In the early fourteenth century, philosophy came to be pursued by an established community of academics. There is much pushing of intellectual positions to their “logical” conclusions, irrespective of whether those conclusions contradicted a balanced and reasonable view of the world.54 More and more, writing was devoted to critiques of one another’s works, finer logical distinctions were made, and a wave of modesty swept through philosophical style. Such a culture naturally supported an attention to finer classifications of propositions than to the gross categories of true and false, and the
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