On Methods. Volume 1: Books I–II. Volume 2: Books III–IV. On Regressus by Jacopo Zabarella (review)

John P. McCaskey provides the first English translation of Jacopo Zabarella’s two masterpieces, On Methods and On Regressus (1578), along with a totally new Latin text. These treatises represent the most important Renaissance discussion of how scientific knowledge should be acquired, arranged, and transmitted, and belong to a lively debate on scientific method and the order of teaching that pervaded Renaissance intellectual discourse for more than a century. The figure of Zabarella has been consistently revaluated in the twentieth century by intellectual historians such as Ernst Cassirer, John H. Randall, Wilhelm Risse, and Charles Schmitt for the alleged influence of his assessment of scientific method on the origin of early modern science. The debate around Zabarella’s impact on the scientific revolution has been protracted and controversial, but there is little doubt that his treatment of method is the best analysis on the subject prior to Francis Bacon’s New Organ and René Descartes’s Discourse on Method. Moreover, owing to his strict examination of the Aristotelian position, Zabarella’s treatises became the most popular logical works in Europe, more so even than Bacon and Descartes, and continued to be taught in university classrooms right up to the end of the eighteenth century. This is true in particular for Protestant universities in England, Germany, and Holland, where Zabarella’s Aristotelian conception collided with the Ramist position. Unfortunately, scholarship has been hindered in its assessment of Zabarella’s fortune by a lack of readily available texts. The present translation is therefore a timely and valuable contribution.

The treatise, On Methods, collects four books. In the first, Zabarella distinguishes order from method: order is a way of teaching or arranging knowledge, while method is a way of discovering new knowledge. In the other three books, Zabarella characterizes the various kinds of orders and methods, pointing out the futility of definition and division, and establishing the existence of only two orders and two methods: compositive and resolutive order, and resolutive and demonstrative method. Zabarella is particularly concerned that method reflect the structure of syllogism in order to express scientific knowledge. Resolutive method usually infers from effects to causes, and its peculiar logical inferences are induction and the demonstration a signo (from a sign) or ab effectu (from an effect). Demonstrative method, on the other hand, infers from causes to effects, usually employing a demonstration propter quid (on account of which). Scientific method is neither resolutive nor demonstrative. Scientific knowledge can be acquired only in the conjunction of the resolutive method and the demonstrative method, and in this conjunction lies the entire theory of the regressus (regress), which is the topic of the homonymous book.

Prior to this edition, the standard reference was Risse’s reprint of Zabarella’s Latin work, Opera logica (1597). McCaskey does not use it for his translation, however, preferring a collation of the two editions published in Venice during Zabarella’s lifetime (1578, 1586), and the two posthumous editions published in Germany in 1597 and 1603. The choice to collate the various versions of the texts is questionable, but the editing is impressive. Risse’s edition still has the indubitable advantage of providing subtitles to the main paragraphs of the chapter that help the reader to readily identify their topics, and their omission in McCaskey’s edition is a serious hindrance. That said, as the Note on Translation testifies, the translation is elegant and conscientious. The author’s choice to contextualize Zabarella’s works within a logical tradition of carefully worded philosophical commentary is laudable, as is his intention to preserve as far as possible the precision of the text, sometimes at the expense of a rendering that is literal and wooden. The choice of archaic forms over their modern derivatives, as...