Ana Maria Mora-Marquez

The aims of this paper are to show (i) that thirteenth-century Aristotelian logic (AL-13) is a logical tradition that considers Aristotelian logic (AL: the logical curriculum at the University of Paris, that is, Porphyry’s _Isagoge_, Aristotle’s _Organon_, Boethius’s _De divisione_ and _De topicis differentiis_, and the anonymous _Sex principia_) as a system that is organized around the syllogistic argument; and (ii) that AL-13 can be characterized as the study of scientific method, of which formal analyses are a part but by no means the crucial one. I give a diachronic account of AL-13, with its continuities and ruptures, by looking at the general accounts of AL by Nicholas of Paris (1230s), Albert the Great (1250s), and Radulphus Brito (1290s).

Thirteenth-century interpreters of Aristotle’s Topics put forward metaphysical accounts aiming to underpin Aristotle’s account of dialectical argumentation. The reason for this, I surmise, is that they took Aristotelian logic to be a scientific method, a crucial part of which is the dialectical method provided in the Topics. Dialectical arguments proceed distinctively from acceptable premises which are not necessarily true. So, if dialectical argumentation is to be a tool to produce scientific knowledge, dialectical arguments must meet the world at least at some joints. In other words, the warrants of dialectical arguments, the topoi, must somehow bring about some adequation between the dialectical conclusion and the ontological structure of the world. The solution of some Parisian masters of Arts is to propose a basic ontology that grounds the topical strategies (topoi) described by Aristotle in Topics II to VII. The aim of this chapter is to use the topoi of the accident as a case-study to reveal this ontology and illustrate how it is subsidiary to their understanding of the functional role of topical warrants in dialectical arguments.

This volume is one of the main outcomes of the 5-years research project The Medieval Reception of Aristotle’s Topics: A Pragmatic Account of Dialectical Argumentation? (henceforth Topica) The aim of the project was to study the medieval reception of Aristotle’s Topics, as the title indicates, and to produce critical editions of two of the main commentaries on the Topics from the thirteenth century: the question-commentary by the Parisian master of Arts Radulphus Brito, the last extant commentary of the century, and the literal commentary (possibly—the attribution is still to be confirmed) by the English Dominican Robert Kilwarby, which is the first extant commentary of the century (1230–40s?) and in all likelihood produced also at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Paris.

This book presents a collection of essays by prominent young researchers and established scholars on the medieval reception of Aristotle’s Topics in the Latin, Arabic and Hebraic traditions, as well as on its late-ancient sources in Alexander of Aphrodisias and Boethius. The book thus provides a fruitful engagement with the late-ancient to medieval reception of the Topics, a tradition that has been understudied in recent scholarship. The collected contributions revisit the reception of the Topics focusing on historical analyses of dialectics as a general method of argumentation and as a scientific method. The authors studied in this book range from well-known figures such as Alexander, Boethius, Buridan and Avicenna, to the lesser-known Radulphus Brito, Judah ben Shlomo ha Kohen, and Ibn Tumlus. This book is an important contribution to the study of argumentation theory in the historical past and is of interest to scholars of the historical development of dialectical argumentation and argumentation theorists.

General studies of medieval logic tend to neglect the context in which medieval logic developed and the needs to which such a development responded. Accordingly, they normally neglect the non-formal elements they encounter instead of integrating them as elements that meet the specific needs of the medieval intellectual endeavour and that are, then, part and parcel of medieval interpretations of Aristotelian logic. The result is, at best, a partial picture of medieval logic, with a focus on the formal that in some periods and key authors is unwarranted. In this study, I present the account of the syllogism of a crucial figure of thirteenth-century Aristotelianism, Radulphus Brito. My main aim is to show that Brito puts forth a pragmatic account of the syllogism, which includes pragmatic necessary conditions, such as institutional context, background knowledge and intention of the arguers, functional both at the propositional and the consequential levels. I aim, thus, to provide some nuance to our general picture of medieval logic with Brito’s pragmatic account of the syllogism.

