Barbara Bartocci

Paul of Venice joined the Austin Friars at an early age and was sent by them from Padua to study at Oxford in 1390. When he returned, full of ideas and laden with books, he began his prodigious writing career with several books on logic, including the Logica Magna, which runs to some half a million words. The current volume contains the final treatise, on insolubles - that is, logical paradoxes. After surveying fifteen previous solutions, Paul develops his own, based on the idea that such propositions falsify themselves. Besides a critical edition of the Latin text, the volume also contains an English translation, a detailed commentary, excerpts from two other logical works of Paul, and a substantial introduction. The introduction describes the fourteenth-century background to Paul's treatise; it also gives a detailed rebuttal of a recent claim that the Logica Magna is not by Paul because its content clashes with genuine works of his. All in all, the volume greatly enhances our understanding of the development of logic, in particular of the semantics of propositions, during a crucial century in its history.

The Louvain professor of Arts and Theology Petrus de Rivo is best known for his central role in the “Quarrel over Future Contingents” at Louvain . But Peter wrote many works, including calendrical treatises and commentaries on Aristotle and the Bible. After presenting the status quaestionis on Peter’s life and works as well as a sketch of the education in Arts at Louvain in the fifteenth-century, the present article focuses on the Aristotelian commentaries, giving both a general impression of their structure and a detailed list of the contets for each surviving commentary

The Aristotelian commentaries by Petrus de Rivo, still unedited, represent a valuable instrument for our understanding of the major trends in the teaching of Aristotle at the fifteenth-century Faculty of Arts at Louvain. We published a preliminary survey of the manuscript material in last year’s issue of this journal, together with an account of the status quaestionis concerning Peter’s biography, works and the historical context of his thought. In the present article, we consider more closely a selection of his commentaries on logic and natural philosophy. First, we offer an overview of Peter’s division of the sciences as expressed in his tractatus prohemiales, particularly those introducing his commentaries on Porphyry’s Isagoge and Aristotle’s Physics. Next, we considers Peter’s explanation of De interpretatione chapter 9, and his exposition of specific parts of Aristotle’s Physics and De anima.

This paper provides a philosophical analysis and a new edition of an anonymous Epitome of John Dumbleton’s solution to the semantic paradoxes. The first part of this paper briefly presents Dumbleton’s cassationist solution to the semantic paradoxes, which the English philosopher proposes in his Summa Logicae, written in the 1330s–40s. The second part investigates the solution to various types of insolubles proposed by the anonymous author of the Epitome. The third part provides a new critical edition of the Latin text – a first edition was edited by Bottin in 1978 – and an English translation.