His project was to replace Scholastic logic and metaphysics with dialectic and rhetoric, as understood by Cicero, Quintilian, and Boethius. This involved a revival of the arguing on both sides of a question, the urbane skepticism and topical argument of classical rhetoric, in opposition to Scholastic “dogmatism.”106 As in Cicero, an emphasis on the likely followed. After dividing premises of arguments into the necessary and the likely, Valla draws distinctions among the latter. “But as long as the reason is not plainly true but half-true and half-certain, then the conclusion is not necessary
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