Provisional schedule:
Monday 12 May
09.30 Tea/Coffee
10.00 Stephen Read (Arche, St Andrews), ‘Richard Kilvington and the Theory of Obligations’
11.00 Tea/Coffee
11.30 visit to MUSA and Chapel
12.30 Lunch
14.00 Cecilia Trifogli (All Souls College, Oxford), ‘Geoffrey of Aspall on Composite Substances’
15.00 Tea/Coffee
15.30 John Marenbon (Trinity College, Cambridge), ‘Abelard on non-things’
16.30 Tea/Coffee
17.00 Anna Marmodoro (Corpus Christi College, Oxford), ‘Emerging and Descendent Wholes in Aquinas’
18.00 Finish
19.00 Workshop Dinner
Tuesday 13 May
09.30 Tea/Coffee
10.00 Spencer Johnston (Arche, St Andrews), ‘Essence and Modality in Robert Kilwardby’
11.00 Tea/Coffee
11.30 Catarina Dutilh Novaes (Groningen), ‘Validity, formality, and evidence in Buridan’s Treatise on Consequence and his questions on the Prior Analytics’
12.30 Lunch
14.00 visit to Special Collections-manuscripts
15.15 Mark Thakkar (Lincoln College, Oxford), ‘Towards a New Edition of Wyclif’s Logic’
16.15 Tea/Coffee
16.45 Rega Wood (Stanford), ‘The Formal Distinction and the Razor: Rufus, Scotus and Ockham’
18.00 Finish
Registration is free, and includes tea and coffee between the talks. To register, please send an email to the workshop organisers at arche@st-andrews.ac.uk

Abstracts:
Catarina Dutilh Novaes, ‘Validity, formality, and evidence in Buridan’s Treatise on Consequence and his questions on the Prior Analytics’:
In his Treatise on Consequence, Buridan introduces the famous distinction between formal and material consequences in terms of validity-preserving substutivity of terms. However, he seems to hold that material consequences are just as valid as formal consequences (contrary to some current views in philosophy of logic), and that the formal/material distinction essentially pertains to how evident a consequence is to us. Now, the idea of some arguments being more evidently valid than others should remind us immediately of Aristotle’s distinction between perfect and imperfect syllogisms, and indeed in his questions on the Prior Analytics Buridan uses the same term, ‘evident’, to refer to the perfection of the perfect syllogisms. Presumably, though, the sense in which an arbitrary formal consequence is evidently valid is weaker than the sense in which a perfect syllogism is evident, given that Aristotle’s imperfect syllogisms (second and third figures) are also formal consequences according to Buridan’s substitutivity criterion. Moreover, in his questions on the Prior Analytics Buridan discusses whether certain syllogisms are valid in virtue of form (gratia formae), an idea not to be found in his discussion of formal consequences in Book I of the Treatise on Consequence. So these are discrepancies between the two texts well worth looking into in more detail, as they reveal much about Buridan’s conception of consequence and formality.
In my talk, I will investigate the different senses in which an argument (syllogistic or otherwise) is said to be ‘evidently valid’ by Buridan, and how this feature of arguments relates to the formal/material distinction. I will argue that the apparent discrepancy between the two texts can be explained if what Buridan means by ‘gratia formae’ in the questions on the Prior Analytics is properly understood.

Spencer Johnston, ‘Essence and Modality in Robert Kilwardby’
TBA

Anna Marmodoro, ‘Emerging and Descendent Wholes in Aquinas’
In this paper I investigate Aquinas’ metaphysics of substance, and emergence as a criterion for differentiating substance from artefacts.

John Marenbon, ‘Abelard on non-things’
Items which, he tells us, do not exist play a very important part in Abelard’s account of the world. In discussing our mind and its relation to language and things, Abelard uses the notion of ‘feigned images’ . In his discussion of universals, Abelard says that men (for instance) come together in the status of man, and status are not things. And sentences, he claims, not only generate thoughts but also signify, not the things to which their parts refer, but what he calls dicta – and these too Abelard says are not things. Should Abelard be taken as having successfully eliminated from his ontology certain sorts of things which might have featured in it, or is he using ‘thing’ in a restricted way, so that he refuses thinghood to items other than particular substances and their particular properties, and yet treats these items as if they were things?

