Treatise on Consequences

John Buridan's Treatise on Consequences contains arguably the most important treatment of logical consequence in the middle ages. Buridan was a philosopher and logician working at the University of Paris in the mid-fourteenth century. His works include commentaries on many of Aristotle's works. The [...]
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John Buridan's Treatise on Consequences contains arguably the most important treatment of logical consequence in the middle ages. Buridan was a philosopher and logician working at the University of Paris in the mid-fourteenth century. His works include commentaries on many of Aristotle's works. The rediscovery of Aristotle's logical works in the late twelfth century led to a revival and fresh development of logical theory, culminating in Buridan's overarching and general treatment in the Treatise on Consequences. He starts by distinguishing formal consequence, in which truth is preserved "in all terms", that is, under replacement of non-logical terms by any other, from material consequence, which depends on the meaning of the non-logical terms (i.e., analytic entailment), and from ut nunc consequence, which turns on how things actually are. He gives a novel treatment of the categorical syllogism based on the notion of distribution, which laid the basis of the traditional logic in succeeding centuries.He gives a general account of the modal terms 'necessary', 'possible' and 'contingent', proceeding to an entirely original treatment of modal syllogisms free from the problems that beset Aristotle's modal syllogism. In particular, he distinguishes composite from divided modal propositions (i.e., de dicto from de re), giving a coherent account of the "ampliation" of the subject of divided modal propositions to the possible and setting out their logical inter-relationships systematically. The Latin text was edited from the three extant manuscripts in the 1970s, and was first translated into English in 1985. This entirely new translation aims for a more accurate and clearer rendering of Buridan's text, and is accompanied by a substantial introduction outlining the context of Buridan's treatment and explaining in detail his arguments and his theoretical position.