Insolubles: Critical Edition with English Translation - cover image

Book Series

Copyright

Barbara Bartocci; Stephen Read;

Published On

2024-10-17

ISBN

Paperback978-1-80511-090-3
Hardback978-1-80511-091-0
PDF978-1-80511-092-7

Language

  • English

Print Length

158 pages (xxviii+130)

Dimensions

Paperback156 x 9 x 234 mm(6.14" x 0.35" x 9.21")
Hardback156 x 12 x 234 mm(6.14" x 0.47" x 9.21")

Weight

Paperback233g (8.22oz)
Hardback406g (14.32oz)

THEMA

  • NHD
  • NHDJ
  • QDHF

BIC

  • HBLC1
  • HPC
  • HPCB

BISAC

  • HIS010000
  • HIS037010
  • PHI012000

Keywords

  • Medieval Paradoxes
  • Liar Paradox
  • Restrictivism
  • Supposition Theory
  • Thomas Bradwardine
  • Fallacy of Accident

Insolubles

Critical Edition with English Translation

  • Walter Segrave (author)
  • Barbara Bartocci (editor)
  • Stephen Read (editor)
Paradoxes, such as the Liar (‘What I am saying is false’), fascinated medieval thinkers. What I said can’t be true, for if it were, it would be false. So it must be false—but then it would be true after all. Attempts at a solution to this contradiction led such thinkers to develop their theories of meaning, reference and truth.

A popular response, until it was attacked at length by Thomas Bradwardine in the early 1320s, was to dismiss such self-reference as impossible: no term (here, ‘false’) could refer to (or in medieval terms, “supposit for”) a whole, e.g., a proposition, of which it is part.

In light of Bradwardine’s criticisms, Walter Segrave, writing around 1330, defended so-called restrictivism (restrictio) by claiming that such paradoxes exhibited a fallacy of accident. The classic example of this fallacy, the first of Aristotle’s fallacies independent of language, is the Hidden Man puzzle: you know Coriscus, Coriscus is the one approaching, but you don’t know the one approaching since, e.g., he is wearing a mask. But Aristotle’s account is unclear and Segrave, building on ideas of Giles of Rome and Walter Burley, shows how the fallacy turns on an equivocation over the supposition of the middle term or one of the extremes in a syllogism. Thereby, Segrave is able to counter Bradwardine’s arguments one by one and defend the restrictivist solution. In this volume, Segrave’s text is edited from the three extant manuscripts, is translated into English, and is preceded by a substantial Introduction.

Contents

Introduction

(pp. xi–xxvi)
  • Barbara Bartocci
  • Stephen Read
  • Barbara Bartocci
  • Stephen Read
  • Barbara Bartocci
  • Stephen Read
  • Barbara Bartocci
  • Stephen Read
  • Barbara Bartocci
  • Stephen Read
  • Barbara Bartocci
  • Stephen Read

Contributors

Walter Segrave

(author)

Barbara Bartocci

(editor)

Formerly Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Geneva (Switzerland) and before that, Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews (Scotland) on the Leverhulme-funded project ‘Theories of Paradox in Fourteenth-Century Logic: Edition and Translation of Key Texts’. Her research focusses on medieval logic; she has published journal articles and book chapters on medieval dialectic and on solutions to paradoxes, like the Liar paradox, developed in the Late Middle Ages. She also specialises in editing medieval logical texts transmitted in manuscripts. She co-edited, together with Stephen Read, the first critical edition and English translation of Paul of Venice’s Logica Magna: The Treatise on Insolubles (Peeters, 2022).

Stephen Read

(editor)
Professor Emeritus of the History and Philosophy of Logic at University of St Andrews

Professor Emeritus of the History and Philosophy of Logic at the University of St Andrews (Scotland). He is the author of Relevant Logic (Blackwell 1988) and Thinking about Logic (Oxford UP 1995), editor of Sophisms in Medieval Logic and Grammar (Springer 1993), editor and translator of Thomas Bradwardine: Insolubilia (Peeters 2010), translator of John Buridan: Treatise on Consequences (Fordham UP 2015), co-editor with Catarina Dutilh Novaes of The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Logic (Cambridge UP 2016), editor and translator, with Barbara Bartocci, of Paul of Venice, Logica Magna: the Treatise on Insolubles (Peeters 2022), and co-editor of Theories of Paradox in the Middle Ages (College Publications 2023); and is author of many articles on contemporary and medieval philosophy of logic and language. He was leader of the project ‘Theories of Paradox in Fourteenth-Century Logic: Edition and Translation of Key Texts’ (2017-21) funded by a Research Project Grant from the Leverhulme Trust.