L’objectif de cet article est de montrer qu’à la fin du xiii e siècle un tournant s’est opéré dans la compréhension de la nature du syllogisme sophistique, allant d’une définition axée sur ses caractéristiques formelles vers une définition tenant compte de ses caractéristiques pragmatiques. La première position est celle de Simon de Faversham, développée vers 1280 et probablement durant son séjour à la Faculté des arts de Paris. La seconde position est celle de Raoul le Breton, dernier des plus grands maîtres ès arts parisien. C’est dans leurs réponses respectives que se révèle leur désaccord sur la manière de concevoir le syllogisme sophistique.

Aristoteles' (384-322 f.Kr.) mange filosofisk-videnskabelige værker er blevet studeret og kommenteret i over 2.000 år, men aldrig så intensivt som i tiden mellem 1100 og 1600, hvor de var rygraden i den såkaldt "skolastiske" lærdomskultur, der skabte det europæiske universitetssystem. Der forskes stadig i Aristoteles verden over, men moderne fortolkere drager kun sjældent nytte af den rige ældre tradition. Denne bog beskriver og sammenligner fortolkningsmetoder og publikationsstrategier hos skolastikerne og nutidens aristotelikere. Der argumenteres for, at dele af den gamle metodik med fordel kunne genoptages, og det vises, at der i konkrete tilfælde kan findes værdifulde fortolkningsforslag, som ikke ses i den nyere litteratur.

This edited work draws on a range of contributed expertise to trace the fortune of an Aristotelian thesis over different periods in the history of philosophy. It presents eight cases of direct or indirect challenges to the Aristotelian passive account of human cognition, taking the reader from late antiquity to the 20th century. Chapters analyse the effect of Aristotle’s account of cognition on later periods. In his influential De anima, Aristotle describes human cognition, both sensitive and intellectual, as the reception of a form in the cognitive subject. Aristotle’s account has been commonly interpreted as fundamentally passive – the cognitive subject is a passive actor upon which a cognitive process is acted by the object. However, at least from the time of Alexander of Aphrodisias onwards, this interpretation has been challenged by authors who posit a fundamental active aspect of cognition. Readers will discover how one or more of three concerns – ontological superiority, direct realism and moral responsibility – drive the active accounts of cognition. Contributed chapters from top scholars examine how these three concerns lead thinkers to take issue with the idea that cognition is a passive process. The authors consider Jesuit accounts of cognition, Malebranche on judgment, and Wittgenstein on perception, as well as Stumpf on active cognition, among other relevant works. This book is ideally suited to scholars of philosophy, especially those with an interest in medieval epistemology, the influence of Aristotle, philosophy of mind and theories of cognition.

Discussions about singular cognition, and its linguistic counterpart, are by no means exclusive to contemporary philosophy. In fact, a strikingly similar discussion, to which several medieval texts bear witness, took place in the late Middle Ages. The aim of this article is to partly reconstruct this medieval discussion, as it took place in Parisian question-commentaries on Aristotle’s De anima, so as to show the progression from the rejection of singular intellection in Siger of Brabant to the descriptivist positions of John Duns Scotus and John of Jandun, and finally to the singularism of John Buridan. All these authors accept some kind of intellectual access to individuals. Therefore, the conundrum is not whether we have some kind of intellectual knowledge of individuals, but rather whether we can know them singularly. This article begins by presenting the crucial obstacle to singular intellection in Siger. Thereafter, the author shows that Jandun and Scotus depart in fundamental ways from Siger’s account, but that for them the intellection of individuals is of a general character. Finally, she proposes that Buridan is a genuine singularist.

