free men فريق العمـــــل *****
التوقيع :
عدد الرسائل : 1500
الموقع : center d enfer تاريخ التسجيل : 26/10/2009 وســــــــــام النشــــــــــــــاط : 6
| | Later Medieval Developments of the Theory | |
Syllogistic logic reached the height of its development in Buridan and for the next two hundred years, little was said about it. Buridan's younger associates at Paris, Albert of Saxony and Marsilius of Inghen, were both competent logicians, but neither made any substantive additions to the theory developed by their master. Paul of Venice was a well-known early fifteenth-century logician, but he had little to say about the theory of the syllogism. In the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, several very good logicians wrote books on logic, perhaps the most skillful being Jodocus Trutfetter, a follower of Ockham who is better known as a teacher of Martin Luther. But Trutfetter's logic is wholly based on Buridan. In his massive work, the modestly titled,Little Compendium of the Whole of Logic (Summulae totius logicae), he extends modal logic beyond Buridan to include discussions of epistemic and doxastic modalities. His treatment of syllogistic is perhaps the most extensive in the medieval tradition.As noted above, the syllogistic logic of Ockham and Buridan was not primarily aimed at saving Aristotle. But historical interest in Aristotle returned in the latter part of the fifteenth century, and some scholars, mainly from the Thomistic and Albertist traditions, wanted to know what Aristotle had said about syllogistic. There was also the nominalist commentator George of Brussels, who tried to offer a historically accurate interpretation of Aristotle together with a systematic account along the lines of Buridan. It is interesting to note that the modal syllogistic these philosophers ascribe to Aristotle is identical to that provided under Kilwardby's interpretation. (For further discussion of modal logic in the later Middle Ages, see Coombs 1990, Roncaglia 1996, and Lagerlund 2000, Chapter 8.)10. SummaryThe theory of the syllogism was the most important logical theory during the Middle Ages and for a long time it was practically synonymous with logic as a discipline. Buridan altered this picture by making syllogistic part of a much larger and more complex logic of consequence.At first, medieval commentators on Aristotle’s Prior Analytics sought to save what they took to be Aristotle’s original system. Kilwardby thought this could be done by interpreting modal sentences in light of Aristotle’s metaphysics of essence together with his account of essential prediction in the Posterior Analytics. This was a very influential interpretation, but it was ultimately abandoned because it did not succeed in saving Aristotle.In the early fourteenth century, Campsall tried to save Aristotle by developing a more radical interpretation restricting the supposition of subject and predicate terms in modal sentences. This enabled him to prove the conversion rules and many of the syllogistic moods accepted by Aristotle, but not even this interpretation could make sense of the Prior Analytics.By the second quarter of the fourteenth century, modal logic had begun to change and new distinctions were used to develop the theory of the modal syllogism, such as the distinction between de dicto and de re modal sentences. Ockham was the first simply to abandon Aristotle’s theory in favor of a newer and more systematic account. He was not quite successful, however, and it was left to Buridan to subsume modal syllogistic as part of his larger project of systematizing the whole of logic.The history of syllogistic does not end with the Middle Ages, of course, but it is fair to say that the theory did not really change in the six centuries since Buridan. What did change, and for the worse, was people's knowledge of the original sources and hence also of the richness and sophistication of medieval logic, a state of ignorance that made the doctrine easy for logicians of the early twentieth century to ridicule. | |
|