This book traces the development of formal logic from its origins inancient Greece to the present day. The authors first discuss the work oflogicians from Aristotle to Frege, showing how they were influenced by thephilosophical or mathematical ideas of their time. They then examinedevelopments in the present century.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In this article, we discuss the notion of merely confused supposition as it arose in the medieval theory of suppositio personalis. The context of our analysis is our formalization of William of Ockham's theory of supposition sketched in Mind 86 (1977), 109-13. The present paper is, however, self-contained, although we assume a basic acquaintance with supposition theory. The detailed aims of the paper are: to look at the tasks that supposition theory took on itself and to use our formalization to (...) relate them to more modern ideas; to explain the notion of merely confused supposition and to defend it against certain criticisms; and to discuss two issues closely related to the idea of merely confused supposition which we could not broach in a shorter article: the mode of supposition of terms in intensional contexts, and the possible existence of a fourth mode, often called suppositio copulatim. (shrink)

The complexity of the scholastic view of descent stems from the attempt to find a reply to three different questions at the same time: those pertaining to the meaning of propositions, the relationships of inference between propositions, and the truth conditions of propositions. From each of these issues there arises a different sequence of developments to this doctrine, each of which has its own problems and solutions. Initially, the concept of descent is introduced in response to the problem of determining (...) the meaning of quantified propositions. This is the first axis of the development of the doctrine of descent, according to which descent consists of the construction of individual propositions which make explicit the meaning of the quantified proposition. The appearance of these new propositions, however, gives rise to the second axis in the development of the doctrine of descent. As soon as we have this multiplicity of singular propositions, it is possible to forget where they came from and how, simply considering the problem of their logical relationship with the original quantified proposition. This is how descent comes to be viewed not as an analysis of the meaning of the proposition, but as a relationship of consequence: that which could be established between a quantified proposition and a set of singular propositions. Lastly, when descent is considered as a relationship of consequence, it is possible to develop this doctrine in a third direction, given that this relationship between a quantified proposition and a set of singular propositions can be used as a means of showing the truth or falsehood of the quantified proposition. Pardo’s text is a good example of the problems which the concept of descent inevitably encounters when it is approached from three points of view which are superimposed upon each other without regard for their radical diversity. (shrink)

v. 1. On the twelfth century theories of fallacy.--v. 2. The origin and early development of the theory of supposition.

Peter Geach describes the 'doctrine of distribution' as the view that a term is distributed if it refers to everything that it denotes, and undistributed if it refers to only some of the things that it denotes. He argues that the notion, so explained, is incoherent. He claims that the doctrine of distribution originates from a degenerate use of the notion of ?distributive supposition? in medieval supposition theory sometime in the 16th century. This paper proposes instead that the doctrine of (...) distribution occurs at least as early as the 12th century, and that it originates from a study of Aristotle's notion of a term's being ?taken universally?, and not from the much later theory of distributive supposition. A detailed version of the doctrine found in the Port Royal Logic is articulated, and compared with a slightly different modern version. Finally, Geach's arguments for the incoherence of the doctrine are discussed and rejected. (shrink)

"On Reduplication is a study of the logical properties of reduplicative propositions, that is, of propositions having qualifications, like 'Christ "qua God is a ...

PART ONE ELEMENTS OF SCHOLASTIC LOGIC I THE LEGACY OF SCHOLASTIC LOGIC "\ T 7E MAY safely describe the initial scholastic contri- VV bution to logical ...

(Appeared in: J. Bernard-J. Kelemen: Zeichen, Denken, Praxis , Institut fur Sozio-Semiotische Studien: Vienna, 1990, pp. 249-267. To print the published version, click here.).