Artistarium
Johannes Buridanus: Summulae: De locis dialecticis
De locis dialecticis is the sixth treatise of John Buridan’s Summulae dialecticae a textbook he wrote for his logic course in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Paris. De locis dialecticis immediately builds upon Peter of Spain but Buridan shows his awareness that the doctrine of the loci took its origin in Boethius’ De differentiis topicis and he frequently quotes from that work. Though not introducing any basically new ideas Buridan contributes a large number of precisions to the standard descriptions of the several loci and he shows that the list of the loci and the traditional division of it into three sections is not something given by nature but was established by earlier logicians as they found convenient. Accordingly such things can be changed if something better is found. Buridan has here given us perhaps the most precise and most interesting exposition of the doctrine of the loci in the medieval logical literature.
Johannes Buridanus: Summulae: De syllogismis
De syllogismis is the fifth treatise of John Buridan’s Summulae dialecticae a textbook he wrote for his logic course in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Paris. De syllogismis contains material related to Aristotle’s Analytica Priora and Boethius’s De hypotheticis syllogismis. The textbook discusses inferences involving not only propositions de inesse but also propositions featuring oblique reduplicative and infinite terms. Buridan displays a keen interest in modal inferences and inferences involving propositional attitudes. Buridan’s De syllogismis continues along the lines of his nominalist conception of the relations between mind language and reality.
Johannes Buridanus, Quaestiones topicorum
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.
Johannes Buridanus: Summulae: De propositionibus
John Buridan (ca. 1300-1361) was one of the most influential philosophers of his time. During his long career at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Paris he taught many logic courses for which he wrote a textbook entitled Summulae dialecticae. This work consists of nine treatises; the present volume contains the first critical edition of the Preface and the first treatise of the Summulae: De propositionibus. As the bearers of truth and falsity propositions are the primary concern of logic the art that serves as a general tool for reaching truth and avoiding falsity in any field of knowledge whether in contemplative or practical contexts. Most important is Buridan’s commitment to the semantic primacy of mental language and the treatment of written and spoken propositions as conventional signs which designate the primary bearers truth and falsity namely mental propositions. In De propositionibus Buridan develops his nominalist conception of the relations between mind language and reality which he goes on to employ in the subsequent treatises of the Summulae.
Johannes Buridanus: Summulae: De practica sophismatum
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.
