Book Series
- The Medieval Text Consortium Series vol. 1
- ISSN Print: 2754-0634
- ISSN Digital: 2754-0642
Copyright
Barbara Bartocci; Stephen Read;Published On
2024-10-17ISBN
Language
- English
Print Length
158 pages (xxviii+130)Dimensions
Weight
OCLC Number
1463606172LCCN
2023513484THEMA
- NHD
- NHDJ
- QDHF
BIC
- HBLC1
- HPC
- HPCB
BISAC
- HIS010000
- HIS037010
- PHI012000
LCC
- BC21.I64
Keywords
- Medieval Paradoxes
- Liar Paradox
- Restrictivism
- Supposition Theory
- Thomas Bradwardine
- Fallacy of Accident
Insolubles
Critical Edition with English Translation
- Walter Segrave (author)
- Barbara Bartocci (editor)
- Stephen Read (editor)
Paradoxes, such as the Liar (‘What I am saying is false’), fascinated medieval thinkers. What I said can’t be true, for if it were, it would be false. So it must be false—but then it would be true after all. Attempts at a solution to this contradiction led such thinkers to develop their theories of meaning, reference and truth.
A popular response, until it was attacked at length by Thomas Bradwardine in the early 1320s, was to dismiss such self-reference as impossible: no term (here, ‘false’) could refer to (or in medieval terms, “supposit for”) a whole, e.g., a proposition, of which it is part.
In light of Bradwardine’s criticisms, Walter Segrave, writing around 1330, defended so-called restrictivism (restrictio) by claiming that such paradoxes exhibited a fallacy of accident. The classic example of this fallacy, the first of Aristotle’s fallacies independent of language, is the Hidden Man puzzle: you know Coriscus, Coriscus is the one approaching, but you don’t know the one approaching since, e.g., he is wearing a mask. But Aristotle’s account is unclear and Segrave, building on ideas of Giles of Rome and Walter Burley, shows how the fallacy turns on an equivocation over the supposition of the middle term or one of the extremes in a syllogism. Thereby, Segrave is able to counter Bradwardine’s arguments one by one and defend the restrictivist solution. In this volume, Segrave’s text is edited from the three extant manuscripts, is translated into English, and is preceded by a substantial Introduction.
Additional Resources
Contents
Introduction
(pp. xi–xxvi)- Barbara Bartocci
- Stephen Read
- Barbara Bartocci
- Stephen Read
- Barbara Bartocci
- Stephen Read
- Barbara Bartocci
- Stephen Read
Capitulum Quartum: Solutio auctoris
(pp. 30–42)- Barbara Bartocci
- Stephen Read
- Barbara Bartocci
- Stephen Read
- Barbara Bartocci
- Stephen Read
Capitulum Septimum: De apparentibus insolubilibus
(pp. 100–121)- Barbara Bartocci
- Stephen Read
Contributors
Walter Segrave
(author)Barbara Bartocci
(editor)Formerly Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Geneva (Switzerland) and before that, Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews (Scotland) on the Leverhulme-funded project ‘Theories of Paradox in Fourteenth-Century Logic: Edition and Translation of Key Texts’. Her research focusses on medieval logic; she has published journal articles and book chapters on medieval dialectic and on solutions to paradoxes, like the Liar paradox, developed in the Late Middle Ages. She also specialises in editing medieval logical texts transmitted in manuscripts. She co-edited, together with Stephen Read, the first critical edition and English translation of Paul of Venice’s Logica Magna: The Treatise on Insolubles (Peeters, 2022).
Stephen Read
(editor)Professor Emeritus of the History and Philosophy of Logic at the University of St Andrews (Scotland). He is the author of Relevant Logic (Blackwell 1988) and Thinking about Logic (Oxford UP 1995), editor of Sophisms in Medieval Logic and Grammar (Springer 1993), editor and translator of Thomas Bradwardine: Insolubilia (Peeters 2010), translator of John Buridan: Treatise on Consequences (Fordham UP 2015), co-editor with Catarina Dutilh Novaes of The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Logic (Cambridge UP 2016), editor and translator, with Barbara Bartocci, of Paul of Venice, Logica Magna: the Treatise on Insolubles (Peeters 2022), and co-editor of Theories of Paradox in the Middle Ages (College Publications 2023); and is author of many articles on contemporary and medieval philosophy of logic and language. He was leader of the project ‘Theories of Paradox in Fourteenth-Century Logic: Edition and Translation of Key Texts’ (2017-21) funded by a Research Project Grant from the Leverhulme Trust.