The humanists' attitude towards scholastic philosophy

There is a certain irony in the fact that it was the humanists with their enthusiasm for the literature of the ancient world who were in large part responsible for the demise of scholastic grammar. For inasmuch as humanism was a literary and educational, not a philosophical movement, the attitude of most humanists towards scholastic philosophy was one of indifference; they seldom manifested outright hostility, and such opposition as they professed was not, for the most part, philosophical.

Humanists outside the university

The early humanists were, in fact, either independent men of letters or, more typically, members of the legal profession holding high office in church or state. Petrarch (1304–74) is the best-known representative of the first category. Famous nowadays for having written some of the most magnificent sonnets in the Italian language, he was known to his contemporaries primarily as a promoter of classical studies and the author of a number of highly regarded original works in Latin as well as a voluminous correspondence, likewise in Latin. An outstanding example of the second type of humanist is Petrarch's younger friend Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406), who was trained as a notary at Bologna University and for the last twenty-six years of his life held the office of chancellor in Florence.

Then, from the early fifteenth century onwards, many humanists became involved in education and left their stamp on generations of students, at first drawn predominantly from northern Italy, but in course of time from as far afield as England and Hungary.

Scholasticism and its means of expression

Medieval logic grew out of the school (university) curriculum; consequently, one characteristic vehicle of it was the commentary on a school-book. Medieval philosophers were not, in general, people who believed that the authoritative authors of the text-books were infallible or had said all that could be said about the relevant subjects, but they shared some convictions that can lead to that misimpression. In general they believed that (I) the auctores had laid down the right principles of the several disciplines and did not normally disagree over fundamental issues; (2) they had divided logic into its sub-disciplines in a reasonable way and taken care to provide posterity with treatises on all the main subjects; (3) therefore the right way to do logic was to reach a full understanding of those books and then proceed further in the footsteps of the auctores, remembering never to contradict them without fully explaining the necessity of doing so or – even better – showing that their text could be interpreted so as to make them say what they ought to have said; (4) Aristotle was the greatest of the auctores.

‘Scholastic’ properly characterises philosophers who approach their task in the way men did in medieval Western Europe, but scholasticism in this sense was neither a medieval nor a Western invention. It had flourished in the Greek-speaking part of the world between ca. A.D. 150 and 550, and medieval Latin scholasticism is not just a phenomenon comparable with its Greek predecessor, it is directly descended from it.

The medieval development of theories of war

In the preface to his Tree of Battles, written in 1387 and dedicated to Charles VI of France, Honoré Bouvet laments that ‘all holy Christendom is so burdened by wars and hatreds, robberies and dissensions, that it is hard to name but one little region, be it duchy or county, that enjoys good peace’. War was the normal condition of society in medieval Europe; and pessimistic doctors argued, on theological or astrological grounds, that ‘in this age it is necessary for there to be wars, and the slaughters and infinite sufferings of war’. Some men were dazzled by the pomp and circumstance of glorious war; a most doubtless agreed that ‘warres & bataylles shold be acursed thyng, & not due’.

About that cursed thing arose a prodigious literature – legal and theological, philosophical and practical, historical, strategical, and ecclesiastical. The centrepiece of the medieval discussions, to which they owe their abiding philosophical interest, is the theory of just war.

That theory is now most familiar from Aquinas' brief essay De hello (ST, Ilallae, q. 40); but in this instance Aquinas was no innovator: he stands in a long line of theorists, the fons et origo of whose ruminations is to be found in the writings of Augustine. The scattered observations of Augustine and his successors were collected and ordered by the canon lawyers of the twelfth century, whose work is best represented by Gratian's Decretum.

A revised dating of the eclipse

The view that the insights and developments of medieval logic were eclipsed during the fifteenth century by a humanist, rhetorically-oriented logic has long been popular, but it needs considerable revision and modification. In what follows I shall first give a brief account of what happened to the writing, teaching, and publication of logical works in the medieval style, by which I mean those which discuss such topics as consequences, in-solubles, exponibles, and supposition. I shall then examine in more detail what was actually said about certain medieval doctrines in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in order to indicate both where logicians of the period had something new to contribute, and where there were departures from medieval doctrines which cannot be attributed to new logical insight. My conclusion will be that medieval logic as a living tradition did largely disappear, but that the eclipse dates from about 1530 (in so far as a specific date can ever sensibly be offered) rather than the mid fifteenth century.

