Richard Kilvington Research Articles

Richard Kilvington on the Capacity of Created Beings, Infinity, and Being Simultaneously in Rome and Paris. Critical Edition of Question 3 from Quaestiones super libros Sententiarum , by Monika Michałowska

Richard Kilvington on the Capacity of Created Beings, Infinity, and Being Simultaneously in Rome and Paris. Critical Edition of Question 3 from Quaestiones super libros Sententiarum , by Monika Michałowska

Ryszarda Kilvingtona Kwestie do Etyki – nowe argumenty i procedury badawcze w czternastowiecznym dyskursie etycznym

Richard Kilvington was the only Oxford Calculator who wrote a commentary on Aristotelian Nicomachean Ethics. Composed in 1332 Questions on the Ethics are an extraordinary commentary for several reasons. First, against a well-established tradition of ethical commentaries, Kilvington does not comment on all the books of Nicomachean Ethics. Nor does he refer to all the most important issues debated by Aristotle. Secondly, the analyses of the problems chosen for treatment vary in length, which means that some issues are debated meticulously, others deserve less attention. Finally, Kilvington uses arguments and methods taken from the fields of logic and natural philosophy in a way and scale unprecedented for ethical commentaries. It allows him to take an original and unique perspective in analyzing ethical issues. In the article I point out the structure of the text and the characteristic scheme of a question of Questions of the Ethics. Then, I describe the specificity of the arguments used in the text. Finally, I analyze the methods employed by Kilvington in debating ethical problems, namely the calculus of compounding ratios, secundum imaginationem procedure, and simpliciter/secundum quid tool, showing how they served analyzing ethical dilemmas.

Tu scis regem sedere (Kilvington, S47 [48])

This work examines Richard Kilvington's Sophisma 47, in the context of the Doctrine of Obligations. Its aim is to revise the thesis of P. V. Spade, who attributes to Kilvington an intermediate position between Burley and Swyneshed, and interprets the Doctrine of Obligations in general as a Theory of Counterfactuals.

Richard Kilvington and the Theory of Obligations

Kretzmann and Spade were led by Richard Kilvington’s proposed revisions to the rules of obligations in his discussion of the 47th sophism in his Sophismata to claim that the purpose of obligational disputations was the same as that of counterfactual reasoning. Angel d’Ors challenged this interpretation, realising that the reason for Kilvington’s revision was precisely that he found the art of obligation unsuited to the kind of reasoning that lay at the heart of the sophismatic argument. In his criticism, Kilvington focused on a technique used by Walter Burley to force a respondent to grant an arbitrary falsehood and similar to Lewis and Langford’s famous defence of ex impossibili quodlibet. Kilvington observed that just as in obligational disputation one may be obliged to grant a false proposition and deny a true one, so in counterfactual reasoning one may be obliged to doubt a proposition whose truth or falsity one knows, on pain of contradiction.

Obligations and Conditionals

The paper considers two kinds of medieval obligational disputations (positio, rei veritas) and the medieval genre of sophismata in relation to the kinds of inferences accepted in them. The main texts discussed are the anonymous Obligationes parisienses from the early 13th century and Richard Kilvington’s Sophismata from the early 14th century. Four different kinds of warranted transition from an antecedent to a consequent become apparent in the medieval discussions: (1) the strong logical validity of basic propositional logic, (2) analytic validity based on conceptual containment, (3) merely semantic impossibility of the antecedent being true without the consequent, and (4) intuitively true counterfactual conditionals. As these different kinds of consequences are spelled out by means of obligational disputations, it appears that the genre of obligations is indeed useful for the “knowledge of consequences,” as the anonymous Obligationes parisienses claims.

Sit Verum Obligationes and Counterfactual Reasoning

In the early 1980s, Paul V. Spade advanced the thesis that obligational reasoning was counterfactual reasoning, based upon his interpretation of the obligationes of Walter Burley, Richard Kilvington, and Roger Swyneshed. Eleonore Stump in a series of contemporary papers argued against Spade’s thesis with respect to Burley and Swyneshed, provisionally admitting it for Kilvington with the caveat that Kilvington’s theory is by no means clear or non-idiosyncratic. In this paper, we revisit the connection between counterfactual reasoning and obligationes, focusing on one particular treatise, the anonymous early twelfth-century Obligationes Parisienses edited by L.M. de Rijk in the late 70s. We show that while positio in this treatise does not involve counterfactual reasoning, the species sit verum or rei veritas apparently does, and it is precisely this which distinguishes the two species in this treatise.

