Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

Developments in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries 625
continue to produce, if not independent treatises, at least commentaries on Peter
of Spain. For instance, the commentary by Alphonso de Veracruz was published in
Mexico in 1554, followed by several printings in Salamanca; and in 1571 Thomas
de Mercado’s commentary made its first appearance in Seville. 78
In Northern Europe, excluding Spain and Italy for the moment, these changes
in publication were accompanied by a change in university curricula. At such
universities as Oxford, Cambridge, Ingolstadt and Tübingen, authors such as
Agricola and Caesarius were required in place of the medieval texts, and Philip
Melanchthon’s simplified summaries of Aristotelian logic swept Germany. 79 Later
Ramus was to enjoy a runaway success. Yet the most important and influential
texts of the second half of the sixteenth century were by no means simplified
humanist manuals, and they contained considerably more syllogistic logic than
Agricola and Ramus had thought appropriate. Indeed, many of them also contained
treatments of such medieval doctrines as supposition theory. In order to
understand these developments, we must first consider humanist logic in more
detail.
Rudolph Agricola’s De inventione dialectica libri tres, written ca. 1479 but first
published in 1515, is central to the development of humanist logic. 80 Agricola
took up the well-known division between invention, that is, the part of logic which
finds the subject matter for argumentation by using the Topics, and judgement,
that is, the part of logic which organizes and evaluates the resulting arguments,
and he focussed almost exclusively on invention, as the title of his work suggests.
The work is divided into three Books. In the first, Agricola discusses Topics. In
the second, he takes up the nature and role of dialectic, but while he mentions
the standard forms of argumentation, his focus is on literary examples and on
the use of arguments in actual situations. The last Book considers moving, or
the use of emotions, pleasing, and disposition. Much of this material came from
rhetoric manuals, and rhetoric itself was restricted by Agricola to questions of
style. For our present purposes, the two most important features of Agricola’s
work are his placing of invention before judgement, and his novel treatment of
the Topics. There was nothing new about the discussion of Topics as such, for
the three standard works about Topics, namely Aristotle’s Topics, together with
Boethius’s two works, De topicis differentiis and In Ciceronis Topica, 81 had always
78 For more details, see E. J. Ashworth, “The eclipse of medieval logic” in The Cambridge
History of Later Medieval Philosophy, ed. Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny and Jan Pinborg
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 790.
79 For the curricula, see Jardine, “Humanistic logic”, pp. 800–801; Heath, “Logical Grammar”,
p. 59, p. 63; Peter Mack, Renaissance Argument: Valla and Agricola in the Traditions of
Rhetoric and Dialectic (Leiden, New York, Köln: E. J. Brill, 1993), esp. pp. 257–302.
80 For full discussion of Agricola, see Mack, Renaissance Argument.
81 For Boethius, see Boethius’s De topicis differentiis, translated, with notes and essays on the
text, by Eleonore Stump (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1978) and Boethius’s
In Ciceronis Topica, translated, with notes and an introduction by Eleonore Stump (Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 1988). For discussion, see Eleonore Stump, Dialectic and
Its Place in the Development of Medieval Logic (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,
1989). For a history of Topics commentaries, see N.J. Green-Pedersen, The Tradition of the