The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability Before Pascal

by James Franklin

The humanists, for all their criticism of science, logic, law, and so on, were not incompetent at everything. Two arts in which they particularly excelled were philology and invective. Petrarch was strong on both, as in a letter to the emperor in which he mocks a document allegedly written by Julius Caesar for anachronistically using the royal plural.100 But these skills, and their combination, reached a high point in the writings of Lorenzo Valla. Counterintuitive theses maintained by him include: that all Scholastic disputes on metaphysics are caused by misuse of words; that the Latin of medieval law is barbarous (“to the highest degree gothic”101—the persistence of this word to describe things medieval is a sign of Valla’s success); that historians and rhetoricians are superior to philosophers; that logic is a subdivision of rhetoric, not vice versa;102 that the lay state is better than the religious; and that Quintilian is a better stylist than Cicero.