absolute truth known through revelation. § 10 epilogizes about Boethius' views about the highest good. (shrink)

Clashes between bits of non-homogeneous theories inherited from antiquity were an important factor in the formation of medieval theories in logic and grammar, but the traditional categories of Aristotelianism, Stoicism and Neoplatonism are not quite adequate to describe the situation. Neoplatonism is almost irrelevant in logic and grammar, while there might be reasons to introduce a new category, LAS = Late Ancient Standard, with two branches: logical LAS = Aristotle + Boethius, and grammatical LAS = Stoics &c. → Apollonius → (...) Priscian. (shrink)

The catalogue contains lists of questions found in Latin commentaries on Aristotle’s De sensu, De memoria and De somno et vigilia composed between 1260 and 1320, approximately, plus a selection of commentaries by notable later medieval authors. Most of the texts included are inedita. The catalogue provides information about the title of each question and its location in the relevant manuscript.

The Danish scholar Jan Pinborg made outstanding contributions to our understanding of medieval language study. The papers in this volume clearly demonstrate the wealth of Pinborg's scholarly interests and the extent of his influence.Though centered on medieval theories of grammar and language, the collection ranges in time from the fourth century B.C. to the seventeenth century A.D.; theories of the pronoun, of mental language, of supposition, of figurative expressions and of mereology are among the topics discussed; and the papers deal (...) with both humble anonymous teachers of grammar and with such well-known men as Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Peter of Spain, Roger Bacon, Robert Kilwardby, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, William of Ockham, Domingo de Soto, and Suárez. The papers are in English, German, or French. (shrink)

Edizione con introduzione delle nove questioni anonime sugli Elenchi Sofistici conservate nel ms Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine, 3523, ff. 70rb-72rb . Nell'introduzione l'A. esamina le convergenze fra queste e le questioni sugli Elenchi conservate nel ms. Praha, Méstska Lidova Knihovna, L. 76 . L'ed. affronta anche il problema, irrisolto, di riferimenti interni ad autori, verosimilmente maestri, non identificati: Albertus , Robertus e Antonius. Su quest'ultimo si concentra l'attenzione dell'ed., per il quale Antonius commentò gli Elenchi attorno al 1260, probabilmente a Parigi. (...) Antunius e Albertus sono ricordati anche in due scholia nella copia dei Sophistici Elenchi in Wien, ÖNB, 2377, f. 49r. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Abaelards Logik by Wolfgang LenzenSten EbbesenWolfgang Lenzen. Abaelards Logik. Paderborn: Brill | mentis, 2021. Pp. 206. Hardback, €59.00.According to its author, this book aims at reconstructing key parts of Abelard's logic while denying him a role as a hero of connexive logic or more generally as one of history's greatest logicians. At the end of the preface, we are told that "Abaelard hat die Logik seiner Zeit nicht (...) revolutioniert; er hat keine Kalküle konstruiert; und er hat auch nicht die Logik seiner Zeit auf ein höheres Niveau gehoben" (xiv).The book is divided into twenty-three chapters with titles such as "'Destruierende' versus 'separierende' Negation," "Vollkommene und unvollkommne Folgerungen," and "'Leere' Begriffe." As the titles show, it ranges over a large field. The results of Lenzen's analyses of Abelard's argumentation are presented in modern logical notation. There are many fine analyses, and despite Lenzen's refusal to see Abelard as a genius, he, too, seems to have been quite impressed by the old logician. However, at the end of the day, I am not sure that I have become any wiser about Abelard's contribution to the history of logic.Lenzen is a newcomer to the study of twelfth-century logic, and the book is marked by this in several ways. Thus, he informs the reader that "Spätestens seit Prantls Publikation der 'Geschichte der Logik im Abendlande' steht fest, dass Abaelards Traktat 'De Sillogismis Ypoteticis' sich stark an das Werk 'De syllogismo hypothetico' von Boethius (470–524) anlehnt" (165). This is quite true, but anything else would have been very remarkable, so the reference to Prantl serves no purpose.Unsurprisingly, the main source texts used are Abelard's Dialectica and his Glosae super Peri hermeneias, a part of the series of commentaries on the Ars vetus that go under the common name of Logica ingredientibus. Lenzen displays a cavalier attitude to philology. He quotes the Dialectica from De Rijk's second edition (1970), but in the bibliography he mentions that there are two editions without stating explicitly which one he quotes. In the case of the Glosae, he uses the obsolete editio princeps by Bernhard Geyer from 1927, and he does not even mention its replacement, Klaus Jacobi and Christian Strub's much superior 2010 edition in the series Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis. This is inexplicable, for in his preface Lenzen describes his book as the child of a research project he began several years after the publication of the new edition. Now, fortunately, the use of Geyer does not have disastrous consequences for Lenzen's interpretation of Abelard, but had he used Jacobi and Strub's edition, he would not have had to propose a textual emendation in one place (88n17), nor would he have needed to quote, in another place, a Latin text (which he does not translate) with a nonsensical significantem instead of figurative (94n1o).Lenzen sometimes proposes textual emendations, but not always in a perspicuous way, and they are not all felicitous. For example, a quotation of L. M. de Rijk's edition of Introductiones Montane Minores in Logica Modernorum (LM) II.2 (1967) contains the phrase aliquod opposit[or]um (127n2). An unsuspecting reader would think this means De Rijk had conjecturally emended oppositorum into oppositum, for this is what opposit[or]um would mean in LM II.2. In fact, De Rijk just prints oppositum, so Lenzen's opposit[or]um must mean that he wants to correct De Rijk's text by inserting 'or,' but he forgets to tell us that he does not [End Page 520] faithfully reproduce the text quoted and that his square brackets mean something different from what they do in De Rijk's edition. This issue aside, his conjecture is superfluous, as proven by a parallel passage in LM II.2: 118. Similarly, he quotes Abelard as saying "alterum istorum [est]: vel nox vel dies" (152). The "[est]" is Lenzen's own, again superfluous, contribution to the text. By contrast, elsewhere he proposes to insert a non at LM II.2: 64.2. This time, he explains what he is doing, and I think his conjecture... (shrink)

This is not a book for the ordinary historian of philosophy. It consists almost exclusively of detailed analyses of the manuscript readings at a few scores of places in Metaphysics A–Δ and Λ, confronting the transmitted readings each time with Alexander of Aphrodisias’s comments on the relevant passage. The reason why only those books are studied is simple: Alexander’s commentary on books E–N was lost before the end of the Byzantine era, but Averroes preserved information about the contents of an (...) Arabic translation of the commentary on book Λ. If you are brazen-bowelled enough to stomach so much philological detail, this is a rich book, which teaches the... (shrink)