Fifteenth-century logicians

After the death of Paul of Venice in 1429, the fifteenth century did not give rise to much important logical writing. There were various logicians in Italy who deserve mention for their contributions to logic in the medieval style, including Domenico Bianchelli (Menghus Blanchellus Faventinus), who wrote a long commentary on Paul of Venice's Logica parva; Paul of Pergula, who wrote on Ralph Strode's Consequentiae as well as producing his own Logica; and Gaetano di Thiene, who wrote on Strode, William Heytesbury, and Richard Ferrybridge.

Aristotle, Porphyry, and the old logic

Prominent among the antecedents of medieval philosophy, particularly of logic and philosophy of language, are two logical works of Aristotle's. His De interpretatione and Categories, as transmitted by Boethius and coloured by Porphyry's introduction (Isagoge) to the Categories, endowed the logica vetus with a substantial inheritance of technical terms and the metaphysical puzzles that go with them. An explanation of this inheritance requires a brief excursion into the history of the terminology central to the Isagoge and the Categories.

The terminology of the Isagoge and the Categories

Aristotle developed two loosely linked doctrines regarding the structure of propositions; one is that of the predicables, the other that of the categories (or predicaments). Chapters 4, 5, and 8 of Book I of Aristotle's Topics contain an account of the predicables definition, property, genus, differentia, and accident. A definition is a phrase signifying a thing's essence. A property is a predicate not indicating a thing's essence but predicable convertibly of it since it belongs to that thing alone; e.g., the capacity for literacy belongs exclusively to man, so that anything that has that capacity is a man, and only a man has that capacity. A genus is predicated essentially of diverse sorts of things; e.g., animal of man, ox, horse, and so forth. A differentia in combination with the genus produces the definition, as when mortal rational is added to animal to produce the definition of man.

Thirteenth-century criticism of Aquinas' Aristotelianism

Strong reaction among traditional theologians in Paris and Oxford against the massive introduction of new Aristotelian ideas was still growing at the time Albert, Thomas, and Siger taught and wrote. It culminated in the formal act of condemnation by Bishop Tempier in 1277. For a while the Averroistic trend was halted, and the main target of criticism was Thomas Aquinas. A conception of the soul too closely connected to the body, too near to matter was an offense against the entire Christian tradition, which derived so much from Platonism and Augustine. The criticism also attacked the concept of the potential and agent intellect. It rejected the potential nature of the intellect which received and did not produce cognition, it rejected the effect of sensible species on the intellect, and the independence attributed to human cognition, unassisted by divine illumination.

Reactions to the criticism

Even Thomas' pupils and defenders stepped back in the face of this overwhelming pressure. Giles of Rome, although he basically agreed with Thomas' conception of the potential and agent intellect, described the agent intellect also as a quasi-Avicennian storehouse of pre-empirical knowledge and rules of understanding, conceived of as complete potential knowledge. Godfrey of Fontaines defended Thomas in his Quodlibeta, written between 1285 and 1297, and gave his conception of the soul an even firmer Aristotelian character, but he denied the possibility that phantasmata can be turned into intelligible species by the agent intellect, and indeed eliminated intelligible species altogether as an element of intellective cognition.

Language, thought, and reality

Beginning as early as the eleventh century, the relationship between thought and language was a focal point of medieval thought. This does not amount to saying that the basic nature of that relationship was being studied; rather it was accepted without discussion, as it had been in antiquity. Thought was considered to be linguistically constrained by its very nature; thought and language were taken to be related both to each other and to reality in their elements and their structure. In the final analysis, language, thought, and reality were considered to be of the same logical coherence. Language was taken to be not only an instrument of thought, expression, and communication but also in itself an important source of information regarding the nature of reality. In medieval thought, logico-semantic and metaphysical points of view are, as a result of their perceived interdependence, entirely interwoven.

The first medieval scholars to have a professional interest in language as such were the grammarians. Their interest was focused on what we would call logico-semantical and syntactical questions; this is especially true of the School of Chartres as early as the 1030s. No longer were words studied as separate units quite apart from their linguistic context; rather it was that context itself that attracted the most intense interest. I have labelled this concentration of attention the ‘contextual approach’ (De Rijk 1967, pp. 113–17; 123–5). The statement (proposition), not isolated words, was taken to be the fundamental unit of meaning.

Aristotelian and Christian backgrounds for the medieval discussion

Medieval teaching on free choice was inspired on the one hand by Christian thinking and on the other by the moral philosophy of Aristotle as expounded in the Nicomachean Ethics. According to Christian thinkers man is given by God the possibility of choosing between good and evil, so that his conscious decisions affect his ultimate fate, although salvation is impossible without the intervention of divine grace. For Aristotle the consequences of free choice are limited to life on this earth; but in other respects there are similarities between his view and the Christian teaching. For both, man can choose between good and evil as a consequence of his capacity for rational judgement, which makes him significantly more independent of his environment than other beings. According to Aristotle man has a will or desire (boulēsis) for what is good for him: when this is combined with a judgement about what, in concrete circumstances, is conducive to his good there results a choice (prohairesis). The criteria by which such choices are made may differ from individual to individual and are by no means uniform for all men.

