Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

LOGICINTHE14 th CENTURY
AFTER OCKHAM
Catarina Dutilh Novaes
This chapter is meant to complement the previous chapter on Ockham’s and
Buridan’s respective semantic systems, and the chapters on modalities, on selfreferential
paradoxes and on supposition in this volume. Here, I intend to cover
for as much as possible the important material from the 14 th century that is not
covered by these other chapters.
The 14 th century was a period of intense intellectual activity in Christian Europe,
in spite of the image of decline and disaster often associated with this period.
By that time, the Universities of Paris and Oxford, whose birth had taken place
in the previous centuries, had acquired maturity as institutions, and the different
forms for intellectual investigation had been laid down. Even the Black Death in
the mid-14th century did not provoke a total decline in the degree of sophistication
of the knowledge being produced at the time, in spite of having taken the lives of
some of its brightest masters (e.g. Bradwardine, cf. [Read, 2006b]).
Logic occupied a privileged position in the medieval curriculum; it was part
of the trivium along with rhetoric and grammar, the three subjects a medieval
student worked on at the very beginning of his career. In many senses, logic was
thought to be the general method with which any student had to have a high degree
of familiarity before proceeding to any other topic (cf. [Zupko, 2003, ch. 2]). So,
on the one hand, at least some of the logic of that period was really meant for very
young students just beginning their intellectual career; on the other hand, while
it was indeed the most common for masters to move on to more ‘serious’ topics
(especially theology) at later stages of their careers (but this was not always the
case; Buridan is the most prominent but not the only example of a master having
stayed at the faculty of Arts throughout his career — cf. [Courtenay, 2004]), many
of them viewed logic not only as the matter to be covered by very young students.
Indeed, the 14 th century corpus on logic presents logical analysis of the highest
quality.
But first, of course, we must clarify what was meant by ‘logic’ in the 14 th
century. That medieval logic is very different from what we call logic in 21 st
century is almost a truism. However, a case can be made for the non-equivocal
use of the term ‘logic’ applied to these two radically different traditions (cf. [Dutilh
Novaes, 2007, ‘Conclusion’]), insofar as some of the most basic traits of what is/was
thought to be logic in each of these periods seem to converge in significant aspects.
But this is not the place for such a conceptual, intensional analysis; rather, for