Abstract

There is little doubt that conceptions and developments in late medieval logic affected much of the content of fourteenth-century philosophy. But logic's mark is even more apparent and prevalent in the attitudes and approaches fourteenth-century philosophers assumed in systematizing doctrines and solv ing problems. These were the attitudes and approaches that were later to form a substantial part of what so disturbed certain fifteenth-century literary humanists. Although we now know that these humanists did not have a proper appreciation of what they criticized, their impatience with the sofismi and sottigliezze of the remotissimi and barban Britanni did have some basis in the very major role that logic and considerations of language actually did play in fourteenth-century philosophy, science, and even theology, especially when these enterprises were English or under the spell of English influence.1 Yet these fifteenth-century critics did not realize that in the earlier part of' the fourteenth century it made sense (historical as well as philosophical sense) for those particular intellectual elements to play the important role that they did.

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