The Medieval Logic Seminar meets during Arche semesters from 9:30am until 11.00 each Monday as an online seminar by Zoom. In this seminar we read through and discuss texts in medieval logic recently translated into English along with the Latin original, including both our own work on medieval logic and other medieval logical texts recently published.
Current Project
Theories of Paradox in Fourteenth–Century Logic: Edition and Translation of Key Texts (Principal Investigator, Stephen Read; Research Fellow 2017–2023, Barbara Bartocci)
The logical paradoxes have played a significant role in the development of philosophical ideas, not just in logic but also in philosophy of language, epistemology, metaphysics and even ethics and political philosophy, throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. They played a no less significant role in later medieval philosophy and were the subject of much debate and the spur to original ideas, arguably reaching their zenith in the 14th century. Much has been learned about the medieval debate in the past fifty years, in the writings of Thomas Bradwardine, John Buridan and others. But other interesting treatises remain unedited, many only surviving in contemporary manuscripts. Among these was the treatise on insolubles (logical paradoxes) by Paul of Venice, summarizing and developing theories and solutions from his predecessors in the 14th century, constituting the final treatise of his Logica Magna. A project was begun in the 1970s to edit and translate into English the whole of the Logica Magna in 20 volumes, but only seven of the treatises from this huge work were completed and published when the project was abandoned in the 1990s, and this final treatise was not included.
The project ‘Theories of Paradox in Fourteenth-Century Logic: Edition and Translation of Key Texts’ (funded from 2017-2021 by a Research Project Grant from the Leverhulme Trust) aimed to edit and translate three treatises on insolubles:
• Paul’s treatise on ‘Insolubles’, which describes fifteen other theories of insolubles which it rejects and subsequently develops its own at length. The text and translation, together with a commentary, has now been published with Dallas Medieval Texts and Translations.
• The treatise on ‘Insolubles’ by Walter Segrave: this detailed response to Bradwardine’s attack on restrictivism mounts an interesting defence of that hitherto popular solution to the logical paradoxes. The text and translation, together with an introduction, was published with Open Book Publishers in October 2024.
• The section on ‘Insolubles’ from John Dumbleton’s Summa Logicae et Philosophiae Naturalis: although the material on natural philosophy has been studied closely in recent years, none of the text of this massive work, written in Oxford and Paris in the 1340s and preserved only in twenty-one manuscripts, has yet appeared in a modern edition. The discussion in the first section of Part I, the Summa Logicae, contains rich ideas on signification, insolubles and knowledge., The edition and translation are at press in the series Auctores Britannici Medii Aevi published by the British Academy.
Publication of these texts will allow a better overview of the development of solutions to the paradoxes through the 14th century, as well as giving further insight into the nature of the paradoxes and their possible solution.
Publications and other outputs
• E. Jennifer Aahworth with the assistance of Stephen Read (ed.), Ralph Strode, Obligationes, Auctores Britannici Medii Aevi 46 (British Academy, 2026)
• Stephen Read, ‘Consequence, signification and insolubles in fourteenth-century logic’, Logica Universalis 19 (2025), 1–22
• Barbara Bartocci and Stephen Read (ed.), Walter Segrave: Insolubles (Open Book Publishers, 2024)
• Barbara Bartocci and Stephen Read (ed.), Theories of Paradox in the Middle Ages (College Publications, 2023)
• Stephen Read, ‘Theories of Paradox from Thomas Bradwardine to Paul of Venice’, in Theories of Paradox in the Middle Ages, 11-42
• Stephen Read, ‘Walter Segrave’s “Insolubles”: A Restrictivist Response to Bradwardine’, in Theories of Paradox in the Middle Ages, 43-66
• Barbara Bartocci, ‘John Dumbleton’s Theories of Meaning and Semantic Paradoxes’, in Theories of Paradox in the Middle Ages, 67–99
• Paul of Venice, Logica Magna: Treatise on Insolubles, critical edition and English translation, with systematic introduction and commentary, by Barbara Bartocci and Stephen Read, Dallas Medieval Texts and Translations 27 (Peeters 2022)
• Stephen Read and Barbara Bartocci, ‘John Dumbleton on insolubles: an edition of an Epitome of his solution to insolubles’, in Logic and modalities in the tradition of the Oxford Calculators, special issue of Noctua 9(3): 48-88 (2022)
• Stephen Read, ‘Swyneshed, Paradox and the Rule of Contradictory Pairs’, Logica Universalis 14 (2020), 27-50
• Stephen Read, ‘The rule of contradictory pairs, insolubles and validity’, Vivarium 58 (2020), 275-304
• Barbara Bartocci, ‘Aristotle’s Metaphysics, semantic paradoxes and medieval commentators: the case of John Dinsdale’, Studi sull’Aristotelismo medievale (secoli VI-XVI) 1 (2021), 173-214
• Stephen Read, ‘“Everything true will be false”: Paul of Venice and a medieval Yablo paradox’, History and Philosophy of Logic 43 (2022), 332–46
• Stephen Read, ‘The Calculators on the Insolubles: Bradwardine, Kilvington, Heytesbury, Swyneshed and Dumbleton’, in D. Di Liscia & E. Sylla (ed.), Quantifying Aristotle: The Impact, Spread and Decline of the Calculatores Tradition (Brill, 2022), 126-52
• Recordings of talks at the Workshop on Theories of Paradox in the Middle Ages (October 2020)
Principal Investigator: Stephen Read
Members: Greg Restall, Alessandro Rossi
Research students: Gabriel Andres Molero, Elias Yuan
Associated news
Publication: Barbara Bartocci and Stephen Read
Round Table on Prof Stephen Read’s new book
Publication: Stephen Read and Barbara Bartocci
Publication: Barbara Bartocci, Stephen Read
Workshop on Theories of Paradox in the Middle Ages: Recordings
Theories of Paradox in the Middle Ages – Recording now available