Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

2 John Marenbon
which was new; the position was consolidated in the three centuries followed, and
logic continued to hold it until the end of the Middle Ages. By studying logic in
the early Middle Ages, therefore, we can hope to gain some understanding of how
and why the subject had its special role within medieval education and thought.
This aim calls for an approach rather different from that of most chapters in this
handbook. Consideration of the uses of logic and its connections with other subjects
are as important here as the technicalities of logical doctrine. Indeed, there
is a sense in which the treatment here, just because it must fit into a handbook
of the history of logic, must still remain over-theoretical and insufficiently historical.
What is most needed to illuminate the broadly human importance of the
subject in this period (and in the twelfth to sixteenth centuries) is a social history
of medieval logic, a type of study that has never until now been envisaged, let
alone attempted. The following pages could be seen as prolegomena to part of
that enterprise.
2 THE ANCIENT LATIN TRADITION
When historians, using the medieval terminology, speak of the logica vetus —the
corpus of ancient logical works used by Latin scholars in the early Middle Ages —
they sometimes take it in a narrow sense to mean just the three Greek logical texts,
Porphyry’s Isagoge, and Aristotle’s Categories and On Interpretation, whichwere
available in translation. From this perspective, it seems that the ancient Greek
tradition of logic, though in a very curtailed form, is behind the work of the
early medieval logicians. But, by the eleventh century, the logical curriculum —
the logica vetus in a wider and more useful sense — consisted of six works: the
three ancient Greek texts, and three textbooks written early in the sixth-century
by the Latin thinker, Boethius: treatises on categorical syllogisms, hypothetical
syllogisms and on topical argument. Also attached to the curriculum, though
more peripherally, was a work on definition attributed to Boethius but in fact
by a Latin predecessor of his, Marius Victorinus, and Cicero’s Topics, along with
Boethius’s commentary on it. And Boethius’s logical commentaries — two on the
Isagoge and On Interpretation, one on the Categories — were the tools with which
these three texts were studied. Other Latin logical texts had been influential in
the eighth to tenth centuries, although they had mostly lost their importance by
the eleventh: the Ten Categories, a paraphrase of Aristotle’s Categories from the
circle of Themistius, thought at the time to be by Augustine; Apuleius’s Peri
Hermeneias; and the sections on logic in the encyclopaedias of Martianus Capella,
Cassiodorus and Isidore of Seville. For all these reasons, though much in early
medieval logic goes back ultimately to Aristotle or to the ancient Peripatetics
and the Neoplatonists who cultivated Aristotelian logic, they drew more directly
on a distinctively Latin tradition. It is here that we must begin. Boethius is
the central figure but, as the list of names above suggests, his predecessors and
successors should not be neglected.
First, one preliminary, verbal note. Many of the chapters or treatises discussed