Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

38 John Marenbon
4 THE DEVELOPMENT OF A BOETHIAN TRADITION
([Minio-Paluello, 1972])
The change in Latin logic shortly before the turn of the millennium can be thought
of as the founding of a Boethian tradition of logic, which was then dominant until at
least the mid-twelfth century. Laurenzio Minio-Paluello (1972) called it, rather ‘the
second phase in the rediscovery of Aristotle and Boethius’, but it is more revealing
to see it both as specifically Boethian and, in being such, as a new development
rather than merely a ‘second phase’. Certainly, the new tradition is Aristotelian,
in that two books of the Organon, theCategories and On Interpretation, occupy
an important place, and it is Neoplatonic, in that Porphyry’s Isagoge is read,
as in the late ancient schools, as an introduction to the study of logic; but,
even more strikingly, it reflects Boethius’s particular version of logic as practised
by the Neoplatonists, a version heavily indebted to Porphyry and following his
tendency to stick to Aristotelian views within logic. Not only were the texts
of Aristotle and Porphyry read in Boethius’s translations and studied using his
commentaries; Boethius’s monographs were themselves the authoritative texts for
half the curriculum. And, despite the use to a very small extent of his translations
and commentaries in the previous two centuries, this Boethian tradition came
into being only from the late tenth century: the earliest medieval logic, as the
sections above have shown, was not strongly influenced by Boethius, but by the
Ten Categories, the encyclopaedic accounts and even Apuleius.
One of the most telling signs of the new approach is the gradual replacement of
the Ten Categories by Boethius’s translation of Aristotle’s text (usually read in
the so-called composite version: see above, p. 8). Whereas half of all the surviving
manuscripts of the Ten Categories date from before c. 1000, only three or four of
the 300 odd medieval copies of Aristotle’s text in translation date from that period.
Copies of the Boethian translation are found at Chartres, Fleury and St Gall
around 1000 and, from the eleventh century there remain 25 manuscripts of the
translation, around 20 of Boethius’ commentary, and just 6 of the Ten Categories
[Minio-Paluello, 1972, 754-5]. In the case of On Interpretation, although there is no
dramatic rise in the number of manuscripts of the text, the eight eleventh-century
manuscripts of the second commentary, as compared to just three from earlier,
indicate that scholars are now studying the work seriously. The letter written by
Gunzo of Novara to the monks of Reichenau in 965 — a letter which is designed
almost entirely to show off Gunzo’s erudition — gives a good indication of the
position, in that he comments that his contemporaries ‘have hardly tried out or
have failed to penetrate’ [Gunzo of Novara, 1958, 37:14-15] the obscurity of On
Interpretation, but he makes sure to cite it, and Boethius’s second commentary,
frequently.
The most striking change was the reception of Boethius’s monographs — on
syllogistic, division and topical differentiae (along with Victorinus’s treatise on
definition misattributed to Boethius). A Fleury manuscript from the later tenth
century (now split: MS Orleans Bib. mun. 267 and MS Paris BNF n. acq. lat.