Ancient scholastic logic as the source of medieval scholastic logic

Abstract

Scholasticism and its means of expression Medieval logic grew out of the school (university) curriculum; consequently, one characteristic vehicle of it was the commentary on a school-book. Medieval philosophers were not, in general, people who believed that the authoritative authors of the text-books were infallible or had said all that could be said about the relevant subjects, but they shared some convictions that can lead to that misimpression. In general they believed that (I) the auctores had laid down the right principles of the several disciplines and did not normally disagree over fundamental issues; (2) they had divided logic into its sub-disciplines in a reasonable way and taken care to provide posterity with treatises on all the main subjects; (3) therefore the right way to do logic was to reach a full understanding of those books and then proceed further in the footsteps of the auctores , remembering never to contradict them without fully explaining the necessity of doing so or – even better – showing that their text could be interpreted so as to make them say what they ought to have said; (4) Aristotle was the greatest of the auctores. ‘Scholastic’ properly characterises philosophers who approach their task in the way men did in medieval Western Europe, but scholasticism in this sense was neither a medieval nor a Western invention. It had flourished in the Greek-speaking part of the world between ca. A.D. 150 and 550, and medieval Latin scholasticism is not just a phenomenon comparable with its Greek predecessor, it is directly descended from it.