A questão "se uma elocução perde seu significado com a destruição das coisas "surge como uma questão sobre o valor-verdade de declarações com um termo vazio como sujeito, a saber, como um subproblema do sofisma "Se 'omnis homo de necessitate est animal' é verdade quando não há homem algum ". Neste trabalho, trarei as discussões conforme elas se apresentam em "De signis" IV.2 de Roger Bacon, em "Quaestiones logicales", q. 2–3 de Peter John Olivi, no OHNEA de Boethius of Dacia, e no OHNEA de Anonymus Alani. Tais textos nos apresentam quatro modos diversos de nos relacionarmos com a questão sobre significação para OHNEA e, assim, com quatro posições diferentes sobre a relação entre significação e referência vazia. Usarei Anonymus Alani como o fio conductor de minha análise, inserindo outras posições onde tal se fizer relevante.The question 'whether an utterance loses its signification with the destruction of things ' is raised as a question about the truth-value of assertions with an empty term as a subject, namely as a sub-problem of the sophism 'Whether "omnis homo de necessitate est animal" is true when no man exists '. In this paper, I shall introduce the discussions as they are present in Roger Bacon's "De signis" IV.2, Peter John Olivi's "Quaestiones logicales", q. 2–3, Boethius of Dacia's OHNEA, and Anonymus Alani's OHNEA. These texts present us with four different ways of relating the question about signification to OHNEA, and therefore with four different positions regarding the relation between signification and empty reference. I shall use Anonymus Alani as the guiding thread of my analysis, inserting other positions where it is relevant.

The article intends to show: a) that the modist Martin of Dacia sides with the traditional reading of the first chapter of Aristotle’s De interpretatione that we find in masters of arts from the first half of the thirteenth century; and b) that the modist Boethius of Dacia is one of the first thirteenth-century scholars to depart from this reading. In fact, Boethius presents us with an account of propositional verification where the terms’ signification is not operational and where the immediate truth-maker of statements like ‘homo est animal’ is an external state of affairs. In Martin’s case, to the contrary, the terms’ signification is operational in his account of propositional verification and the immediate truth-bearer of such statements is a mental composition or division.

Nous proposons de montrer une rupture que la tradition interprétative médiévale du passage 16a3-8 du De interpretations a subie dans la seconde moitié du XIIIe siècle. On met ainsi en évidence que, dans cette même période, s'est façonnée une nouvelle théorie de la signification, qu'on retrouve notamment dans l'œuvre de théologiens franciscains ou proches des idées franciscaines, opposée sur des points fondamentaux à celle qui a été transmise par Boèce dans son deuxième commentaire du De interpretations. The aim of this article is to describe a rupture that occurred in the second half of the 13th century concerning the interpretation of the passage 16a3-8 of the De interpretatione. We also discuss a new theory of signification which arose during the same period, a theory found in the works of Franciscan theologians or of theologians close to the Franciscan tradition. This theory is fundamentally opposed to the one transmitted by Boethius in his second commentary on the De interpretatione

This book presents an exhaustive study of the three 13-century discussions explicitly dealing with the notion of Significatio. The study aims to show that the three discussions emerge because of apparently opposite claims about the signification of words in the authoritative literature of the period. It also shows that the three discussions develop in the same direction - towards a unified use of the notion of signification, which keeps its explanatory role in semiotics, but loses its role in grammar and logic.

The aim of this paper is to present a reconstruction of Olivi's account of signification of common names and to highlight certain intrusion of pragmatics into this account. The paper deals with the question of how certain facts, other than original imposition, may be relevant to determine the semantical content of an utterance, and not with the question of how we perform actions by means of utterances. The intrusion of pragmatics into Olivi's semantics we intend to point out may seem minimal today, but was of a certain importance at his time. Even if the conventional codes still play a role in his explanation of how words acquire a semantical content, both the intention of the speaker and the communication context in which this intention is being effectuated are essential features of the actual signification of names

In this article I present the analysis of the syncategorematic term ‘omnis’ in the commentaries on the Topics by the Parisian masters of Arts Boethius of Dacia and Radulphus Brito. I shall focus on the different relations between subject, predicate and particular instances that obtain in universally quantified statements, and in particular on the relations that obtain in universally quantified statements with an empty subject. I also attempt to highlight some continuities and ruptures with respect to this problem in its 13th-century treatments, by comparing Boethius and Brito’s analyses with the earlier analyses put forth by Peter of Spain and William of Sherwood