Against the Pseudodialecticians: A Humanist Attack on Medieval Logic. Texts (in Latin), with translation, introduction and notes.

by Juan Luis Vives y March, Rita Guerlac

The humanist treatises presented here are only peripheral to the history of logic, but I think historians of logic may read them with interest, if perhaps with irritation. In the early sixteenth century the humanists set about to demolish medieval logic based on syllogistic and disputation, and to replace it in the university curriculum with a 'rhetorical' logic based on the use of topics and persuasion. To a very large extent they succeeded. Although Aris­ totelian logic retained a vigorous life in the schools, it never again attained to the overwhelming primacy it had so long enjoyed in the northern universities. It has been the custom to take the arguments of the humanists at face value, and the word 'scholastic' has continued to have pejorative overtones. This is easy to understand, because until recently our knowledge of the high period of medieval logic has been slight, and the humanists' testimony as to its decadent state in the sixteenth century has, for the most part, been accepted uncritically. Within the past two decades important work on medieval logic has recovered the brilliant achievement of thirteenth and fourteenth century logicians, philosophers, and natural scientists. New studies are constantly appearing, and the logico-semantic system of the terminists has become fruitful territory not only for historians of logic but also for students of modern linguistics and semiotics.

262 pages, Hardcover

First published May 31, 1979

About the author

Juan Luis Vives y March. (Català: Joan Lluís Vives i March) Humanista y pensador valenciano. Nacido en una familia de judíos conversos, estudió en las universidades de Valencia y París. Desde 1512 se estableció en Flandes, donde fue profesor de la Universidad de Lovaina y entabló una estrecha relación con Erasmo de Rotterdam. También mantuvo amistad intelectual con Tomás Moro, que le llevó a enseñar en la Universidad de Oxford desde 1523.

Al igual que Moro, se opuso al divorcio de Enrique VIII, motivo por el que fue arrestado y hubo de dejar Inglaterra y regresar a Flandes en 1528. Su influencia sobre la Europa del Renacimiento fue enorme, pues no sólo acudieron a consultarle los más influyentes artífices de la Reforma protestante y de la Contrarreforma católica, sino que fue tutor y educador de muchos nobles que ocuparon puestos de responsabilidad en la monarquía de Carlos V.

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Juan Luis Vives was a Valencian scholar and humanist who spent nearly his entire adult life in the Southern Netherlands. His beliefs on the soul, insight to early medicine practice, and perspective on emotions, memory, and learning earns him the title of the ‘father’ of modern psychology. Vives was the first to shed light on some key point ideas that established how we perceive psychology today.

Vives was born in Valencia to a Jewish family which had converted to Christianity. As a child, he saw his father, grandmother and great-grandfather, as well as members of their wider family, executed as Judaizers at the behest of the Spanish Inquisition; his mother was acquitted but died of the plague when he was 15 years old. Shortly thereafter, he left Spain never to return.

Whilst still in Spain he attended the Valencia Academy, where he was taught by Jerome Amiguetus and Daniel Siso. The school was dominated by scholasticism, with the dialectic and disputation playing a central role in the delivery of education.

Reviews

[Brent Pinkall · Rating 5 out of 5]

We've largely lost the ancient art of dialectic as taught in Aristotle's Topics and the like. We tend to equate it with formal logic, the art of "judgment," but it was traditionally understood primarily as an art of invention and only of judgment secondarily. Boethius is partly responsible for this change, but it is largely the fault of logicians in the late medieval period. This fact alone was not a big problem, since the rhetoricians still taught the art of invention (until they stopped doing it, too). The main issue with the new dialectic was that it incorporated a whole slew of new "rules" that twisted language into barbaric forms, disparaged common sense, and promoted speculation about vanities. Insofar as the humanists attack these aspects of medieval dialectic, I sympathize with them. In his introduction to English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, C.S. Lewis comes down pretty hard on the humanists, claiming that they merely "jeer and do not refute" when attacking the scholastics. But works like this one demonstrate that some of their attacks had real substance, and at least men like Valla proposed their own philosophical systems. There are many things to be thankful for concerning medieval dialectic and philosophy, and the best humanists acknowledged this. But it certainly became corrupted, and we can thank the humanists for exposing this.