Copyright

Barbara Bartocci; Stephen Read;

Published On

2024-10-17

Page Range

pp. 100–121

Language

  • English
  • Latin

Print Length

22 pages

Capitulum Septimum

De apparentibus insolubilibus

  • Barbara Bartocci (translator)
  • Stephen Read (translator)
In the seventh chapter, Segrave discusses sophisms which he claims only appear to be insolubles but are not really so since they do not satisfy the definition he gave in chapter 1. Examples include the pair, ‘This is true’ and ‘This is false’ referring to each other, which Bradwardine and others counted as an insoluble and to which they accordingly applied their own solution to the insolubles. Segrave proposes a solution different from that he gave to what he counted as insolubles, namely that the mutual reference sets up an infinite regress, ‘This, namely “This, namely … is false” is true’, which is never resolved or completed. But he also offers alternative solutions, including it would seem, a restrictivist solution appealing to the fallacy of accident. Further sophisms are drawn from the practice of obligationes, such as ‘You respond negatively’, which should be granted if you deny it and denied if you grant it. Various solutions are proposed. The paralogism ‘This is unnamed’, which paradoxically appears to name something (by ‘unnamed’), is solved by distinguishing between divided and composite senses.

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.