Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

438 Catarina Dutilh Novaes
logic in the continent, especially in Italy. 7
Burley’s work is also representative of the topics that were to become the logical
topics par excellence throughout the 14 th century: he wrote a treatise on consequences
early in his career [Walter Burley, 1980] (Green-Pedersen argues that this
treatise was certainly written before 1302 — cf. [Green-Pedersen, 1981], as well as
a treatise on supposition, and an influential treatise on obligations [Green, 1963].
But he is perhaps most famous for his On the Purity of the Art of Logic [Walter
Burley, 2000], of which he wrote a shorter and a longer version. 8 For the present
purposes, Burley’s treatises on consequences and on obligations are particularly
important, as well as the parts of the Purity concerning consequences; they will
be the starting point for the conceptual analyses of each of these topics in this
chapter.
Ockham, perhaps the most famous 14 th century philosopher now as well as then,
was slightly younger than Burley. He led an agitated life, most notably marked
by his quarrels with the Avignon popes. 9 He wrote on logic for only a very brief
period of his life, before his departure to Avignon; but his work on logic, especially
his Summa Logicae [William of Ockham, 1974] was to have a significant impact
in subsequent developments. However, Ockham’s writings will not be among the
main objects of analysis in this chapter: his semantics is already thoroughly examined
elsewhere in this volume, and his theory of obligations (described in his
Summa Logicae III-3, chaps. 39-45) is not particularly important for the development
of these theories in the 14 th century. Only his writings on consequence
(Summa Logicae III-3) will be examined in the appropriate section below.
Of the same period, Adam Wodeham is now mostly known as the secretary
and assistant of Ockham in the period in which the latter was writing the Summa
Logicae (in the 1320s); although Wodeham has made important contributions as
diffusor and also critic of Ockham (especially with respect to his epistemology),
his contribution to logic does not seem to have been significant. He is, though,
currently thought to be the creator of the doctrine of complexe significabile, which
was later to be defended by the Parisian theologian Gregory of Rimini (see below in
the next section), and was to become an influential theory concerning the meaning
and truthmakers of propositions, with applications to epistemology.
Besides the very famous Ockham and Burley, several other extremely innovative
and bright masters were active in the first half of the 14 th century in England
(the Black Death in 1349 is usually considered as a convenient divisor between
this period and the one to follow, each having quite distinct characteristics — cf.
[Ashworth and Spade, 1992]). As already mentioned, most of these masters were
connected to Merton College in Oxford, and are thus often referred to as the ‘Mertonians’
(often also as the ‘Oxford Calculators’ — see [Sylla, 1982]). The Merto-
7For brief but informative overviews of Burley’s life and influence, see [Spade, 2000; Conti,
2004].
8On the rather awkward title of Burley’s masterpiece, which might be better translated as
On the Essence of the Art of Logic, see [Spade and Menn, 2003].
9For an account of Ockham’s life and influence, see [Courtenay, 1999].