Institutio Logica (review)

432 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY although this volume is apparently intended for an English-reading public, the only work cited in English is MacClintock's 1956 monograph on Jandun. The book's value would have been increased if a short bibliography had been added, one containing at least references to some of Armand Maurer's publications, to Weisheipl's book on Thomas, and perhaps also to MacClintock's 1954/55 article. Such a bibliography should also have included references to some of the writings of the late Bruno Nardi and Harry A. Wolfson, neither of whom is ever mentioned in this volume? On the other hand, it must be underscored that the translation is clear and fluid, the author 's prose arresting. The volume has been meticulously edited by Professer Wippel. A special debt of gratitude is owed to him and to his two colleagues for making available to a wider audience Canon Van Steenberghen's interpretation of the course of late-thirteenth-century philosophy. EDWARD P. MAHONEY Duke University There also appears to be no reference to Nardi in Van Steenberghen's The Philosophical Movement in the Thirteenth Century (Belfast, 1955). Pierre Gassendi. Institutio Logica. Critical edition with translation and introduction by Howard Jones. Assen: Van Gorcum & Co., x981. Pp. Ixvii + 172. Gassendi's Institutio Logzca is valuable for the insight it offers us about the history of logic and, in general, of the transition in philosophy from the Scholastics to the moderns. As more research is done on the seventeenth century, it is becoming clear that Leibniz was not the only modern admirer and follower of Scholastic logic and philosophy, but that others, like Hobbes, in his Computatio (recently translated by A. P. Martinich), also found the Schoolmen's work of interest, although needing emendations. Howard Jones has now made generally accessible a text of Gassendi where it is clear that, despite his rhetorical flourishes, Gassendi is seriously indebted to Scholastic logic and philosophy. In the lengthy introduction, Professor Jones takes pains to show how the Institutio Logica fits into Gassendi's philosophical career and, more particularly, how it related to his other, earlier logical works. Jones also gives a critical Latin text, and a fairly literal, yet smooth, English translation. His work would be more useful if the text and translation were displayed on opposing pages. I have one major puzzle about this book. If I had read the text without having read the introduction, I would have supposed that Gassendi was writing a logic text, like Sherwood's lntroductio or Peter of Spain's Tractatus, in which he was presenting standard doctrines of traditional logic while including material from Renaissance and modern scientific perspectives. That is, the lnstitutio reads like a standard (medieval Scholastic) logic text, with insertions about seventeenth-century scientific meth- BOOK REVIEWS 433 ods, and with others having to do with etymology and the authors dear to Renaissance humanism. So the Institutio can be viewed as an updated logic text. The puzzle is whether the lnstitutio should be taken this way, given what Jones says in his introduction. There he points out that Gassendi in his Exercitationes is engaged in a polemic against Aristotelians. Gassendi contemptuously dismisses Aristotle's theory of the categories, his syllogistic, and his theory of definition (pp. xx-xxii). Moreover, Gassendi is a follower of Epicurus, who also rejected Aristotle's logic (p. xxx). It is peculiar, then, that in the Institutio Gassendi presents Aristotelian categories, syllogisms , definitions, and even topica, or commonplaces (pp. 33ff.). To be sure, Gassendi has judiciously edited the material: many medieval topics, like the exponibilia, are omitted, and the syllogistic is presented in new figures that Gassendi claims are simpler, although, as Professor Jones rightly remarks (p. lxiii), Gassendi's reduction is quite cumbersome (pp. 42ff.). Again, in his treatments of the imagination and method, Gassendi has much Epicurean material, but there is also, for example, a discussion of finding the middle term, in the style of the Posterior Analytics. Jones is aware of this incongruity between Gassendi's earlier logical writings and the ln~titutio; he suggests that the Exercitationes was deliberately onesided, whereas the lnstitutio positively contributes to logic by shaping traditional logic to...