Changes in British Logic Teaching During the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Abstract

British logic teaching in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was provided in England by Oxford and Cambridge, both medieval foundations, and in Scotland by the universities of St Andrews and Aberdeen, both founded in the fifteenth century, and Edinburgh, founded in 1582. Wales had no university, and high schools in England did not teach logic. This paper explores the effect that the invention of printing, along with organizational, political, and sociological changes, had on the teaching of these institutions as they affected the logic textbooks that were used and the ways in which the material was presented to students. The disappearance of important medieval developments such as supposition theory along with changes in the treatment of Aristotle’s logic are discussed in relation to selected logicians from the period under discussion. In particular, attention is paid to the Cambridge logician John Seton (d. 1567), whose popular Dialectica was published in 1545, the Frenchman Peter Ramus (d. 1572), whose influence in both England and Scotland was less than has been supposed, and the Oxford logician Robert Sanderson (d. 1662/3) whose Logicae artis compendium was reprinted as late as 1841.