The relations between different areas of knowledge have been a subject of interest to philosophers as well as to scientists and mathematicians from antiquity. While recent work in this direction has been largely concerned with the question whether one branch of knowledge can be reduced to another , the questions which exercised the Greek philosophers on these matters have a different starting point. Taking for granted that there are a number of distinct areas of knowledge, they proceeded to consider a (...) variety of relations which they observed to hold among the sciences as they knew them; the question of the priority of one science to another is a recurrent theme. In fact, three sorts of orderings were noticed, and the associated conceptions of priority are interesting. Only one of them is the concern of the present paper, though, and I shall briefly describe the remaining two only for purposes of contrast. (shrink)

The change of medieval philosophy, known to have taken place in the 14th century, is accompanied by a new and extensive application of terminist logic and by a growing importance of the university of Oxford. This essay asks the question whether this development can be explained as a development of a specific English tradition within medieval logic. In the first part of the paper it is briefly shown that a certain discontinuity can be observed in the most important continental intellectual (...) centers; the 'sociological' conditions which make possible such distinct local traditions within the general development of medieval scholasticism are considered shortly. The second and larger part of the paper is a census of the English contribution to logic before Ockham, ordered according to the various literary genres: Summulae, Syncategoremata/sophismata, Grammar, Commentaries on the Organon. This census tends to prove that terminist logic had a continuous tradition in Oxford, a fact which may account for the preponderance of Oxford logic in the early 14th century. (shrink)

Roger Bacon has often been victimized by his friends, who have exaggerated and distorted his place in the history of mathematics. He has too often been viewed as the first, or one of the first, to grasp the possibilities and promote the cause of modern mathematical physics. Even those who have noticed that Bacon was more given to the praise than to the practice of mathematics have seen in his programmatic statements an anticipation of seventeenth-century achievements. But if we judge (...) Bacon by twentieth-century criteria and pronounce him an anticipator of modern science, we will fail totally to understand his true contributions; for Bacon was not looking to the future, but responding to the past; he was grappling with ancient traditions and attempting to apply the truth thus gained to the needs of thirteenth-century Christendom. If we wish to understand Bacon, therefore, we must take a backward, rather than a forward, look; we must view him in relation to his predecessors and contemporaries rather than his successors; we must consider not his influence, but his sources and the use to which he put them. (shrink)