From a Topical Point of View: Dialectic in Anselm of Canterbury’s (review)

For a long time scholars ignored Anselm of Canterbury’s dialogue, De grammatico. It was not until D. P. Henry’s investigations in the 1960s and 70s that it was seriously studied. He showed that it was an important work, but his interpretation was peculiar. The main point of it was to show that Anselm thought traditional logic inadequate for analyzing logical problems and that he wanted to establish a new language that was better suited for the task. Henry also argued that the logical system of the Polish logician, Lesniewski, best captured Anselm’s new logical language.

It is only very recently that his interpretation has been challenged. In a paper from 2000, M. M. Adams argued that De grammatico should be seen as an introduction for students to Aristotle’s Categories (“Re-Reading De grammatico or Anselm’s Introduction to Aristotle’s Categories,” Documenti e Studi sulla Traditione Filosofica Medievale XI [2000]: 83–112). She is much closer to the truth than Henry, but Anselm’s work seems too sophisticated to be an introduction, even though the problem he is dealing with certainly derives from the Categories, together with Boethius’ commentary on it.

De grammatico is about the place of denominatives or paronyms in the Categories. The question concerns what is named by denominatives like grammaticus and albus. Is it a substance, that is, the human being that is a grammaticus or an albus, or is it an accident, that is, the knowledge of grammar inhering in the human being or the whiteness inhering in it? Aristotle uses grammatikos as an example of a quality, but Anselm gives a very simple argument, for which he finds support in Priscian, that it is the name of a substance. Anselm solves the problem by introducing some new and interesting distinctions, but he also creates some new problems. For example, by saying that a thing can belong to more that one category, he fundamentally breaks with Aristotle.

Prior to this volume, the only book-length study of De grammatico was Henry’s commentary. It contains a thorough presentation of the work and an illuminating discussion of its sources, and is perhaps the most careful study of Anselm’s work to date. A final suggestive but careful chapter also places it in the context of eleventh-century logic. The general thesis of the book is that De grammatico is a complex introduction to logic, and that it includes a theory of disputation, a theory of fallacies, and an advanced semantics.

It is obvious when reading De grammatico that Anselm makes heavy use of fallacies to develop his account of paronymy, but according to Boschung, he also provides a theory of fallacious reasoning quite independent of Aristotle’s Sophistici elenchi. Boschung emphasizes Boethius’s commentary on Cicero’s Topics as a source of Anselm’s theory, though I find this doubtful. A much more likely source is Boethius’s major commentary on Aristotle’s De interpretatione, which includes a discussion of some fallacies from the Sophistici elenchi. Boschung, however, does not put any emphasis on this work. It is also unclear to me that Anselm has a theory of fallacious reasoning and I found Boschung’s reconstruction ahistorical particularly since it is based on Garlandus of Compotista’s Dialectica.

Bosching’s analysis of Anselm’s semantical discussions is most interesting. His main point is that Anselm’s view of signification emerges from a logical context and not, as in the later developments of terministic logic, from a grammatical context. He stresses that Anselm’s distinction between appellation and signification comes from reading Boethius and Porphyry through an Augustinian lens. He is also careful not to say that Anselm had an influence on twelfth-century developments, though his distinctions and theories were similar.

Boschung’s book contributes a new perspective on Anselm’s De grammatico by highlighting the role of fallacies...