Introduction to Medieval Logic

by Alexander Broadie

Medieval logicians advanced far beyond the logic of Aristotle, and this book shows how far that advance took them in two central areas. Broadie focuses upon the work of some of the great figures of the fourteenth century, including Walter Burley, William Ockham, John Buridan, Albert of Saxony, and Paul of Venice, and deals with their theories of truth conditions and validity conditions. He reveals how much of what seems characteristically twentieth-century logic was familiar long ago. Broadie has extensively revised his text for this second edition, while preserving the character of the first. There are now fuller accounts of supposition, of intentional contexts, and of medieval syllogistic, and the conclusion has been substantially expanded.

228 pages, Hardcover

First published April 9, 1987

About the author

Alexander Broadie FRSE is a Scottish philosopher and emeritus professor of logic and rhetoric at Glasgow University. He writes on the Scottish philosophical tradition, chiefly the philosophy of the Pre-Reformation period, the 17th century, and the Enlightenment.

Broadie attended the Royal High School, Edinburgh, the University of Edinburgh (MA), Balliol College, Oxford (MLitt), and the University of Glasgow (PhD, DLitt). He was Henry Duncan prize lecturer in Scottish Studies, Royal Society of Edinburgh (1990 - 1993), and has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh since 1991. As Gifford Lecturer in Natural Theology at Aberdeen University in 1994, he delivered a series of Lectures published under the title The Shadow of Scotus: Philosophy and Faith in Pre-Reformation Scotland (1995). Since demitting his professorship of logic and rhetoric at Glasgow University (held from 1994 to 2009) he has been honorary professorial research fellow there, mainly researching 17th-century Scottish philosophy.

In 2007 Broadie was awarded the degree of DUniv honoris causa by Blaise Pascal University at Clermont-Ferrand in recognition of his contribution to Franco-Scottish collaboration in the field of the history of philosophy.

Broadie's A History of Scottish Philosophy (2009) was named Saltire Society Scottish History Book of the Year. In July 2018 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society, and in 2020 was appointed honorary vice-president of the Saltire Society in recognition of his contribution to Scottish philosophy.

Reviews

[Simon Mcleish · Rating 2 out of 5]

The title is perhaps somewhat misleading. I would expect that a book introducing medieval logic should be fairly easy to follow for someone like myself, with a doctorate in modern mathematical logic and an interest in medieval philosophy. But the first few chapters assume a fair amount of prior understanding of the form of logic used in the middle ages, i.e. one based on natural language rather than symbolic representation of carefully pre-defined and abstract ideas of such ideas as truth, implication, proof and so on (this, the basis of modern mathematical logic, being the legacy of Frege and others such as Russell, Tarsky, and Gödel).

In fact, what is eventually revealed is a way to relate the arguments of medieval logicians, which can seem weird and monumentally pedantic, to a process which moves from the potential ambiguities of natural language towards more abstract understanding of the processes of logic. No matter how interesting that might be to me, though, the path travelled through mainly fourteenth century logical arguments is one I found hard to follow. For me, the best part of the book is the concluding chapter, in which Broadie discusses the transition from scholastic logical thought to humanistic ideas of proof, more based on rhetoric and Ciceronian legal arguments, and the relation of scholasticism to the ideas of modern mathematics.

I would have welcomed a lot more historical context, and also some way to connect the thematically organised discussion to that context.