Ne evagemur in verbis floridis

This term I’ve been running scholastic Latin reading classes at three difficulty levels, and at the highest level I offered to cover not only difficult authors but also “flowery prefaces”, i.e. passages in which authors stray beyond the confines of workaday scholastic prose. In the event, nobody was interested in flowery prefaces, so we stuck to ordinary material by Scotus and (since he is often called difficult) Wyclif. As if on cue, though, I’ve just noticed a good illustration of the way that scholastic authors can confuse historians of philosophy by adopting a higher literary register, and I’m writing it up here so I can point to it in future.

The passage in question is from Alberto Fantini’s 1499 edition of Buridan’s Consequentie, and specifically from Fantini’s dedicatory epistle to his brother Giustiniano, which begins:

Compulisti me assiduis vocibus … ut tibi non minus ac germano cuius consequentiis te familiariter accommodare debeas significarem.

You have urged me with persistent words … to indicate to you no less than (to) a brother whose Consequentie you should intimately devote yourself to.

The difficulty here is ‛non minus ac germano’, which complicates the ‛ut … significarem’ clause while also including a slightly unusual use of ‛ac’ (OLD s.v. atque 15). Even once its meaning is clear, there is still an ambiguity (perhaps deliberate, and clunkily preserved in my translation) as to whether it goes with ‛significarem’ or ‛te familiariter accommodare’.

And now here’s what Stephen Read made of it in his 2015 translation of Buridan:

You have supported me with assiduous words … so that I would signify to you no less as a brother whose needs you are bound to meet as a kinsman.

I can’t see how ‛compulisti’ and ‛consequentiis’ came out as ‛supported’ and ‛needs’, but I’m sure the sentence would have fared better if Fantini had written it in a less fancy way, e.g. ‛… ut tibi significarem cuius consequentiis te familiariter accommodare debeas.’

The moral of the story? Even if you’re only interested in texts with simple syntax, you will occasionally be confronted with more complex prose, so you need to be able to handle it. Historians of philosophy sometimes deal with this by quietly ignoring difficult passages – Michael Loux’s 1974 translation of Part I of the Summa logice gives the impression that Ockham omitted to write a preface altogether! – but this is evidently not the wisest policy.

Peter Auriol and scholarly inertia

The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (1982) has only two substantial discussions of Peter Auriol (a page each on future contingents and on intentions), though there is also a footnote on his “esse apparens”.  This fairly reflects the state of modern scholarship on Auriol when the CHLMP's chapters were written in the late 1970s.

But since the late 1980s, thanks to Katherine Tachau, historians of 14th-century philosophy have become increasingly aware that Auriol was just as important as his much more famous confrère William of Ockham, and the literature has proliferated accordingly.  Readers might therefore expect him to feature rather more prominently in the brand-new Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy (2010).

Alas, no.  Not only is he now mentioned on fewer occasions, but the most substantial discussion of him in any of the chapters reads in its entirety as follows:  “A fellow Franciscan, Peter Auriol, insisted that the infused virtue of charity plays a more important role in salvation.  In his view, infused charity is not simply the consequence of divine acceptance but necessary by its very nature in order to make the soul acceptable to God” (ch. 36, “Virtue theory”, by Bonnie Kent).

In Robert Pasnau's introductory chapter, Martin Stone confidently predicts that “Within twenty years Henry, Giles, Durand, and Auriol will become a part of the canon” (p. 5).  In your own time, folks.

Mediaeval Commentaries on the Sentences, vol. 2

I can't wait to get my hands on the second volume of Mediaeval Commentaries on the Sentences of Peter Lombard: Current Research, which so far seems to have only made it into the Warburg Institute library.  In the meantime, as Brill are being coy about it, here's the chapter list (with authors omitted for clarity's sake):

—  The Pseudo-Peter of Poitiers Gloss
—  Stephen Langton
—  The Glossa in IV libros Sententiarum by Alexander of Hales
—  The Sentences Commentary of Hugh of St.-Cher
—  Thomas Aquinas and his Lectura romana in primum Sententiarum Petri Lombardi
—  Robert Kilwardby's Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard
—  William de la Mare
—  Henry of Harclay and Aufredo Gonteri Brito
—  On the Limits of the Genre: Roger Roseth as a Reader of the Sentences
—  Richard Fitzralph's Lectura on the Sentences
—  Peter of Candia's Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard
—  Martin Luther
—  Conclusion: The Tradition of the Sentences

It seems some standardization of the titles wouldn't have gone amiss.

