Fifty said:
Plotinus: J.S. Mill stated that he thinks that studying scholastic logic is extremely rewarding. Have you studied it, and if so, would you agree, and if you agree, do you have any recommendations for a beginner (both primary and secondary literature on the subject)?
I haven't studied much of it, at least formally; it's more a matter of working it out from reading other scholastic stuff. I'm not sure what secondary literature would be best, but I can give you some pointers for the primary literature and basically suggest that you look at some of the secondary literature on these:
Medieval logic pretty much entirely took its cue from Aristotle, as you might expect; remember that Aristotle's logical works were never lost in the west, as his works on natural philosophy were, so they remained highly influential right through, even in the early Middle Ages. The works in question are those in the
Organon, namely
Categories,
On interpretation,
Prior analytics,
Posterior analytics,
Topics, and
On sophistical refutations. So if you want to understand the basic structure of scholastic logic you should look at those or some of the literature surrounding them. Stoic logic was also influential, but less so, and by the time it got to the scholastics it had been completely mixed up with Aristotelian logic.
The other key influences were Porphyry and, especially, Boethius, both of whom took their cue from Aristotle. Porphyry wrote an influential commentary on Aristotle's
Categories and also a work entitled
Isagoge, intended as an introduction to Aristotle's logic, which was extremely widely read in the Middle Ages (despite Porphyry's status as one of the leading anti-Christian polemicists of late antiquity...). In fact the
Isagoge served as the starting point for most of the medieval arguments about universals.
Boethius also wrote commentaries on Aristotle's logical works, in which he followed Porphyry quite closely. He wrote a commentary on the
Categories and another on
On interpretation, which is especially useful since Porphyry's own has been lost. And he also wrote two commentaries on Porphyry's
Isagoge, which would be widely read in conjunction with that work. And finally he wrote two independent treatises on logic,
On differentiae and
On hypothetical syllogisms, which like Porphyry's work are based on Aristotelian logic but consider problems associated with it.
One other source much read by the medievals was John of Damascus, who although a Byzantine author was popular throughout Christendom. The first part of his
Pege gnoseos, known as the
Dialectica, is an introduction to logic drawn from Aristotle and Porphyry as well as Athanasius and Cyril of Alexandria, which means that it's an effective synthesis of classical logic with theological terminology.
The medievals themselves didn't write very much on logic, since they used the texts of Aristotle himself as the key works on the subject and those of Porphyry and Boethius as introductions to it. Some of them wrote commentaries on these works; those of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas on Aristotle are obviously among the most important.
Of the medieval logicians, Peter Abelard is probably the most important. His main logical work is the
Logica, a series of commentaries on Aristotle, Porphyry, and Boethius. He also wrote another treatise on logic called
Dialectica. Another important medieval logical text is the
Summulae logicales of Peter of Spain, which was a fairly standard textbook for some centuries. Duns Scotus also wrote a series of
quaestiones on logic known as the
Parva logicalia.
However, the most important logical writings in late scholasticism are those of William of Ockham and John Buridan. Ockham wrote a
Summa logica, which again takes Aristotle and his commentators as its starting point. Buridan wrote a commentary on the whole of Aristotle's
Organan and also a
Summulae de dialectica, which is supposed to be a commentary on Peter of Spain's work but is actually ten times longer and much more original and important.
Finally, there's Francisco Suárez, but I'm not sure which part of his immense
Metaphysical disputations deals with logic specifically - I think it would be different sections scattered throughout the whole.
I must admit I haven't read most of these. But of the earlier figures, I think that John of Damascus is probably the best and easiest to read. His
Dialectica can be found in an edition of his works edited by Frederick Chase, part of the Fathers of the Church series from the Catholic University of America Press, but it's not available online as far as I can tell. I think that if you want a good introduction to late scholastic logic from a primary text, you would probably be best off trying Ockham. I think he is quite readable and very straightforward and direct, as well as being one of the most important of all of these characters on this subject. You can find a goodly part of Ockham's
Summa logica in English
here, together with a bunch of other interesting stuff. The article there on "Why don't medieval logicians ever tell us what they're doing?" gives a good overview of the whole topic as well as some of the problems it raises...
Ok, I'm getting a picture how the Judaism works today.
)
