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  • Johannes Buridanus: Summulae de Practica Sophismatum
  • Stephen Read
Fabienne Pironet , editor. Johannes Buridanus: Summulae de Practica Sophismatum. Artistarium 10–9. Turnhout: Brepols, 2004. Pp. xlix + 193. Paper, €40.00.

John Buridan was an unusual figure in fourteenth-century logic and philosophy. Logic was at that time largely the preserve of the young, who would lecture on logic while studying in higher faculties such as theology, before moving on to lecture in their maturity on philosophy and theology. Two notable exceptions are the Englishman Walter Burley and the Frenchman from Picardy, John Buridan. Already active in the Arts Faculty at Paris in the late 1320s, Buridan was still there thirty years later. In the meantime, among other works on metaphysics, ethics, politics, and natural philosophy, he lectured repeatedly on logic, producing eventually a work which, in its recent English translation by Gyula Klima (Yale University Press, 2001), runs to almost 1,000 pages.

Surprisingly, this work—his Summulae de Dialectica—has fully appeared in print in English before doing so in Latin. Much of it is preserved only in manuscript, with the exception of its ninth and final treatise, the Sophismata (or, as Buridan calls it in his opening remarks, the 'Practice of Sophisms'), which was printed in Paris in the late fifteenth century. (This edition is omitted from the bibliography in the present volume on pages xl–xlii, though it is mentioned on page xxxiii and indeed, referred to throughout.) The so-called Perutilis Compendium totius logicae Joanni Buridani, printed in Venice in 1499 (etalia) and reprinted by Minerva in 1965, contains very little of Buridan's own text, but consists mainly of Johannes Dorp's commentary on what Buridan had written—indeed, in the case of treatise 4, on what Marsilius of Inghen had written. Buridan's Summulae formed a course of lectures which could hardly be covered in total in any one year, and there are numerous references in both past and future tense to the treatment of topics in others parts of the text, showing how it went through repeated presentations and revisions. The final version of treatises 18 appears to have been made in the mid-1350s in response to astute criticisms by the young Albert of Saxony; but the Sophismata seem to have missed this revision. An interesting footnote in a manuscript written in Prague but now in Uppsala (which lacks treatise 9) is given on page xiii of the present volume. It considers a doubt whether treatise 8 concludes Buridan's logic, "since he himself said in the division of the book at the start that he would finally describe the practice of sophisms," and here at the end of treatise 8 he has not yet done that. The explanation given is that he said he would do that "if he lived." But like all flesh, God returned him to earth (in terram reduxit) before he could complete the final revision.

Treatise 9 has been previously published in various forms, first in a complete English translation by T. K. Scott in 1966, then in 1977 in a Latin version based largely on the incunabulum, again by Scott. In 1982, chapter 8—by far the longest chapter of the ninth treatise—appeared in both Latin (based on six manuscripts) and English, with a detailed commentary, all by George Hughes. There has also been considerable discussion of Buridan's doctrines, famously by Ernest Moody in the 1950s and Arthur Prior in the 1960s. What has grabbed most attention is his attempted solution to the Liar and other semantic paradoxes in chapter 8. By his own account, what he presents here is a revision of his earlier solutions, the core idea of which is that every proposition signifies (in earlier versions) or at least virtually implies (in the latest version) its own truth. This type of account, found also in Albert of Saxony, was anticipated in Oxford in the 1320s and 1330s, notably by Thomas Bradwardine and his successors, though quite what the connection was, if any, has yet to be determined.

The treatment of the semantic paradoxes in chapter 8 is certainly...

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