Cambridge History of Science: The Middle Ages

I have been salivating over the second volume of the Cambridge History of Science ever since it was first labelled ‘forthcoming’ – which is a very long time indeed.  I'm afraid I have no news of its imminent arrival, but I can at least give a small sop to anyone who finds themselves in my position: a provisional chapter list, based on the bibliography to the 2008 second edition of David Lindberg's excellent introductory survey The Beginnings of Western Science.

Medieval Alchemy – W.R. Newman
Anatomy, Physiology, and Medical Theory – D. Jacquart
Astronomy and Astrology – J.D. North
Islamic Astronomy – R.G. Morrison
Byzantine Science – A. Tihon
Change and Motion – W.R. Laird
Science and the Medieval Church – D.C. Lindberg
Cosmology – E. Grant
Cosmology, Astronomy, and Mathematics – B.S. Eastwood
Science in the Fifteenth Century – M.H. Shank
Geography – D. Woodward
Islamic Culture and the Natural Sciences – F.J. Ragep
Science in the Jewish Communities – Y.T. Langermann
Logic – E.J. Ashworth
Mathematics – A.G. Molland
Islamic Mathematics – J.L. Berggren
The Mathematical Sciences in Islam – E. Kheirandish
Early Medieval Medicine and Natural Science – V. Nutton
Medical Practice – K. Park
Medicine in Medieval Islam – E. Savage-Smith
Natural History – K. Reeds & T. Kinukawa
Natural Knowledge in the Early Middle Ages – S.C. McCluskey
The Organization of Knowledge: Disciplines and Practices – J. Cadden
The Science of Light and Colour: Seeing and Knowing – D.C. Lindberg & K. Tachau
The Social and Institutional Background of Medieval Latin Science – M.H. Shank
Technology – G. Ovitt
Translation and Transmission of Greek and Islamic Science to Latin Christendom – C.S.F. Burnett
The Twelfth-Century Renaissance – C.S.F. Burnett

Ah, well.  It's nice to have something to look forward to.
[Update (October 2013): this is finally being published!]

Blackburn's Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy

Simon Blackburn's endearingly idiosyncratic Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy first appeared in 1994 and received an expanded second edition in 2005.  I've just bought the 2008 revision, and I'm pleased to report a substantial improvement in the coverage of mediaeval philosophers compared to the first edition: not only is Peter Lombard included, but the number of biographical entries for the 13th and 14th centuries has risen from 14 to 34.  Specifically:

13th century.  The first edition contained 7 entries: Aquinas, Albert the Great, Roger Bacon, Bonaventure, Ramon Lull, and Siger of Brabant.  The second edition adds 11 names to this list: Alexander of Hales, Giles of Rome, Henry of Ghent, Peter John Olivi, Peter of Spain, Philip the Chancellor, Richard Rufus, William (of) Sherwood, William of Auvergne, William of Auxerre, and William of Moerbeke.

14th century.  The first edition contained 7 entries: John Buridan, Dante, Duns Scotus, Gersonides, Marsilius of Padua, William of Ockham, and John Wyclif.  The second edition adds 9 names to this list: Albert of Saxony, Thomas Bradwardine, Hasdai Crescas, Meister Eckhart, Gregory of Rimini, Richard Kilvington, Nicholas of Autrecourt, Paul of Venice, and Petrarch.

Now, any such selection is bound to disappoint, but the omission of Peter Auriol and Marsilius of Inghen is particularly surprising.  One might also have expected to see an entry for Walter Burley, since he is mentioned in Kilvington's entry.  Stranger still, a new entry on the Oxford Calculators fails to mention William Heytesbury and even Richard Swineshead, the Calculator par excellence.

