Logic in the British Isles During the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Abstract

After two centuries of intense creativity of the terministic logic and of the calculatores in Oxford, which had a great success and impact all over Europe, and most of all in Italy, the philosophical culture in the British Isles underwent a period of severe crisis and decline, which lasted throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Schmitt has stated that ‘the picture that emerges from a consideration of the philosophical and scientific culture of England during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is one of a steady decline from the position held during the fourteenth century’, while Ashworth has concluded that ‘the intellectual life at Oxford and Cambridge in the fifteenth century was somewhat sluggish … there seems to be no record of any original writing on logical subjects until the mid-sixteenth century’.