Die Mittelalterlichen Traktate De Modo Opponendi et Respondendi. Einleitung und Ausgabe der einschlägigen Texte, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters, Neue Folge, Vol. 17 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 249 friends. This, of course, presupposes the questionable assumption that the methods and concepts of traditional phenomenology, e.g. the Husserlian and Heideggerian exegeses of "Lifeworld", "truth", etc. are impartial and neutral with respect to the scientific worldview. Thus Held's book aims to kill two birds with one stone. Indeed, since the whole third section on Parmenides builds on the interpretation of Heraclitus (the Parmenidean introduction of Being is seen as having the same overall aim as that of Heraclitus, viz. to distinguish Intelligence from common opinion, but its transition to a metaphysical plane is seen to entail the loss of the temporal character of the Lebenswelt) the lives of at least three large birds are at stake. This reader's search |i)r the bodies of the birds turned up only feathers. WILLIAM POHLE Lehman College, CUNY Lambert Marie De Rijk. Die Mittelalterlichen Traktate De Modo Opponendi et Respondendi, Einleitung und Ausgabe der einschltigigen Texte, Beitrage zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters, Neue Folge, Vol. 17, Miinster: Aschendorff , 198o, Pp. 379. DM 134.oo De Rijk's starting point was Pseudo-Albert the Great's tractatus de modo opponendi et respondendi and Grabmann's study of it. Examination of a Paris manuscript of the pseudo-Albert treatise suggested that the material is an elaboration of a previous model (Vorlage), which De Rijk recognized in a text called Thesaurus Philosophorum, contained in two Vatican manuscripts (p. lO). The present w)lnme includes De Rijk's edition of the pseudo-Albert tractatus, the Thesaurus, a Prague version of the Thesaurus and another version by a certain Magister Gentilis. De R!ik dew)tes a special chapter of his one-hundred-page introduction to the description of other manuscripts that are relevant to the theory of disputation (chapter V). De Rijk is very negative towards the materials he has published in this w)lume. He emphasizes repeatedly that the Thesaurus group is not representative of the Medieval art of disputation; that it has a place in the history but not in the "development" of Medieval logic (p. 68). It is the ars obligatoria which represents the Medieval art of disputation; the aT:~obligatoria is the literarischer Niederschlag of the Medieval Disputationspraxis (p. 81 ). De Rijk sees the superiority of the ars obligatoria over the Thesaurus group in two respects: l) the spirit of the Thesaurus is to cheat, to deceive the partner of disputation , whereas this is not the case in the obligation dialogues (p. 81). ~) The ars obligatoria has a higher technical level (p. 77); in the Thesaurus group there is no disputation technique at all. The cautelae for the opponent involve some technicalities , according to De Rijk, but he regards them as later additions (p. 77, fn. 25 and p. 66). This reviewer's impression is that De Rijk has failed to see that there is a technique in the Thesaurus group and that this technique is different from the obligations. 250 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY In the Thesaurus group, the opponens is the one who asserts, whereas the respondens restricts himself to conceding, distinguishing or rejecting an opponent's assertion. The game may start with the opponent asking whether the respondent accepts or rejects a certain thesis--and to this extent the procedure coincides with the obligation systemibut once the respondent accepts and asserts the proposed thesis, his task is no longer assertive. Rather, the respondent is passive; it is the opponent who constructs arguments whose conclusions imply the negation of the thesis accepted by the respondent. I have called this type of disputation the "argument method,"' to be distinguished from the "question method" where the opponent asks and the respondent asserts. The post-Medieval (Neuzeit, second-scholastic) logical theory seems to prefer the argument method, whereas the Medieval logicians appear to prefer the question method (obligations are obviously of the question type). I have hinted at the pseudo-Albert treatise as a Medieval representative of the argument method. Now the cluster of texts published by De Rijk, of which the pseudo-Albert is but one example, increases the significance of the argument method for the Medieval period. The fact that the Thesaurus group represents...