Catarina Dutilh Novaes on why we should dig into the cosmopolitan roots of logic

Novaes, Catarina Dutilh

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Logical GapsCatarina Dutilh Novaes on why we should dig into the cosmopolitan roots of logicUntil not that long ago (say, the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century), the very concept of ‘medievallogic’ would seem to many to be intrinsically incoherent: weren’t medieval authors onlypreoccupied with religious matters? If logic is the pinnacle of rationality, how can it be combinedwith something so inherently outside the scope of rationality like religious faith? Moreover, Kant’s(in)famous claim that nothing of importance had happened in logic since Aristotle seemed to justifya sweeping dismissal of everything in between.Nowadays, the trope of the ‘dark Middle Ages’ still has some grip, but much has happened inmedieval philosophy scholarship (especially since the 1950s) that has changed our overallconception of medieval philosophy, and of medieval logic in particular. Some of the scholars whoplayed a pivotal role in these developments were Ernest Moody, Philotheus Boehner, and JózefMaria Bocheński. Bocheński in particular (in his A History of Formal Logic, 1956) singled out themedieval period as one of the three golden eras for logic (along with the ancient Greek period andthe mathematical/formal period that started in the nineteenth century). The publication ofReference and Generality (1962) by the inﬂuential English philosopher Peter Geach furtherexposed the relevance of medieval logical theories for contemporary philosophical questions.(Geach was mostly wrong in his interpretation of the medieval theories, but he was right to seethem as relevant to current debates.) The logical writings of authors such as William of Ockham,Peter of Spain, William of Sherwood, and John Buridan, among others, received renewed interest,and in particular became the object of modern critical editions. (A critical edition is one where allknown manuscripts of a text are used/consulted.) Until then, most of these writings existed only inmanuscript form, or in unreliable editions from the Renaissance period. Thanks to the criticaleditions, these writings became accessible to a wider readership, and sustained scholarly work onthem could truly get started. These texts were originally written in Latin. In order to reach an evenwider readership, some were translated into English and other modern languages. (Note, though,that it is highly inadvisable to conduct scholarly research on this material using the translatedversions alone.)What were these theories about? Medieval logic, especially from the thirteenth century onwards(which is known as the great scholastic period), was very deeply inﬂuenced by Aristotle’s logicalwritings, and so medieval authors were interested in much of the same topics as Aristotle: thenature of predication, the semantics of sentences, syllogisms, inference, modalities, fallacies. Butmedieval authors also developed a host of theories that were distinctively their own, such astheories of the properties of terms, theories of consequence, and theories of disputation such asobligationes. These theories were known as ‘logica modernorum’, the logic of the moderns, inopposition to ‘logica vetus’ or old logic, a term used to refer to work drawing explicitly fromAristotle’s writings (a tradition that continued to thrive alongside logica modernorum).There remains, however, a fundamental ﬂaw in this way of approaching medieval work in logic,namely, an unjustiﬁable Eurocentrism. In the same period (in fact, starting before this golden ageof European scholasticism), a highly sophisticated logical tradition was being developed in theIslamic world, starting with the large translation efforts of Greek philosophical texts into Arabic inthe ninth century, sponsored by the Abbasid Caliphs. (The ‘Philosopher of the Arabs’, Al-Kindi wasa major ﬁgure in the translation movement.) From there on, a distinctive logical tradition emergedthat took ancient Greek logic, and Aristotelian logic in particular, as its main starting point, butwhich (as with the Latin tradition) developed in novel and surprising directions.  (Importantly,‘Arabic’ and ‘Latin’ logic is a linguistic classiﬁcation, as some work in the Arabic tradition was doneby non-Arabs such as the Persian Avicenna, or by non-Muslims such as some Jewish authors. Butit was invariably written in Arabic, while the Christian European intellectual tradition had medievalLatin as its ofﬁcial language.)Because the Latin tradition and the Arabic tradition stem from the same source—ancient Greeklogic—they can be described as sister traditions, and as such are fruitfully studied in tandem(though there are also important differences between them). Moreover, Arabic philosophy ingeneral and Arabic logic in particular exerted signiﬁcant inﬂuence on its Latin counterpart, thoughcommunication in the other direction seems to have been scarce.Systematic scholarly work on the Arabic logical tradition is a fairly