Possibility And Necessity In The Time Of Peter Abelard

This book offers a major reassessment of Abelard’s modal logic and theory of modalities, and provides a comprehensive study of the 12th-century context in which his views originated and developed, by analysing many logical sources that are still unedited and mostly unexplored.

The first book-length study to address issues in modal logic at the eve of the Renaissance, this monograph provides important new insights into the way the debates on modal logic during the post-medieval period tied in with the so-called Wegestreit, the divide between the via antiqua and via moderna that dominated the discourse on logic during the 15th and early 16th centuries. The focus of the book is on the logic and philosophy of language of John Fabri of Valenciennes (fl. c. 1500), one of the last exponents of the terminist approach to logic that was bitterly criticized by the humanist movement. By means of a careful reconstruction of Fabri’s text, the book argues that Fabri's modal logic ultimately goes back to the work of John Buridan, and represents the same approach to the topic as the modal logics that were developed by adherents of the via moderna in Paris. This has significant implications for the historiography of post-medieval philosophy. Fabri was active in Louvain, which until the late 16th century was the most important intellectual center in the Low Countries. According to a long-standing tradition in the scholarship, Louvain was one of the few bulwarks of via antiqua logic on the map of post-medieval Europe. The book argues that this thesis is at least in part a scholarly fiction, and thus in need of revision. By shedding light on an author whose thought has thus far remained entirely unstudied, it also constitutes a valuable step towards a history of philosophy without any gaps. The book is aimed at graduate students and researchers in the history of logic and philosophy, but will also be of interest to intellectual historians, historians of ideas, and to any contemporary modal logician who is interested in the historical roots of their discipline.

Introduces readers to the history of necessity and possibility, two modal concepts which play a key role in philosophy.

This book offers a major reassessment of the philosophy of Peter Abelard (1079-1142) which shows that he was a far more constructive and wider-ranging thinker than has usually been supposed. It combines detailed historical discussion, based on published and manuscript sources, with philosophical analysis which aims to make clear Abelard's central arguments about the nature of things, language and the mind, and about morality. Although the book concentrates on these philosophical questions, it places them within their theological and wider intellectual context.

This volume evaluates Thomas Bradwardine's view of time as a mathematical, philosophical and theological concept within the context of ancient and medieval discussions of the problem of time. The book begins with an historiographical analysis of Bradwardine's mathematical and theological works, followed by an examination of the problem of time in classical, early medieval and thirteenth-century texts. Next, a series of chapters surveys Bradwardine's view of time as it related to proportionality, contingency, continuity and predestination. A final chapter establishes Bradwardine's place among fourteenth-century natural philosophers and theologians. As it uses a wide range of Bradwardine's writings, this book is able to show how Bradwardine's philosophical and theological views converged. This study is especially useful for historians of late medieval science, philosophy and theology.

The first general study of Peter Lombard (c. 1100-1160) in a century, this book places Peter's thought in the context of the intellectual debates of his time in the effort to understand the substance of Lombardian theology and the reasons why his principal work, the Sentences , immediately became a classic of early scholastic theology with a durable influence, doing more to shape the education of university theologians and philosophers than any other work of systematic theology for the next four centuries. Attention is paid to the sentence collection as a genre of theological literature, the problem of theological language with which Peter and his contemporaries wrestled, and his contribution to early scholastic biblical exegesis as well as to the development of his systematic theology in the Sentences .

Starting at the very beginning with Aristotle's founding contributions, logic has been graced by several periods in which the subject has flourished, attaining standards of rigour and conceptual sophistication underpinning a large and deserved reputation as a leading expression of human intellectual effort. It is widely recognized that the period from the mid-19th century until the three-quarter mark of the century just past marked one of these golden ages, a period of explosive creativity and transforming insights. It has been said that ignorance of our history is a kind of amnesia, concerning which it is wise to note that amnesia is an illness. It would be a matter for regret, if we lost contact with another of logic's golden ages, one that greatly exceeds in reach that enjoyed by mathematical symbolic logic. This is the period between the 11th and 16th centuries, loosely conceived of as the Middle Ages. The logic of this period does not have the expressive virtues afforded by the symbolic resources of uninterpreted calculi, but mediaeval logic rivals in range, originality and intellectual robustness a good deal of the modern record. The range of logic in this period is striking, extending from investigation of quantifiers and logic consequence to inquiries into logical truth; from theories of reference to accounts of identity; from work on the modalities to the stirrings of the logic of relations, from theories of meaning to analyses of the paradoxes, and more. While the scope of mediaeval logic is impressive, of greater importance is that nearly all of it can be read by the modern logician with at least some prospect of profit. The last thing that mediaeval logic is, is a museum piece. Mediaeval and Renaissance Logic is an indispensable research tool for anyone interested in the development of logic, including researchers, graduate and senior undergraduate students in logic, history of logic, mathematics, history of mathematics, computer science and AI, linguistics, cognitive science, argumentation theory, philosophy, and the history of ideas. - Provides detailed and comprehensive chapters covering the entire range of modal logic - Contains the latest scholarly discoveries and interpretative insights that answer many questions in the field of logic