The Early Commentators on the Prior Analytics

The first known commentary on the Prior Analytics in the Latin West is an anonymous work that has recently been edited (Thomsen Thörnqvist 2015) but is not yet fully studied (see Thomsen Thörnqvist 2010 and 2013 for more details). The author has been called Anonymous Aurelianensis III by Sten Ebbesen, who studied parts of the work (Ebbesen 1981). He dates it to c. 1160–80. The theory of the assertoric syllogism was repeated and summarized in almost all logic works from this time, but there are no other major Latin commentaries that we know of until the 1240's when Robert Kilwardby (d. 1279) wrote his Literal Commentary on the Books of the Prior Analytics (In libros Priorum Analyticorum expositio).
By the time Kilwardby wrote his commentary, however, a Latin translation of a commentary by Averroes on the Prior Analytics was becoming known in the West. Averroes wrote three kinds of commentaries on Aristotle’s works, called ‘minor’, ‘middle’, and ‘major’ or ‘great’ based on their length and detail. In the 1220s and 1230s, William of Luna translated Averroes’ middle commentary on Porphyry’s Isagoge as well as his middle commentaries on Aristotle’sCategories, On Interpretation, and Prior Analytics. In addition to these, a major commentary on the Posterior Analytics also became available. In the middle commentaries, Averroes does not go much beyond Aristotle, adhering closely to the letter of Aristotle’s text and deviating only on occasion. Nevertheless, his commentaries played an indispensable role throughout the later Middle Ages in the teaching and study of these difficult texts.
One thing Averroes does do in these commentaries, however, is to build a strong connection between logic and a realist metaphysics, which had a clear influence on thirteenth-century logicians in the Latin West (Lagerlund 2000, 2008). In particular, Averroes’s treatment of modal syllogistics is profoundly metaphysical. In his commentary on the Prior Analytics, he pursues a line of interpretation which is more developed in the Quaesitum, a short treatise on mixed syllogisms (see Uckelman and Lagerlund 2016). In the Quaesitum, Averroes focuses on modal syllogistics and develops an interpretation based on the metaphysical nature of the terms involved in different syllogisms. It has been claimed that this short work is the final result of his inquiries into modal syllogistics (Elamrani-Jamal 1995, p.74). The Quaesitum has been studied by scholars in detail insofar as it clearly influenced Robert Kilwardby (c. 1215-79) (Lagerlund 2000, 32-35; Thom 2003, 81-91; Lagerlund 2008, 300-302). Although Kilwardby added nothing of substance to the theory of the assertoric syllogism, his interpretation of modal syllogistic is quite remarkable. It was also very influential in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Albert the Great, Simon of Faversham, and Radulphus Brito — in other words, all of the major thirteenth-century commentators on the Prior Analytics — followed Kilwardby in their interpretations.
Throughout the commentary, Kilwardby assumes that Aristotle’s theory is correct and makes it his project to find the interpretation that shows this. He begins by considering a counterexample to the accidental conversion of necessity sentences:

اقتباس :: (5:1) Every literate being is necessarily a human being.

According to the conversion rules accepted by Kilwardby, (5:1) should convert to:

اقتباس :: (5:2) Some human being is necessarily literate.

But (5:1) is obviously true whereas (5:2) is false.
As we have seen, this is a common issue for de re readings of the modal sentences. Kilwardby assumes that Aristotle’s modal syllogistic is a logic for divided (de re) sentences. He proceeds to give two separate solutions to this puzzle. The first is based on a distinction between different readings of (5:1). Kilwardby explains that the subject term of a sentence can stand for the subject of the inherence (the suppositum), or for the qualification through which the subject is specified (qualitas/forma). If the term ‘white’ stands for its suppositum, it refers to a thing that is white or to ‘that which is white’, but if it stands for the quality or form, it refers to the whiteness inhering in that which is white, rather than to the thing in which it inheres. Kilwardby says that in (5:1), ‘literate being’ stands for its suppositum, which explains why (5:1) is true, whereas in (5:2) the term is taken differently as standing for the quality or form. According to Kilwardby, the meaning of the original subject term is changed when it no longer stands for the suppositum (literate being), but for the abstract quality of being literate, and it is this change that blocks the conversion. (5:2) is true if it is read as:

اقتباس :: (5:3) Something that is a human being is necessarily that which is literate.