Those interested in natural philosophy will miss Francis of Marchia and Nicole Oresme, but they will be more galled to read in the new entry on Aristotelianism that ‘the Schoolmen were more interested in defending the truth of Aristotle's dynamical and physical system, which they saw as substantially compatible with Christianity, than in promoting the empirical and scientific method that he championed, with the result that to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Aristotle was regarded as little but an obstacle: the author of fossilized and dogmatic scholastic nonsense.’

Still, I suppose such treatment beats a damnatio memoriae.

Henninger on Fiorentino on Rimini

Francesco Fiorentino's book Gregorio da Rimini: Contingenza, futuro e scienza nel pensiero tardo-medievale (2004) is riddled with errors.  For example, here is n. 16 on p. 9 of the introduction:

‘C. Normore, Peter Aureoli and his contemporaries on future contingents and the excluded middle, "Synthèse", 96 (1993), pp. 83-92.  Nel 1999 C. Normore è ritornato sul tema secondo una prospettiva più ampia; cf. C. Normore, Contingenti futuri, in La logica nel Medioevo, The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, a cura di N. Kretzmann, A. Kenny, J. Pinborg, Milano 1999.’

An attentive reader working on future contingents will immediately spot three mistakes in this one footnote.  The first two are comparatively insignificant: the title of Normore's article begins with ‘Petrus’ and does not contain the definite article.  The third is more worrying: the CHLMP was published in 1982, so Normore's 1993 article appeared after his CHLMP chapter, but Fiorentino (presumably using a 1999 translation) tells us that in the latter Normore ‘returned to the theme from a wider perspective’.  The worrying thing is that the CHLMP has been the standard handbook of mediaeval philosophy since its appearance over 25 years ago.

Both author and publisher deserve a rap on the knuckles, so I was pleased to discover that Mark Henninger had already reviewed the book in Gregorianum.  Pleased, that is, until I read the review.

Henninger is grateful for ‘certain logical principles he wisely provides in the introduction [actually Chapter 1]: the principle of bivalence, i.e., in whatever statement, either its affirmation or its negation is true; the law of contradictories, i.e., for every affirmative statement there exists its contradictory, and vice versa’.  Unfortunately, both of these are more or less obvious howlers on Fiorentino's part.

If the meaning of ‘bivalence’ in a logical context is not clear enough from the etymology, even a standard dictionary will define it as the existence of only two truth-values, the corresponding principle being that every statement is either true or false.  Worse, Fiorentino goes on (p. 24 n. 23) to cite Łukasiewicz's insistence on distinguishing between the principle of bivalence and the law of excluded middle.  A reader following this up will be astonished, given Fiorentino's formulation, to read on p. 82 of Łukasiewicz, Aristotle's Syllogistic: ‘…the so-called principle of bivalence, which states that every proposition is either true or false, i.e. that it has one and only one of two possible truth-values: truth and falsity.  This principle must not be mixed up with the law of the excluded middle, according to which of two contradictory propositions one must be true.’

As for the law of contradictories, Fiorentino refers only to Aristotle, De int. 9, 18a28-31.  The reader following this up will find a discussion of the truth or falsity of an affirmation and its corresponding negation – not the mere assertion that there is a corresponding negation.  And I think the reader checking in Rimini and Auriol will find that the law of contradictories is that if one part of a contradictory pair is false then the other part is true (Rimini), or vice versa (Auriol).

Henninger's verdict is that ‘Fiorentino provides a well-researched, thorough and balanced investigation of the teaching of Gregory of Rimini … In the introduction, Fiorentino sets the context with a helpful historiography of the problem of future contingents and divine foreknowledge as treated mostly by researchers in the last century, as well as a survey of the literature on Gregory of Rimini. … This is a fine work by a fine scholar.’

Sadly, then, Fiorentino's book still awaits a properly critical review.