Richard Kilvington’s Quaestiones super libros Ethicorum

The importance of Richard Kilvington’s thought has already been brought to light by historians of science and philosophy. His ethical and theological views, however, still await analysis. This edition of one of Kilvington’s ethical questions, “Utrum prudentia sit habitus cum recta ratione activus circa hominis bona et mala,” is intended to be a first step in reviving Kilvington’s ethical and theological writings. The question testifies to the uniqueness of Kilvington’s methods of argumentation, which can best be described as ‘argumentative sophistication’, and to the originality of his philosophical concepts.

On a Sophisma of Richard Kilvington and a Problem of Analysis

On a Sophisma of Richard Kilvington and a Problem of Analysis

New Light on Medieval Philosophy: The Sophismata of Richard Kilvington

The fourteenth-century English philosopher and theologian Richard Kilvington (1302/5–61) presents a useful correction to popular views of medieval philosophy in two ways. On the one hand, he reminds us that to think of medieval philosophy in terms of Aquinas, Duns Scotus and Ockham, or to think of medieval logic in terms of Aristotelian syllogistic, is to overlook vast areas of intellectual endeavour. Kilvington, like many before and after him, was deeply concerned with problems that would now be assigned to philosophy of language; philosophical logic and philosophy of science. He discussed topics in epistemic logic, semantic paradoxes, problems of reference, particularly those connected with the interplay between quantifiers and modal or temporal operators, and problems arising from the use of infinite series in the analysis of motion and change. On the other hand, this very account of his work raises the important issue of conceptual domain. I have spoken as if Kilvington's work can be neatly classified in terms of contemporary interests; and the temptation to read medieval philosophy in modern terms is only strengthened when one recognizes Kilvington as the first member of the group of Oxford calculatores, men such as William Heytesbury and Richard Swineshead, whose discussions of mathematics and physics have caused them to be hailed as forerunners of modern science.

The Sophismata of Richard Kilvington.

Journal Article Book Notes Get access The Sophismata of Richard Kilvington. Text Edition By Norman Kretzmann and Barbara Ensign Kretzmann. (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1990. Auctores Britannici Medii Aevi XII. Pp. xx + 156. Price £27.50.) S.L. R S.L. R Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 41, Issue 165, October 1991, Page 515, https://doi.org/10.2307/2220094 Published: 01 October 1991

Paraconsistent Logic: Essays on the Inconsistent.

Journal Article Book Notes Get access The Sophismata of Richard Kilvington. Text Edition By Norman Kretzmann and Barbara Ensign Kretzmann. (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1990. Auctores Britannici Medii Aevi XII. Pp. xx + 156. Price £27.50.) S.L.R. S.L.R. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 41, Issue 165, October 1991, Pages 515–516, https://doi.org/10.2307/2220095 Published: 01 October 1991

Philosophy and Science in the Middle Ages.

Journal Article Book Notes Get access Philosophy and Science in the Middle Ages, ed. G. Fleistad (J.J.H.); The Sophismata of Richard Kilvington, ed. Norman Kretzmann and Barbara Ensign Kretzmann (S.L.R.); Paraconsistent Logic: Essays on the Inconsistent, ed. Graham Priest, Richard Sylvan and Jean Norman (S.L.R.); Peter Geach: Philosophical Encounters, ed. Harry A. Lewis (J.J.H.); Miscellaneous Writings, John Stuart Mill (J.M.S.); Freedom, Tim Gray (L.G.G.); Freedom, Rights and Pornography, Fred R. Berger (L.G.G.); The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart, Noel Carroll (B.G.); Understanding War, W.B. Gallie (P.M.W.B.); The Problem of Evil, ed. Marilyn McCord Adams and Robert Merrihew Adams (P.M.W.B.) J. H J. H Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 41, Issue 165, October 1991, Pages 514–515, https://doi.org/10.2307/2220093 Published: 01 October 1991

The Sophismata of Richard Kilvington: introduction, translation, and commentary

Preface Introduction Translation Commentary Appendix Bibliography Index nominum Index rerum.

