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Copyright

Barbara Bartocci; Stephen Read;

Published On

2024-10-17

Page Range

pp. xi–xxvi

Language

  • English
  • Latin

Print Length

16 pages

Introduction

  • Barbara Bartocci (translator)
  • Stephen Read (translator)
Chapter of: Insolubles: Critical Edition with English Translation(pp. xi–xxvi)
Walter Segrave was at Merton College, Oxford from 1321 until at least 1338. His treatise on insolubles (logical paradoxes) is his only known work. It appears to have been composed at Oxford in the late 1320s or early 1330s, and is clearly a response to Thomas Bradwardine's ‘Insolubles’, composed there in 1321-23. The dominant solution to the insolubles at the time Bradwardine was writing was restrictivism, the claim that a part cannot supposit for the whole of which it is part (and consequently, for its contradictory or anything convertible with it), at least in the presence of a privative term such as ‘false’ and ‘unknown’. Segrave's treatise is an extensive and detailed response to Bradwardine’s attacks. Segrave defends restrictivism by presenting a well-thought out reason for the restriction of supposition necessary to avoid contradiction. Where Burley and Bradwardine both attributed the fallacy in insolubles to what Aristotle described as the fallacy of the conditional and the unconditional (secundum quid et simpliciter), Segrave attributed it to the fallacy of accident, turning on a variation in the supposition of the middle term and the extremes in what appears to be a sound syllogism.

Contributors

Barbara Bartocci

(translator)

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

(translator)
Professor Emeritus of the History and Philosophy of Logic at University of St Andrews

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.