Visual Thinking in Logic Notebooks and Alba amicorum

Abstract

This chapter turns to the notebooks of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century students of logic in Paris and Leuven to demonstrate further the ways in which visual representations, including diagrams of the Porphyrian tree and the square of opposition, along with allegorical and figurative illustrations, were critical in the teaching and development of Aristotelian scholastic philosophy. It shows that lecture notebooks, as well as contemporaneous alba amicorum, incorporate visual materials as a mode of philosophical thought in itself. The visual representations of lecture notebooks and friendship albums are discussed in the same chapter as both these bound manuscript sources functioned as a locus in which students could manipulate visual materials to reflect on philosophical questions in their own voices and with a certain amount of freedom. Furthermore, it shows the iconographic overlaps among the prints and drawings found in these sources.