recent phenomenon, though oneexception is the work of the philosopher Nicholas Rescher, who published a number of studies onArabic logic in the mid-twentieth century. While much work remains to be done, there has been asteady growth of interest in Arabic logic among historians of logic. The overall scholarly outputdoes not yet match, in terms of quantity, that of work on the Latin tradition; but with a growingnumber of researchers working on the Arabic tradition, our knowledge thereof increases by theday.Naturally, in the same period elsewhere in the world—in particular, in  India—lively intellectualtraditions ﬂourished, and some of these developments fall squarely within the remit of what we liketo call ‘logic’. So, technically, these can also be seen as falling under the heading ‘medieval logic’(though, of course, the very periodization that gives us the notion of the ‘Middle Ages’ isEurocentric). However, these traditions developed largely independently from the Latin and theArabic traditions, and moreover they do not share the common ancient Greek matrix.Why is this important? There has been much discussion recently on diversifying the philosophicalcanon along a number of dimensions, in particular, in terms of gender and race/ethnicity. For now,the traditional philosophical canon remains composed essentially of white, European (oftenChristian) male authors, and this is perceived as a problem by many, both because an awful lot ofgood philosophy is being left out, and because it is hypothesized that a non-diverse canonpropagates the idea that philosophy is a thing for ‘white men’, thus discouraging women andpeople of colour from becoming philosophers. Perhaps diversifying the canon in this way, so as toinclude neglected work by women such as the early-modern authors Margaret Cavendish, AnneConway, and Émilie Du Châtelet, and philosophical work outside of the Christian Europeantradition, such as in the Chinese, Indian, and African traditions, will have the effect of attracting tothe benches of philosophy demographic groups beyond white men.Monday, 9 January 2017Share This Story, Choose Your Platform!Related PostsAt any rate, it is clear that there is a colossal amount of interesting and important philosophicalwork that is traditionally ignored by the canon, and it is everyone’s loss that we have not paidenough attention to this rich material thus far. Moreover, in certain cases, understanding the exactdetails of European philosophical traditions requires familiarity with other traditions, given theamount of cross-pollination that has occurred, particularly in the case of medieval Latin and Arabicphilosophy.And thus, motivated by these historical, intellectual, and moral considerations (the neglect ofvoices other than white male voices in ‘traditional’ philosophical historiography), when we werecommissioned to edit the Cambridge Companion to Medieval Logic, my co-editor Stephen Read(University of St. Andrews) and I were adamant that we should include as much on the medievalArabic tradition as we could. Again, purely historical considerations already make this a ratherobvious choice, given that the two traditions are closely related in a number of ways. But for me atleast, it was also a matter of intellectual justice, of recognizing and bringing to the fore thebrilliance of medieval Arabic logic, alongside the more widely recognized sophistication of the Latintradition. The result of our efforts came out a few months ago, and while it is still somewhatskewed towards the Latin tradition (both as a result of the more mature state of scholarship on thistradition, and the fact that the two editors’ background is on Latin rather than Arabic logic), we feelwe have made progress in the right direction.As noted by the late philosopher and Indologist Frits Staal, ‘pre-modern, that is, ancient andmedieval science can only be adequately understood if the Eurasian continent is treated as anundivided unit’. He rejected the idea of ‘separate and impermeable cognitive worlds that areisolated from each other’, and instead defended a model of regular cross-pollination andtransmissions among Chinese, Indian, Arab, European-Christian, and many other intellectualtraditions. It is time that we recognize the cogency of this model for the history of philosophy too,and start exploring more systematically the connections between these traditions. Studying Latinand Arabic medieval logical theories in tandem is but a ﬁrst step in this direction, which we haveattempted to achieve with The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Logic.Catarina Dutilh Novaes is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy and Rosalind Franklin Fellow andthe University of Groningen. This essay is based on her recent book co-edited with Stephen Read,The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Logic (Oxford University Press, 2016). Her researchfocuses on logic and reasoning, and the historical developments of both.Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

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