Articulating Medieval Logic

Abstract

Medieval logic can often ‘seem to consist of a variety of unsystematic and disparate remarks, and it is not at all obvious whether or how they fit together’ (p. 1). In this ambitious book, Terence Parsons seeks to demonstrate how ‘medieval logic can […] be seen as a group of theories and practices clustered around a core theory which is a paradigm of logic; this theory consists of a number of widely known principles, all of which can be derived from a very simple core of rules and axioms’ (p. 1). Starting from the beginning—that is, Aristotle—Parsons takes the reader from the semantics of the simplest categorical (subject-predicate) statements through a semi-formal notation called ‘Linguish’ (a mix of Latin and English, plus some symbols), to the modes of personal supposition, and eventually to complex statements involving tenses, relatives, anaphora, and other phenomena; along the way, comparisons with contemporary logic and lingusitic theory are regularly made.