Late Scholastic Logics: Another Look
1971; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 9; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/hph.2008.1749
ISSN1538-4586
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Economic and Legal Thought
Resumo226 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY in Book II, but it serves to underscore the problem certain philosophers have had in treating relations within a framework of psychological atomism. DONALDF. HENZE San Fernando Valley State College LATE SCHOLASTIC LOGICS: ANOTHER LOOK A list of the significant secondary works in the field of late scholastic logic would scarcely fill the remainder of this page. I am referring to the logicians among those thinkers whom Giacon (1943) dubbed the "second scholastics," thus distinguishing them from the medieval or first scholastics and the modern or neoscholastics . The period has been called the Neuzeit, stretching roughly from the development of printing in Europe (ca. 1475) until 1800, earlier or later, depending on the geographical area considered. The standard histories of logic offer, for the most part, only gaps where a treatment of this material should have been. Prantl's classic work (1855-1870) devotes scarcely one hundred pages to the subject, his last entry being Johann Turmair who died in 1534.1 Bochenski (1956) reduces this to less than one paragraph , deciding as does Kneale (1962), to treat of other contemporaneous movements, such as the Renaissance Humanists. In the past few years, however, interest in second scholastic logic has been on the upswing. Giacon (1943) provided a limited bibliography for the period. Simon, Glanville and Hollenhorst (1955) furnished a translation of about three-fifths of the Ars Logica of one of the most important of the second scholastics, John of Saint Thomas. z It was not until the mid-sixties, however, that the importance of the logic of the second scholastics came to be fully appreciated by even a small circle of philosophical historiographers. 1964 marked the publication of Mufioz Delgado's book on nominalistic logic at the University of Salamanca from 1510-1530. This was also the year for the appearance of the first volume (1500-1640) of Risse's work on the history of logic in the Neuzeit. With the aid of these two works one could finally get a feel for the possibilities and subtleties of the period. Professor Angelelli has reminded me that not all of Prantl's work on Neuzeit logic is contained in his well known four volume history. Not only do many articles in the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (1875-1917) bear his name, but he left a considerable Nachlass as well. 2 Even Yves R. Simon, one of the translators of John of Saint Thomas, apparently failed to appreciate the larger aspects of the scholastic logic of the Neuzeit. In a statement which sounds very much like an apology for the remainder of the period, he makes the claim for his author that "contrary to popular belief, there still was, in this late phase of "decadent scholasticism', one man of genius among the so-called scholastics." (Simon, p. xix of his preface to the work cited. Italics mine.) NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS 227 The following year was even more important as it brought the publication of not one, but two important bibliographies in the field. Angelelli (1965) published an article on the importance of late Ibero-American scholasticism and provided a critical presentation of a portion of a rare nineteenth-century bibliography he had discovered (Rabus, 1868). In the same year, Risse published his scarcely believable Bibliographia Logica, listing an estimated eight thousand logical titles from the Neuzeit. Highly sophisticated critical studies of Neuzeit scholastic answers to perennial logical problems began to appear ( Angelelli, 1967) (Mufioz Delgado, 1966, 1967, 1968). II It now hardly seems necessary to demonstrate the importance of the Neuzeit scholastic logics: such a justification has been drawn in the most recent works cited. What remains to be done is, I think, twofold. Obviously there is a need for many critical examinations of the period from many different vantage points. But before this can be done, there must be a "reconstruction" of texts; even Risse's formidable work is far from comprehensive. Such a reconstruction may have several aspects. In Latin American libraries, for example, it may involve literally prospecting warehouse-like arrangements of what were at one time massive colonial libraries. And once these sources have been searched, significant bibliographical additions need to be made available...
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