Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

6 John Marenbon
excusing himself for not going further into the distinguishing features of the first
Category, substance, he comments that ‘since they are clear in Aristotle himself,
it seems superfluous to explain them, especially since this discourse does not aim
to put down everything that the Philosopher said, but to recount in a simpler way
what seem obscure to the untrained.’ In practice, this means that the paraphraser
omits some of the more complex ideas and concentrates on providing an elegant,
lucid exposition of the Categories. On the question that had exercised readers of
the text since interest in it revived in the first century BC, whether it is about
words or things, the paraphraser manages to maintain a neutral position. Aristotle
begins — he says, following Themistius (Aristotle, 1961, 137:20 -138:1) — from
the things that are perceived, but in order to discuss them he has to talk about
both the things that exist, and the things that are said, because what we perceive
is produced by what exists and cannot be demonstrated except with the aid of
what is said. What will follow must therefore be a ‘mixed disputation’.
Martianus Capella (E.L. Burge in [Stahl, 1971, 104-21], very unsatisfactory)
Martianus Capella was a pagan, living in Roman North Africa either near the
beginning of the fifth century or c. 470 [Shanzer, 1986]. His one work is an
encyclopaedia, in prose interspersed with verse passages, called On the Marriage
of Mercury and Philology (De nuptiis Mercurii et Philologiae), because Books I
and II tell the story of the marriage of Mercury (divine reason) and Philology (the
human soul), an allegory of the ascent of the soul to wisdom; Books III — IX
[Martianus Capella, 1983] each treat one of the Liberal Arts. Book IV is devoted
to logic, and Book V to rhetoric. Both books need mentioning, because in Book IV
Martianus treats the material of the Isagoge, theCategories and On Interpretation,
followed by a presentation of syllogistic based on Apuleius (cf. [Sullivan, 1967, 170-
3]) and, near the end of the book, an account of what he calls the ‘conditional
syllogism’, in which he presents a list of seven modes that are the same as Cicero’s,
but he is unusual in, at one point, giving these seven modes in the traditional Stoic
form, using numbers to stand for propositions (‘If the first, the second; the first;
so the second’) [Martianus, 1983, 144]. Then, in Book V, Martianus goes into a
presentation of the Topics, based on Marius Victorinus. It has been argued that
Victorinus originally incorporated Apuleius’s Peri hermeneias into his own work,
and so Martianus is putting forward a thoroughly Victorine scheme of logic [Hadot,
1971, 196].
2.2 Boethius
([Chadwick, 1981, 108-73; Marenbon, 2003, 17-65; Cameron, Forthcoming; Ebbesen,
Forthcoming; Martin, Forthcoming])
Boethius is the central figure in the ancient Latin tradition of logic. A small
part of his importance is due to his continuing the tradition of Cicero and Marius
Victorinus; the far larger part to his making — as a translator, a commentator
and a writer of textbooks — Greek Aristotelian logic available to the Latin world