Logic, Renaissance

Abstract

The European Renaissance inherited a long tradition of logical thought from the ancient and medieval world. The basis of logic was Aristotle, the few works available particularly in Boethius’ translations, which formed the corpus of the Logica Vetus, along with a range of ancient and late antique commentaries and encyclopedic works, most importantly Porphyry’s commentary on the Categories, Cassiodorus’ Institutiones, Galen’s Institutio Logica, and the works of Isidore of Seville and Martianus Capella. Medieval scholastic logic continued this tradition and also expanded on it, especially when, in the thirteenth century, more Aristotelian logical texts became available in Latin translation, including the Prior and Posterior Analytics, forming the corpus of the Logica Nova. A particular focus, which was important for the Renaissance, was the interaction of logic with grammar, in the works of Anselm and Abelard, as well as the development of Logica Modernorum, terministic logic, concerning the denotation of logical terms. In another direction, the thirteenth-century Catalan philosopher Ramon Llull created his own combinatory art as part of a Christian apologetic mission.

The Renaissance both continued and reacted against these trends. Humanists such as Lorenzo Valla, Rudolph Agricola, and Peter Ramus denounced scholastic logic as arid and ineffective and proposed a new focus on a rhetoric capable of convincing an interlocutor. This encouraged also to the rise of logic written in the vernacular. At the same time, the development of empirical science led to new questions about the relationship of logic, mathematic, and the natural world, particularly in the texts of Alessandro Piccolomini and Jacopo Zabarella. These developments would reach a climax in the logical investigation behind Galileo Galilei’s and Francis Bacon’s works, who both attempted to move beyond Aristotelian logic toward a new inductive and empirical science. Finally, René Descartes’ philosophical meditations also presented a new method for logic, which was then developed in Port Royale Logic and which opened the way to a new mathematical and analytical understanding of logic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.