Stephen Read, ‘Richard Kilvington and the Theory of Obligations’
Kretzmann and Spade were led by Richard Kilvington’s proposed revisions to the rules of obligations in his discussion of the 47th sophism in his Sophismata to claim that the purpose of obligational disputations was the same as that of counterfactual reasoning. Angel d’Ors challenged this interpretation, realising that the reason for Kilvington’s revision was precisely that he found the art of obligation unsuited to the kind of reasoning which lay at the heart of the sophismatic argument. In his criticism, Kilvington focussed on a technique used by Walter Burley to force a respondent to grant an arbitrary falsehood and similar to Lewis and Langford’s famous defence of ex impossibili quodlibet. Kilvington observes that just as in obligational disputation, one may be obliged to grant a false proposition and deny a true one, so in counterfactual reasoning one may be obliged to doubt a proposition whose truth or falsity one knows, on pain of contradiction.

Mark Thakkar, ‘Towards a New Edition of Wyclif’s Logic’
Most of Wyclif’s works were printed for the first and only time in the late 19th and early 20th century under the auspices of the Wyclif Society. These editions are notoriously variable in quality, but worst of all are the three volumes that appeared from 1893 to 1899 under the title Tractatus de Logica. The editor was working with poor manuscripts, inadequate background knowledge, and a distorting historiographical agenda; consequently, the two works printed in these volumes (which the editor calls De logica and Logicae continuatio) are in such bad shape that they have received little scholarly attention. This is a shame, because the second work in particular (which I would call Tres tractatus de superiore parte logicae) looks rather interesting; eight times as long as the first work, it ranges well beyond its expected confines, covering topics like atomism, optics, geometry, digestion, planetary motion, space and time.
I will talk about the favourable prospects for a new edition of these works, and show how it would help us both to understand their content and to trace their influence. As a test case, I will focus on Wyclif’s classification of hypothetical propositions in the Tres tractatus de superiore parte logicae.

Cecilia Trifogli, ‘Geoffrey of Aspall on Composite Substances’
Geoffrey of Aspall was an Aristotelian commentator, active at Oxford around the middle of the thirteenth century, and indeed one of the major protagonists of the reception of Aristotelian learning to Oxford. His view on composite substances, although common at his time, is highly original as an interpretation of Aristotle. In Aspall’s account, a composite substance (either animate or inanimate) has a very complex structure, which involves many components and of different kinds: not just matter and a substantial form, but many substantial forms, and two main kinds of matter, namely, prime matter and natural matter. In this paper I will present Aspall’s view of composite substances, focusing in particular on the distinction between prime matter and natural matter. I will explain that the relevant ingredient of this distinction is the notion of an active potency of matter. I will also deal with the role of this kind of potency in substantial change, and its connection with the theory of intentional species.

Rega Wood, ‘The Formal Distinction and the Razor: Rufus, Scotus and Ockham’
Coined in the 17th century by Libert Froidmont, the phrase `Ockham’s razor’ was intended as an insult. As Froidmont pointed out, Ockham’s own followers wielded it against him on the subject of the human soul. But Ockham and Froidmont seemingly agreed that the only alternative to positing real distinctions in the soul was to posit only conceptual distinctions in the soul. Apart from Thomists and Nominalists or Conceptualists, however, most scholastics held that properly to account for the soul, it was necessary to posit a distinction that was neither real nor conceptual. Such diminished distinctions have been called ‘formal’ since the time of John Duns Scotus.
I seek to show firstly that Richard Rufus is the ancient doctor whose concept of formal predication Scotus cited when presenting his formal distinction, and secondly that positing such a distinction in the case of the powers of the rational soul and its essence is necessary. For, as Rufus showed, untoward consequences arise if we suppose either (a) that the powers of intellect, will, and memory are not different from the soul’s essence, or (b) that those powers are entirely the same as the soul. I will conclude that both Ockham and his detractor were mistaken about the substance of the soul and its powers.