Dialectical Disputations, Volume 1: Book I by Lorenzo Valla, and: Dialectical Disputations, Volume 2: Books II–III by Lorenzo Valla (review)

Lorenzo Valla was a firebrand of early Italian Humanism. A controversial figure with an acerbic personality, he battled fellow humanists, disparaged Church Latin, and proved that the “Donation of Constantine,” granting papal authority, was fraudulent. His fulminations against Aristotle, Porphyry, and Boethius shaped later humanist ideology as well as modern attitudes toward Scholasticism.

In Dialectical Disputations, Valla proposes a new model of dialectic. The present translation is based on alpha, the latest of three versions edited by Gianni Zippel (Padua, 1982), with “only a few emendations but many differences in punctuation and orthography” (I.315). Latin and English on facing pages afford easy comparison. The informative introduction, copious notes, appendices, and indexes are useful for exploring Valla’s ideas in context. The text is accurate, and the translation of Valla’s refined prose is both precise and eloquent.

The Dialectical Disputations contains three books that correspond to Aristotle’s division of logic: I. words, II. sentences, and III. arguments or syllogistic. However, Book II includes chapters on immediate and mediated inferences. With this outline in hand, I will proceed to canvas major topics in each book and conclude with some critical comments on Valla’s philological method.

In Book I, Valla criticizes the vocabulary of Aristotelian logic, metaphysics, and ethics that Porphyry and Boethius bequeathed to the Middle Ages. He argues that Aristotle and his medieval followers violated both the sense and the syntax of Greek and Latin. He reduces the categories from ten to three: substance, quality, and action (I.1, 13, 16–19). He replaces the five transcendentals with one, namely, “thing” (I.2). He finds no warrant in Greek for various distinctions, e.g. abstract/concrete, essence/to be, essence/substance (I.3, 5–6). He rejects abstract nouns ending in ‘-itas’ because that morpheme takes adjectives (I.4). He prunes the Tree of Porphyry and challenges language about spirits, angels, and God (I.7–8). He disputes Aristotle’s claims about the soul in De anima as well as his views on the body, virtues, matter/form composition, sensation, and perception (I.9–15). Following a critique of Aristotelian concepts of definition, he praises Quintilian’s concept of description and stresses the importance of etymology for the study of rhetorical signs (I.20).

In Book II, Valla replaces the subject–copula–predicate analysis of a sentence with that of noun–plus–verb (II.1). He reviews various kinds of sentences, for example indefinites, and disputes common ways of analyzing them (II.2, 3). He examines sentence conversion (II.4) and certain modifying signs—negation, for example (II.5–12). He reconfigures immediate inferences (such as contrariety, subcontrariety, contradiction, subalternation [II.13–18]) and reduces the six-fold division of modal propositions to three—possible, impossible, and true. ‘False’ and other modalities are for “stylistic purposes” (II.19). Finally, he introduces the notion of “places of arguments,” that is, topics, and quotes verbatim a long passage on forensic argumentation from Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria V (II.20–23).

Book III proposes to “rescue” students from the “traps and tricks of the sophists” (lege ‘scholastics’) and distinguishes between dialectic and logic (III.1). Of categorical syllogisms, he rejects a number of moods of the first and second figures (III.2–8) as well as the third figure entirely (III.9). He disparages Boethius on hypothetical syllogisms and shows a number of ways that complex syllogisms can be formed (III.10–11). The remaining chapters elaborate various rhetorical forms of argumentation, i.e. sorites, dilemma, example, induction, and enthymeme (III.12–17).

Valla’s erudition and command of classical philology are unmatched. His emphasis on the...