Logica parva (review)

Abstract

554 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 24:4 OCTOBER ~986 use their classical learning in espousing the new teachings. '~ And just beginning is the consideration of why late Roman and Byzantine dvilizadon is anything but the fossilized millennium so eloquently portrayed by Gibbon. '~ Press's Idea of Histo~ presents a dull, pedantic civilization which seems to have been bored by its own arguments. The texts show a lively and continually adaptive debate, replete with the wobbly opinions and quirks of human beings constantly seeking security in an uncertain world, t2 Press would have greatly benefitted from the work of Sorabji, Is who has forced us again to think about the essentials of time and space, and about how Aristotle formulated a long-influential concept of necessity . Press, however, apparently has not read much in the modern literature since about t965. JOHN SCARBOROUGH University of Wisconsin Paulus Venetus, Log/ca parva. Translated by Alan R. Perreiah. Munich: Philosophia Verlag, 1984; Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1984. PP. 37 ~. $59.95, cloth. Paul of Venice, the Augustinian friar who brought the Oxford logic to Italy at the end of the fourteenth century, was most famous in the late medieval and renaissance periods for his Log/caparva. The text is found in more than 8o manuscripts and went through more than two dozen editions. As an introduction, it deserved to be in such demand; it provides a wonderful unified overview of all the areas of late medieval logic. In a parallel way the translator's 118 page introduction also offers an invaluable overview, not only of this work, but also of today's state of scholarship regarding medieval logic in general. 2o V/d. e.g., E. H. Blakeney, ed., trans., and comm., F/a/an/Laaara//Ep/~/~taionura d/v/nature (London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 195o); R. M. O|gilvie, The Libra] of Lactantius (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978); Ernest Evans, ed., trans., comm., Tertullian's Treatise on the Resurrection (London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 196o); and J. H. Waszink, ed. and comm., Quinli septimi Florentis Tertul2ian/:De an/ma (Amsterdam: North-Holland Pub. Co., 1947). 21 E.g. Alexander Kazhdan, in collab. Simon Franklin, Studies on Byzantine Litercaureof the E/eventh and Twe/fthCentur/es (Cambridge: University Press, 1984), and John Scarborough, ed., Symposium on Byzantine Medicine, Dumb~zm Oaks Papers, 38 (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1984). zz One can do no better than cite the ~d century hypochondriac, Aelius Aristides. C. A. Behr, introd, and trans., Adius Aristides and the Sacred Tales (Amsterdam: A. M. Hakkert, 1968). E. R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (Cambridge: University Press, 1965), 39-45' John Scarborough, Roman Medicine (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969; rpt. x976), 1o5-to7. z3 Richard Sorabji, Time, Creationand the Continuu~ (London: Duckworth, 1983) and Necessity , Cause, and Blame: Pe~pechve~on ArtiCle's Theo~ (London: Duckworth, 198o). BOOK REVIEWS 555 The present translation is based on the 1472 Venice edition of the text. This Venice edition was reprinted in 197o by Georg Olms Verlag from a Paris Biblioth~que Nat/ona/e copy which contains a number of penned-in corrections, some suggested deletions and a few illegible logical tables. Perreiah has attempted to get over the hurdles presented by these conditions by consulting the 1492 and 1565 editions as well as the earliest dated (14~ 1) manuscript. Although I would question his claim (12) that "the correspondence between the 14Ol manuscript and the 1472 edition is in fact so close that the later appears to have been copied from the former," (there are, on the average, ten variants in the 14Ol manuscript for each page of the 197o reprint), still I think his use of this manuscript and the two other editions has given him a solid, although not a critical, text for his translation. In genera1, the translation is both accurate and readable. Perreiah has organized and divided the work in a way that brings out the clarity and integration so characteristic of Paulus Venetus's original plan. The layout of the translation is far superior to the Venice 1472 Latin edition...