Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

636 E. Jennifer Ashworth
commentary in their introduction to the Prior Analytics. 132 They write that some
more recent thinkers have argued, on the basis of the Stoic division into invention
and judgement (“which is not disproved by the Peripatetics”), that the Prior Analytics
does not precede the Topics, on the grounds that dialectic is divided into
invention and iudicium seu dispositio, and invention is naturally prior to dispositio.
This view is wrong. First, the two parts spoken of do not deal with the same
material. The Topics concerns only the invention of probable arguments, but the
Prior Analytics deals with the disposition of all arguments, with respect to their
form. Moreover, given that dialectic is most properly divided into the three modi
sciendi, defining, dividing and arguing, it is clear that invention and judgement
have a role in all three parts. One should start by investigating and finding the
parts of a definition, and then aptly disposing them. Certainly we find neither
invention alone nor disposition alone in the Topics and the Prior Analytics. 133
The same is true of the Posterior Analytics. And even if in an art invention must
occur first, there is no reason why it should be taught first. It seems that one
cannot understand invention perfectly unless one has a prior notion of disposition.
The Coimbra commentary therefore opted for the standard ordering in which the
Perihermenias precedes the Prior Analytics, which is immediately followed by the
Posterior Analytics and then by the Topics.
The discussion of invention, and the association of judgement and dispositio
brings us to the question of rhetoric’s relation to dialectic.
3 RHETORIC AND ITS RELATION TO DIALECTIC
One can think of rhetoric merely as a means of presenting arguments in a clear and
engaging manner, and it is quite clear that, as a result of humanist literary studies
and the changes in the educational system, logical writings in general did undergo
change. The more tortured formulations of late medieval logic were abandoned,
classical examples were used, and classical vocabulary was often substituted for
medieval technical terms. However, it is rhetoric as an academic discipline that
is more important for our purposes. Again, it is quite clear that it had a more
important role in the curriculum than it had enjoyed during the medieval period, 134
but this does not settle the question of its relation to logic. One issue concerns its
parts; the other main issue concerns its possible subsumption under logic.
In 1518, a student at Bologna debated the question “Is rhetoric a part of dialectic
132 Commentarii Collegii Conimbricensis, II, cols. 235–236
133 Cf. Augustinus Niphus, Commentaria in octo libros Topicorum Aristotelis (Parisiis, 1542), f.
2 ra–vb. He argued that while there were reasons for attributing both invention and judgement to
the individual books of the Organon, there were better reasons for following the sharp distinction
found in Cicero and Boethius.
134 For instance, the University of Glasgow’s new constitution of 1577 greatly reduced logic
teaching while increasing the time given to rhetoric: see J. M. Fletcher, “The Faculty of Arts”
in The History of the University of Oxford III. The Collegiate University, ed. James McConica
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 158.