Organiser: Stephen Read
Semester 1: meeting each Monday from 10 October 2011 at 2.30 till 4 pm in Edgecliffe room 109.
John Buridan, Treatise on Consequences, Book IV: Syllogisms between Modal Propositions. For details, see below under 2008-9 and 2009-10.
Semester 1: Albert of Saxony, 'Twenty-five Disputed Questions on Logic'. English translation by Michael Fitzgerald, published in 2010 by Peeters. (Fitzgerald published the Latin text with Brill in 2002.) We will concentrate on Questions 12-19, on the theory of supposition.
Semester 2: William Heytesbury, 'Treatise on the compounded and divided senses' and 'Rules for solving sophisms' (the first two parts on 'Insolubles' and 'Knowledge and doubt'). They are all available in English translation. The 'Treatise on the compounded and divided senses' and 'Knowledge and doubt' are in The Cambridge Translations of Medieval Philosophical Texts, ed. N. Kretzmann and E. Stump (CUP 1988), pp. 413-72, and the 'Insolubles' are available in an English translation by Paul Spade (out of print, but in the University Library at BC21.I64H4S7). The Latin text is available online.
Second term: we have now completed our reading of William Ockham, Predestination, God's Foreknowledge, and Future Contingents, translated by M.M. Adams and N. Kretzmann (second edition: Hackett 1983). The Latin text was edited by P. Boehner in The Tractatus de Praedestinatione et de Praiscientia Dei et de Futuris Contingentibus of William Ockham (Franciscan Institute 1945), along with a commentary and other texts. As background reading, look at (my translation of) Richard Lavenham's very short Treatise on Future Contingents, and at Norman Kretzmann's translation of (part of) Thomas Bradwardine's treatise “On Future Contingents” (probably drawn from his Sentences Commentary, written in the 1330s, which appears to be lost). You could also look at the Stanford Encyclopedia article on “Future Contingents”, or at Calvin Normore's article on “Future Contingents” in the Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy, pp. 358-81 .
First term: we have now completed reading Buridan's Treatise on Consequences in my new translation of Book III (Syllogisms). Sometime in the future (perhaps starting in September 2010), I hope we can read and discuss Book IV (Modal Syllogisms). See also my paper “Inferences”, in the Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy, and “The Medieval Theory of Consequence”, a paper I presented to the Workshop on The Philosophy of Logical Consequence at Uppsala in November 2008 (forthcoming in Synthese). You might also find it useful to look at Catarina Dutilh Novaes, “14th century logic after Ockham”, in D.Gabbay and J.Woods (eds.), The Handbook of the History of Logic, vol 2 (2008), pp. 433-504.
In session 2008-9, we read through Books I and II of Buridan's Treatise on Consequences in a new translation which I have made of the treatise. The translation published in 1985 is very problematic: see my review in Vivarium 1987.
In session 2007-8, we worked through Walter Burley’s treatise Obligations. I made a (rough) English translation of those sections which were not translated in Kretzmann and Stump, The Cambridge Translations of Medieval Philosophical Texts, vol. I (Cambridge UP, 1988). Here also is a ‘Short History of Impossible positio’.
In session 2006-7, we worked through my new edition and translation of Thomas Bradwardine's Insolubilia. This has now appeared (May 2010) as volume 10 of the Dallas Medieval Texts and Translations.
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