Brepols Online Books Medieval Monographs Archive v2016 - bobar16mome

This critical edition is the first edition of John Buridan’s commentary on Aristotle’s Topics. The work is preserved in one complete manuscript of good quality and in four abbreviated versions. Buridan composed the work at the University of Paris in the first half of the fourteenth century, and the work illustrates very well how the commentators of this period took a freer attitude to Aristotle than previously and were selective about the passages which they commented upon. In book II Buridan discussed a number of sophisms which are not found in his collection of sophisms. The commentary was quite influential in the fifteenth century, particularly on the teaching in the universities of Central and Eastern Europe.

The present volume presents a new critical edition of Buridan’s Sophismata based on a collection of six manuscripts and an incunabulum. It forms part of an international project to edit the whole of John Buridan’s Summulae dialecticae, the most extensive version of which consists of nine treatises (tractatus). The treatise on sophisms is the ninth treatise of the Summulae dialecticae and deals with most of the major subjects discussed by the fourteenth century logicians (signification, supposition, appellation, truth-conditions, insolubles, etc.). Although it illustrates how some of the theorems of the preceding treatises may be put to use, it can not be considered a systematic practical companion to the preceding collection of theorems. It is nevertheless one of the most important pieces among Buridan’s works.