Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

PORT ROYAL: THE STIRRINGS OF
MODERNITY
Russell Wahl
1 INTRODUCTION
Logic or the Art of Thinking, popularly known as the Port-Royal Logic, was probably
the most important logic text book from the time after the mediaeval period
until the middle of the nineteenth century. Published anonymously, it was
authored by two associates of the abbey of Port Royal des Champs, Antoine Arnauld
(1612-1694) and Pierre Nicole (1625-1695). It is unclear how much each
contributed to the work, although there are indications that Nicole wrote the first
and second discourses and also the additions, and that the rest was very much
a collaborative effort. 1 According to the forward, the initial draft was written in
just a few days with the aim of teaching a student to master “everything useful
about logic” in four or five days. This draft was expanded into a published version
in 1662 and the book went through five editions during the lives of the authors
and over fifty editions in French, thirteen in Latin, and nine in English before
the twentieth century. The sixth English edition, entitled The Port-Royal Art of
Thinking, was, according to its subtitle, used in the first class of the course of education
pursued at the Universities of Cambridge & Oxford. 2 Arnauld and another
associate of Port Royal, Claude Lancelot published (also anonymously) the Grammaire
générale et raisonnée in 1660. This work is also known as the Port-Royal
Grammar. Several points from the first part are taken from the Grammar and
the first two chapters of the second part, added in the fifth edition, were taken
straight from Part II, Chapter 2 of the Grammar.
While including discussions of many topics found in previous logic works, the
Port-Royal Logic is primarily a statement of the new logic of the seventeenth
1 This is from a remark by Racine, who also said that Arnauld wrote the entire fourth part.
See the first note in [Arnauld and Nicole, 1662, 365], for the discussion of the composition of the
Logic. There is also some further discussion in [McKenna, 1986] which reveals just how difficult
it is to determine what was written by Nicole and what by Arnauld. All the page numbers for
quotations from the Port-Royal Logic cited here will be from the critical edition by Clair and
Girbal. These pages are the only pages cited where the work is not specified. This edition is
based on the fifth (1683) edition with reference to variations in other editions, and has become
the standard edition of the Port-Royal Logic. There is now a good translation by Jill Buroker,
as LogicortheArtofThinking[Buroker, 1996b], which includes the page references from Clair
and Girbal.
2 This is the subtitle on the sixth English edition listed in [Arnauld and Nicole, 1662, 9].
Handbook of the History of Logic. Volume 2
Dov M. Gabbay and John Woods (Editors)
c○ 2005 Elsevier BV. All rights reserved.