Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

Alcuin as a Logician
The Latin Tradition of Logic to 1100 23
Alcuin (d. 806) was educated at the Cathedral school of York and managed,
from the 780s until he was made Abbot of Tours in 796, to gain a position and,
ultimately, a good deal of influence, in Charlemagne’s court at Aachen. Among
his compositions are text-books on grammar, rhetoric and logic. The one on logic,
Dialectic (Dialectica) [Alcuin, 1863], written in the form of a dialogue between
Alcuin and Charlemagne himself, can claim to be the first medieval work on this
discipline. In setting out these three linguistic arts of what came to be called the
‘trivium’ as basic elements of education, Alcuin was, in a sense, merely following
the lead of Cassiodorus, though unlike him neglecting the mathematical arts of
the quadrivium. But in a preface to the three works, pointedly called On True
Philosophy (De vera philosophia) [Alcuin, 1863, 951-76], Alcuin makes explicitly
the case for the liberal arts as pillars in an education that will finally lead to the
temple of Biblical wisdom (cf. [Marenbon, 1984, 172-4]). This was an educational
programme that Alcuin ensured was politically underwritten; Charlemagne’s role
as pupil and interlocutor in Dialectic is a flattering endorsement of the direction
of royal policy.
Alcuin did not just help to place the arts of the trivium at the centre of medieval
education: he helped to make logic the foremost among them. But from Dialectic,
a text not only wholly derivative, but copied in the main — with one important
exception — verbatim from the encyclopaedic accounts of Cassiodorus and Isidore
[Prantl, 1885, 16-19; Lehmann, 1917], perhaps with some use of Boethius’s first
commentary on On Interpretation (queried in [Kneepkens, 1998]; but [Bullough,
2004, 404] upholds its use), it is not easy at first to see how. Certainly not because
of any logical thinking done by Alcuin himself: the one section for which there is no
obvious source, Chapter XII on ‘Arguments’, is simple in the extreme and avoids
giving even the summary accounts of types of categorical syllogisms or modes of
hypothetical syllogisms available in the encyclopaedias.
Yet Alcuin manages his material with a clear sense of his own particular purpose.
In Isidore’s Etymologies, his main source, the presentation centres on logic as a tool
for devising and judging arguments: the section on syllogisms is the longest, and
as in Cassiodorus it comes at the end of the work, along with the presentation of
topical arguments, punctuated by the discussion of definitions. Alcuin ends with
his treatment of material from On Interpretation, and, as mentioned, he gives a
very simple and brief treatment of syllogistic. The emphasis of Dialectic in terms
of space and detail falls on the exposition of the Categories. Here alone Alcuin
turns to a non-encyclopaedic source, the Ten Categories, the intelligent paraphrase
produced in the circle of Themistius (see above, 2.1). The excerpts from it occupy
two fifths of the whole treatise. To judge from Dialectic, logic is above all about
the doctrine of the Categories.
There is every reason to believe that Alcuin would have been happy to leave
this impression. He believed that the Ten Categories was the work of Augustine,
no less, and he wrote a prefatory poem for it which would accompany it in the