Kilwardby, however, preferred another solution to these difficulties for the conversion rules of necessity sentences. The second solution is based on a distinction between sentences that are necessary per se and those that are necessary per accidens. He writes (I, fol. 7rb):

اقتباس :: When it is said: ‘Every literate being is necessarily a human being’, the subject is not something that can be said per se of the predicate, but since ‘literate being’ is not separated from what belongs to a human being in itself, the sentence is conceded as necessary, though when a sentence is necessary in this way it is necessary per accidens. Therefore, when Aristotle says that necessity sentences are convertible, he means only sentences necessaryper se are convertible.

The idea is here that since ‘human being’ is not predicated per se of its subject ‘literate being’, the sentence (5:1) is not a per se necessity sentence and therefore not convertible. (5:1) is a necessity sentence, though of the per accidens type, since it is necessarily true only in the sense that being human and being literate are not separable. Kilwardby implies that the relation between the subject and predicate terms must be of a special kind if a sentence is to be called necessaryper se. In (5:1), ‘literate being’ and ‘human being’ do not have the close per se relation Kilwardby demands of a convertible sentence.
Kilwardby thinks that sentences per se should be understood following An. Post. I.4–6, where Aristotle discusses four different notions of per se (kath’ hauto) predication, though Kilwardby seems only to have the first two in mind when discussing per se necessity. Aristotle says that the first type of per se predication (per se primo modo) occurs when the definition of the subject includes the predicate. The second type of per se predication (per se secundo modo) occurs when the definition of the predicate includes the subject. The best characterization of the first type is the genus/species relation, where the definition of a species includes its genus. The second type is often characterized by a proprium (property), since a proprium is included in the definition of a subject, as in ‘a human being is able to laugh’, where the term ‘human being’ is included in the definition of the predicate ‘able to laugh’. A sentence is per se necessary if it involves either of these two predications, according to Kilwardby. Necessity per accidensbelongs to all other necessity sentences, which lack this intrinsic relation between subject and predicate.
Kilwardby also stresses that in a per se necessity sentence, the subject must be ‘something belonging in itself to that predicate’ (‘per se aliquod ipsius predicati’), by which he seems to mean that the subject has the predicate as an essential property, i.e., such that it has the predicate as a necessary property through itself and not through something else. A syllogistic necessity sentence is then understood as a proposition expressing the essential properties of a thing in a genus/species relationship. He seems to assume that in a per se necessity sentence, the subject term is not an accidental term but an essential or necessary term, and that the subject is essentially (per se) linked to the predicate rather than merely through the weaker relation of inseparability. Consequently, if the subject term is necessary and the link is necessary, it follows that the predicate term cannot be merely a contingent (accidental) term. It must be necessary as well. The Aristotelian theory of necessity syllogistic is thus limited to a special class of terms, all of which stand for substances. The same terminology is also used to explain syllogistic for contingency sentences, which suggests that Kilwardby was trying to develop a uniform and highly original interpretation of the theory. A number of recent scholars have offered similar interpretations of Aristotle (see van Rijen 1989, Patterson 1995, Thom 1996, and Nortmann 1996).
When they interpreted Aristotle’s modal syllogistic, most medievals saw the need to introduce a distinction between different kinds of assertoric sentences. In the mixed syllogism L–L (L represents a necessity sentence), the assertoric minor premise cannot be any kind of assertoric sentence because then the terms could merely be accidentally connected. Kilwardby therefore introduced a distinction between absolutely (simpliciter) and as-of-now (ut nunc) assertoric sentences. The origins of this distinction can be found in Aristotle (An. Pr. I.15, 34b7–18), but Kilwardby of course uses his own per se/per accidens terminology to spell out the difference. An absolutely assertoric sentence involves a per se predication whereas an as-of-now assertoric sentence involves a per accidens predication. In this way, he can guarantee that an essential connection between the terms in a valid L–L syllogisms is preserved through to the conclusion. This is not unproblematic (see Lagerlund 2000, 39–42), though the distinction between different assertoric sentences needed somehow to be made and remained a problem throughout the later Middle Ages.
In the end, Kilwardby did not arrive at just the moods accepted by Aristotle. For example, he accepts –LL for the first figure, which is not accepted by Aristotle, and does not manage to get –CC and LCC for Disamis in the third figure. There are also some other moods he does not succeed in validating and others still he grants but which are not accepted by Aristotle. But perhaps Kilwardby gets as close as one can possibly get to making Aristotle’s system consistent. (See Knuuttila 1996, Lagerlund 2000, and Thom 2003 and 2007.)

The Early Commentators on the Prior Analytics

The Early Commentators on the Prior Analytics :: تعاليق

The Early Commentators on the Prior Analytics