Medieval thinkers derived their Christian view of free will principally from the Book of Genesis and from the Epistles of St Paul, but they were also acquainted with Augustine and John of Damascus. The former, in speaking of free choice, emphasised on the one hand the freedom and spontaneity of human aspirations, and on the other the moral and theoretical problems associated with the liberation of human beings from the fetters of doubt, suffering, and sin.

Introduction

Perhaps one of the last really obscure areas of medieval logic is contained in the scholastic work on ‘obligations’. We know something about the authors and the contents of scholastic treatises on obligations (De obligationibus), and we think that these treatises came to be a standard, perhaps even an important part of medieval logic; but we do not yet fully understand the nature of the material contained in them. We are unclear about the function and purpose of obligations and its significance for other parts of medieval logic; and we have only a sketchy notion of the rich and complicated development of obligations from its beginnings in the late twelfth or early thirteenth centuries to the end of the scholastic period. There are as many guesses about the purpose and function of obligations as there are scholars who have written on the subject: it has been described variously as anything from ingenious schoolboy exercises to primitive axiomatised logic. My own account of obligations will emerge in the course of this chapter.

Historical survey

Even in the twelfth century, there is some use of terminology associated with obligations in discussion of disputation, and in some treatises from this period either disputation or obligations themselves are connected with fallacies or sophismata. In the first half of the thirteenth century, in the work of the terminists, the investigation of fallacies tends to contain a long discussion of disputation, and one of the species of disputation discussed there has as its gold redargutio: the forced denial of something previously granted or the granting of something previously denied in one and the same disputation – very similar to the stated gold of obligations in, for example, Walter Burley.

The identity and the writings of the Calculators or ‘Mertonians’

In the second quarter of the fourteenth century a collection of works was produced at Oxford whose joint impact on European natural philosophy lasted well into the sixteenth century. The works at the core of this collection are Thomas Bradwardine's De proportionibus velocitatum (1328), William Heytesbury's Regulae solvendi sophismata (1335), and Richard Swineshead's Liber calculationum (usually dated ca. 1350, but probably earlier). Other treatises were linked with these three through common interests and approaches in logic, in mathematics, and in physics or natural philosophy. Among the most closely linked works were Richard Kilvington's Sophismata, Walter Burley's De primo et ultimo instanti and Tractatus primus et secundus de formis accidentalibus (the Tractatus secundus is known better as De intensione et remissione formarum), Richard Billingham's Conclusiones, Heytesbury's Sophismata and the Probationes Conclusionum of his Regulae, Roger Swineshead's De motibus naturalibus, John Bode's treatise on the sophisma ‘A est unum calidum’ and others, the anonymous Sex inconvenientia, and John Dumbleton's Summa logicae et philosophiae naturalis, not to mention many treatises on the usual subjects of fourteenth-century logic – supposition, consequences, obligationes, insolubilia, etc. – or commentaries on Aristotle's physical works and other set books of the medieval curriculum.

Since many of the most famous authors of these works, including Bradwardine, Heytesbury, Richard Swineshead, Burley, Dumbleton, and possibly also Bode, had been fellows of Merton College, Oxford, some recent historians of science call this group of authors the Merton School, although there is little contemporary evidence that they were called Mertonians.

The Aristotelian concept of happiness and the Christian tradition

The medieval discussion of happiness both before and after the reception of Aristotle is governed by two basic thoughts: there is no happiness in this world because ‘all men, so long as they are mortal, are also necessarily wretched’; true happiness is to be found only in the enjoyment of the contemplation of God (frui Deo) in the world to come. Thus the concept of happiness involves an element that transcends human capacities. But the Aristotelian and Christian conceptions also understand happiness as the perfection of human nature, the actualisation of the possibilities inherent in man. This rules out all definitions of happiness in terms of something like worldly wealth, which is external to human nature, or like the satisfaction of sensual desire, which is not specific to human nature. For Aristotle as for others the essence of happiness is to be found in perfection. It is in that spirit, for instance, that Anselm regards the contemplation of God as the perfection of human rationality, because without this form of happiness man would be rational to no purpose.

The difference between the Christian and the philosophical conception is particularly clear in the Dialogus inter philosophum, Iudaeum, et Christianum of Peter Abelard. While the philosophers speak only of ethics, aiming primarily for the way to the highest good, and accordingly deal mainly with the virtues, Christians take the goal itself as their starting point.