Logic in the British Isles During the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
After two centuries of intense creativity of the terministic logic and of the calculatores in Oxford, which had a great success and impact all over Europe, and most of all in Italy, the philosophical culture in the British Isles underwent a period of seve
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Logic in the British Isles During the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
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From Scholastic Logic to Humanist Logic
After two centuries of intense creativity of the terministic logic and of the calculatores in Oxford,1 which had a great success and impact all over Europe, and most of all in Italy,2 the philosophical culture in the British Isles underwent a period of severe crisis and decline, which lasted throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Schmitt has stated that ‘the picture that emerges from a consideration of the philosophical and scientific culture of England during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is one of a steady decline from the position held during the fourteenth century’,3 while Ashworth has concluded that ‘the intellectual life at Oxford and Cambridge in the fifteenth century was somewhat sluggish … there seems to be no record of any original writing on logical subjects until the mid-sixteenth century’.4 In this period three kinds of logical works were circulating: commentaries on the Aristotelian Organon, works that deal directly with Aristotelian logic, and logical textbooks for the universities.5 In particular, in the British Isles, there were two
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Cf. E. Jennifer Ashworth, Language and Logic in the Post-Medieval Period (Boston-Dordrecht, 1974), 1–25; Edith D. Sylla, ‘The Oxford Calculators’, in Nicolas Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny and Jan Pinborg (eds.), The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge, 1982), 540–563; E. Jennifer Ashworth, ‘The Eclipse of Medieval Logic’, in Nicolas Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny and Jan Pinborg (eds.), The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, 787–796. 2 Cf. Eugenio Garin, ‘La cultura fiorentina nella seconda metà del ‘300 e i barbari britanni’, La Rassegna della Letteratura Italiana, 64 (1960), 181–195; Cesare Vasoli, ‘Per una ricognizione delle fonti della scienza in Italia. Scritti di logica e metodologia e letteratura magico-astrologica nei secoli XIV–XVI’, in Carlo Maccagni (ed.), Atti del I Convegno internazionale di ricognizione delle fonti della scienza italiana nei secoli XIV–XVI (Florence, 1967), 31–105. 3 Schmitt, John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance England, 25. 4 Ashworth, ‘Introduction’, XXIII. 5 Cf. Ibid. XVII. M. Sgarbi, The Aristotelian Tradition and the Rise of British Empiricism, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 32, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-4951-1_2, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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2 Logic in the British Isles During the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
collections of texts which were particularly widespread, and whose fortunes have been reconstructed by Lambertus M. de Rijk6: the Libellus sophistarum ad usum cantabrigiensium and the Libellus sophistarum ad usum oxoniensium.7 A brief glance at the treatises in these collections shows unequivocally the impact of medieval Scholastic logic.8 These collections had a wide dissemination during the fifteenth century and, as McConica has shown, they survived, especially in Oxford, at least until the late 1570s.9 In
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