Logic in Seventeenth-Century Scottish Academic Philosophy

Abstract

For a seventeenth-century Scottish regent, logic was preliminary to all other disciplines and secondary only to Latin. Logic was the trait-d’union between natural language (Latin, grammar, classical literature, the Bible) and the technical philosophical jargon. Logic was also important for theology and apologetics. Until the 1650s, logic is scholastic, centred on the trivium of logic, rhetoric, and grammar. The influence of Humanism, especially Ramism, is visible in the importance of induction, the treatment of method as a branch of logic, the orientation of logic towards practical tasks. Later in the century, alongside Aristotle, the key figures are René Descartes and Francis Bacon. The ‘old’ Aristotelian logic is made compatible with the ‘new’ method for the acquisition of new truths developed from Cartesian and Baconian insights. The reception of Descartes and Bacon has a common root in scholastic empiricism.