Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

Developments in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries 637
or politics?” 135 This was not a new question. Aristotle’s Rhetoric as well as his
Poetics had come to be regarded by the late Greek commentators of the School of
Alexandria as part of the Organon, that is, as part of logic in a wide sense, and the
Arabs followed this established tradition. 136 Albert the Great, Aquinas, and Simon
of Faversham, among others, followed the Arabs, at least in principle. If we look
at Aquinas’s analysis of the parts of logic in his Posterior Analytics commentary,
we find that demonstrative syllogisms produce certainty, while dialectic deals with
arguments on the basis of probable premisses that produce opinion or belief, and
rhetoric deals with arguments whose premisses produce suspicio, an inclination to
accept one position rather than its opposite. 137 In the sixteenth century, the most
conspicuous defender of this tradition was Zabarella, who devoted a large part
of his work De natura logicae to arguing that rhetoric and poetics were genuine
parts of logic. 138 None of these claims seem to have had any practical impact. One
reason for this, at least during the medieval period, was the relative inaccessability
of Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics, but during the sixteenth century, when these
works were readily available, 139 the consensus seemed to be that while rhetoric
should be taught in tandem with dialectic, it should nonetheless be regarded as a
separate discipline.
The most important issue is how the five parts of rhetoric, namely inventio,
dispositio, or the structuring and arrangement of material, elocutio, memoria and
pronuntiatio, were to be handled. For Agricola and Ramus, dispositio was interchangeable
with judgement, and both inventio and dispositio were to be handled
by the logician. This arrangement left matters of eloquence to the rhetorician,
and anything to do with the Topics, with argumentation, or with the ordering of
discourse to the logician. With respect to inventio, Agricola insisted that the Topics
were to be confined to dialectic, and that rhetorical Topics, which had covered
material of a more particular kind, were to be reduced to dialectical Topics. 140 In
135 Herbert S. Matsen, “Student “Arts” Disputations at Bologna around 1500”, Renaissance
Quarterly 47 (1994), p. 545. Rhetoric came after logic in order of importance as a disputation
topic, op.cit., p. 543 and p. 545.
136 Black, Deborah L. Logic and Aristotle’s ‘Rhetoric’ and ‘Poetics’ in Medieval Arabic Philosophy.
Leiden etc.: E.J. Brill, 1990, pp. 17–18; Marmo, Costantino. ‘Suspicio: AKeyWordtothe
Significance of Aristotle’s Rhetoric in Thirteenth Century Scholasticism.’ Cahiers de l’institut
du moyen-âge grec et latin 60 (1990), 145–198.
137 Thomas Aquinas, In Aristotelis libros Peri Hermenias et Posteriorum Analyticorum Expositio
(Turin: Marietti, 1964), Prooemium §6, pp. 147–148. He writes, p. 148: “Per huiusmodi
enim processum, quandoque quidem, etsi non fiat scientia, fit tamen fides vel opinio propter
probabilitatem propositionum, ex quibus proceditur: quia ratio totaliter declinat in unam partem
contradictionis, licet cum formidine alterius, et ad hoc ordinatur Topica sive Dialectica. Namsyllogismus
dialecticus ex probabilibus est, de quo agit Aristoteles in libro Topicorum. Quandoque
vero, non fit complete fides vel opinio, sed suspicio quaedam, quia non totaliter declinatur ad
unam partem contradictionis, licet magis inclinetur in hanc quam in illam. Et ad hoc ordinatur
Rhetorica.”
138 Zabarella, De natura logicae in Opera omnia, cols. 71–100.
139 See Brian Vickers, “Rhetoric and Poetics” in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy,
p. 718 for details of the reception of the Poetics in the sixteenth century, and p. 721
for the reception of the Rhetoric.
140 Agricola, De Inventione Dialectica, pp. 313–319. Boethius had discussed the relationship