Lambert of Auxerre, Logica, or Summa Lamberti trans. by Thomas S. Maloney (review)

Thomas Maloney offers us a critical translation of a mid-thirteenth-century logic text, Logica or Summa Lamberti, written by Lambert of Auxerre. The translation is replete with notes and includes an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources. Two helpful appendices are included as well: one that concerns corrections to the Latin, and the other a convenient summary of all the questions and objections stated by Lambert over the course of the text. Maloney also investigates, in the introduction to his translation, the biographical and historiographical background of Lambert. In short, Maloney finds it most plausible that Lambert, a French Dominican who achieved standing as a master of arts, was rather associated with Ligney-le-Châtel and may have only taught logic while at Auxerre: “possibly a former canon of the cathedral of Auxerre, now friar of the Dominican convent there, [he] would have been called upon to teach logic in service to the curriculum in the schola of his convent” (xxxix).

Lambert’s text is divided into eight chapters and is pedagogically organized in the way that we would naturally expect of a logic text: beginning with fundamentals in the opening chapter, it progresses to more advanced notions that build on previous ones. Chapter 1 takes up the logic of propositions, the different types of which Lambert identifies as the primary subject of logic; these include categorical, hypothetical, equivalent (or “equipollent”), and modal propositions. Chapter 2 turns to the predicates and predicables of propositions, or, that which stands (the predicate) in relation to a subject (the predicable) in a proposition. Predication, in fact, presupposes the categories (subject of the next chapter) upon which predicates are based. Chapter 3 then goes on to delineate the categories that underlie predication, and we may not be surprised to find here that the categories—for instance, that of Substance—are the same ones found in Aristotle’s logical and metaphysical works. Chapter 4 furnishes remarks after the categories for the purpose of understanding similarities or differences of things in the categories, such as opposites in color of things within a particular genus or across genera. Chapter 5 introduces the syllogistic form of argument and argumentation; the logic of the syllogism covers the major, minor and middle terms of any such argument. Chapter 6, on possible topics for arguments, proceeds to offer a variety of grounds upon which arguments may be made. Some topics involve the more purely logical, as we find with the topic that concerns the logic of parts and wholes; others involve ideas from natural philosophy, as we find with those topics that concern cause and effect or generation and destruction. Chapter 7, on sophistical topics, discusses the various ends (or “termini”) of logical disputations and the numerous possible fallacies that may be encountered in the course of argumentation that so terminate an argument. Chapter 8, the final chapter, provides an account of the properties of terms, such as signification; the importance of this chapter may be gathered following the analysis of such fallacies as equivocation.

Lambert’s logic text is not a work of pure logic without trace of its place or time in the history of ideas; the philosophical context of the text is especially visible in places, despite the general censuring of philosophical texts contrary to articles of faith at Lambert’s time. In fact, there are four features of the text that we can take into account when assessing Lambert’s text. First, there is the fact that Lambert’s logic is largely based on Aristotle’s works on logic, which he took to be “all the works on logic” up to his time; but we should view Lambert’s text as a reorganization and synthesis of the books of that corpus upon which Lambert was focused: in particular, Aristotle’s Categories, On Interpretation, Topics, Prior Analytics, and Sophistical Refutations. Lambert was writing shortly after the corpus of Aristotle’s work was made...