Propositional Attitudes in the Logic of Walter Burley and William Ockham

PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDES IN THE LOGIC OF WALTER BURLEY AND WILLIAM OCKHAM [1] While there is no separate treatise in either Burley or Ockham dealing with propositional attitudes, there are a considerable number ofpassages in the logical writings ofeach ofthe two authors which do in fact deal with propositional attitudes. As may be expected, many of these passages are found in the discussions of modal logic in general , while some appear in other contexts, in particular in those places in which the question of supposition of terms is raised, or in the context ofdiscussion of general inferential relations involving the so-called non-standard (i.e. epistemic and doxastic) modes, or in the theory of formal disputation. [2] By 'propositional attitude' I mean locutions such as 'a knows that p,' 'a believes that p,' 'a doubts that p,' and so on, and their counterparts in the passive voice, presumably equivalent in their logical force to those in the active voice; e.g., 'p is known,' 'p is believed,' 'p is doubted,' and so on. [3] These latter ways offorming such attitudinal claims are much more frequent in both Burley and Ockham than their counterparts in the active voice. Both authors, at least occasionally formulate such claims in an expanded form, e.g., 'p is known by you' or 'p is known by me,' and I shall understand this to be a sufficent indication that Burley and Ockham at least half-consciously assumed an epistemic subject , even though their tendency to use an impersonal passive mode may have prevented them from fully realizing the sui generis character of the epistemic/doxastic logic which they were in fact helping to develop. [4] The study of propositional attitudes constitutes what has be- 32IVAN ??? come known as epistemic or epistemic/doxastic logic.1 In order to be logic, such an enterprise must consider relations among propositions such as compatibility or consistency, inconsistency, implication or entailment , and the like; in order for it to be epistemic/doxastic logic, such an enterprise must consider the logical relations precisely as these are present in virtue of propositional-attitude-functors such as 'is known by a,' 'is believed by a,' etc. [5] Although nowadays epistemic/doxastic logics are sometimes presented as deductive calculi, the late-medievals (as well as the rediscoverers of the discipline in our own century, e.g., J. Hintikka, R. Chisholm and a great many philosophers of recent decades), thought of this enterprise primarily as a critical examination of our ordinary, natural-language uses.2 Thus, if there are cases of natural uses wherein we seem to allow locutions such as 'p, but I don't believe it,' we have to take such cases seriously and then decide whether our current statements of necessary and sufficient condition for knowledge should continue to include the claim that if I know that p, then I must believe that p. [6] The full-fledged developments of epistemic logic seem to have taken place in England during the second quarter of the fourteenth century. As far as we know at this stage of research, the leaders in those development appear to have been William Heytesbury (d.1372/3) [and other Oxford Fellows Richard Kilvington (d. 1361), John Dumbleton (fl. 1340s), Richard Swineshead (fl.1340-55), Ralph Strode (d.1387)] and the distinguished "followers" of the English tradition in 1 In our own century, epistemic/doxastic logic was rediscovered and systematically investigated by Jaakko Hintikka in his Knowledge and Belief (Ithaca &t London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1962). Within the framework of this logic, an especially influential article was that by Edmund L.Gettier, "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" Analysis, 23 (1963): 121-23. 2 Cf. Wolfgang Lenzen, Recent Work in Epistemic Logic, Acta Philosophica Fennica, vol. 30, issue 1 (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Co., 1978). In this comprehensive study Professor Lenzen examines many arguments the structure and components of which amply illustrate the reliance of the proponents on our natural language uses. For medievals, the Latin language was of course not natural in exactly the same sense, but even though it was a learnt "scientific" language, it was not an artificial language in the sense in which our schematic and axiomatic languages...

Three theories ofobligationes:burley, kilvington and swyneshed on counterfactual reasoning

This paper defends the thesis that the mediaeval genre of logical treatises De obligatiombus contained a theoretical account of counterfacutal reasoning, perhaps the first such account in the history of philosophy. This interpretation helps to explain some of the theoretical disputes in the obligationes literature in the first half of the fourteenth century. Section 1 is introductory. Section 2 presents Walter Burley's theory, while section 3 argues for the counterfactual interpretation of obligationes and section 4 discusses difficulties with Burley's theory. Section 5 presents the textual basis for Richard Kilvington's theory, and section 6 outlines that theory. Section 7 discusses Roger Swyneshed's theory. Section 8 contains a summary and conclusion.