The latin tradition of logic to 1100

Abstract

Publisher Summary The chapter presents the Latin tradition of logic to 1100. When historians, using the medieval terminology, speak of the logica vetus the corpus of ancient logical works used by Latin scholars in the early Middle Ages—they sometimes take it in a narrow sense to mean just the three Greek logical texts, Porphyry's Isagoge, and Aristotle's Categories and On Interpretation, which were available in translation. From this perspective, it seems that the ancient Greek tradition of logic, though in a much-curtailed form, is behind the work of the early medieval logicians. But, by the eleventh century, the logical curriculum the logica vetus in a wider and more useful sense consisted of six works: the three ancient Greek texts, and three textbooks written early in the sixth-century by the Latin thinker, Boethius: treatises on categorical syllogisms, hypothetical syllogisms and on topical argument. Also attached to the curriculum, though more peripherally, was a work on definition attributed to Boethius but in fact by a Latin predecessor of his, Marius Victorinus, and Cicero's Topics, along with Boethius's commentary on it.