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17Wyclif's Logica and the Logica OxoniensisIn Luigi Campi & Stefano Simonetta (eds.), Before and After Wyclif: Sources and Textual Influences, . pp. 1-31. 2020.John Wyclif’s logical works have lain under a kind of fog since they were first published in the 1890s. My first aim is to clear up some long-standing confusions by dispelling this fog once and for all. A partial identification of Wyclif’s source material then allows me to make a more dramatic claim about persistent misunderstandings of what is thought to be his earliest work.
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121Duces caecorum: On Two Recent Translations of WyclifVivarium 58 (4): 357-383. 2020.Two recent publications have greatly increased the amount of Wyclif available in translation: the Trialogus, translated by Stephen Lahey, and an anthology translated by Stephen Penn. This review article documents the failings that make these translations worse than useless. A post mortem leads me to claim that the publication of these volumes, the first of which has already been warmly received, is a sign of a gathering crisis in medieval studies, and one that we should take steps to avert.
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40Walter Chatton on Future Contingents: Between Formalism and Ontology, written by Jon Bornholdt (review)Vivarium 57 (1-2): 210-221. 2019.This light revision of Bornholdt's doctoral thesis (Würzburg, 2015) is effectively a medievally-oriented follow-up to Richard Gaskin’s 'The Sea Battle and the Master Argument' (1995). The book is stimulating from a philosophical point of view, but the exegesis is disappointingly unreliable.
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27Articulating Medieval Logic by Terence Parsons (review)Journal of the History of Philosophy 55 (2): 348-349. 2017.One of the founding myths of analytic philosophy is that the predicate logic that was developed in the late 19th century was far more powerful than its predecessors. This ambitious book argues on the contrary that medieval philosophers developed "a system of logic that is similar to the predicate calculus in richness and power" – or that, as Parsons put it in his presidential address to the APA, "the core of medieval logic is as accurate and as expressive as the core of contemporary logic."
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70Francis of Marchia on the HeavensVivarium 44 (1): 21-40. 2006.Francis of Marchia (c. 1290-1344) is said to have challenged Aristotelian orthodoxy by uniting the celestial and terrestrial realms in a way that has important implications for the practice of natural philosophy. But this overlooks Marchia's vital distinction between bare potentiality, which is actualizable only by God, and natural potency, which is the concern of the natural philosopher. If due attention is paid to this distinction, Marchia's position no longer seems to be revolutionary.
St Andrews, FIfe, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
13th/14th Century Philosophy |
Medieval Logic |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Language |
Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy |
Medieval Logic |