Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

618 E. Jennifer Ashworth
rejected and the fourth figure accepted. 47
2 THE FATE OF THE MEDIEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS TO LOGIC
So far I have considered only Aristotle and commentaries on Aristotle. However,
this is somewhat misleading so far as university instruction is concerned, since the
material in question was aimed at more senior students, including those studying
for the M.A. degree. Medieval universities exposed first-year arts students to
a wide range of logical writings, mostly contemporary; and during the sixteenth
century, although Italian universities continued a tradition of reading Aristotle and
his commentators directly, 48 other universities turned more and more to textbooks
of one kind and another. What I have considered so far is misleading for another
reason as well, since I have totally ignored the development of areas of logic not
discussed by Aristotle. It is now time to remedy these defects, and I shall begin by
outlining the specifically medieval contributions to logic which have been discussed
in previous chapters.
One of the features of medieval logic was the production of independent texts,
each focussing on a particular topic. These texts were regarded as complete in
themselves, and as not needing any justification in terms of Aristotelian logic.
They can be organized into three groups. The core of the first group is formed
by the so-called parva logicalia, or treatises dealing with the properties of terms,
including their reference in various contexts. Here we find tracts on supposition,
on relative terms, on ampliation, appellation, restriction and distribution. These
core treatises were supplemented in three ways. Logicians wrote about syncategorematic
terms, that is, the logical particles such as ‘all’, ‘some’, and ‘not’, which
determine the logical structure of a proposition. They wrote about exponible
terms, that is, those logical particles such as ‘except’ and ‘only’ whose presence
requires the analysis of an apparently simple categorical proposition into several
conjoined propositions. Finally, they wrote about the proof of terms, or the ways
in which the truth-conditions of propositions are affected by the presence of exponible
terms, of modal terms such as ‘necessary’ and ‘possible’, or of epistemic
terms such as ‘knows’ and ‘believes’. Obviously there is a good deal of overlap
between writings on syncategorematic terms, on exponibles, and on the proof of
terms, since one and the same particle could be discussed in all three types of
treatise. The second group contains the ‘three tracts of the moderns’, that is, the
treatises on consequences, obligations and insolubles. 49 The third group is formed
by the treatises on sophismata in which problematic or puzzling statements were
47For details, see E. J. Ashworth, “Some Notes on Syllogistic in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries”, Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 11 (1970), 17–33.
48Schmitt, “Philosophy and Science in Sixteenth-Century Universities: Some Preliminary Comments,”
p. 508.
49For an interesting discussion of the way in which the phrase ‘Logica modernorum’ has been
extended in recent times to refer to all the new developments of medieval logic, see N. W. Gilbert,
“Ockham, Wyclif and the ‘via moderna’,” Miscellanea Mediaevalia 9 (1974), pp. 111–115.