This volume is the first annotated translation in any language of the entire text of the Summulae de dialectica, by the Parisian master of arts John Buridan (1300-1358). One of the most influential works in the history of late medieval philosophy, the Summulae is Buridan's systematic exposition of his nominalist philosophy of logic. Buridan's doctrine spread rapidly and for some two hundred years was dominant at many European universities. His work is of increasing interest today not only to historians of (...) medieval philosophy but also to modern philosophers, several of whom find in Buridan's ideas important clues to problems of contemporary philosophy. Gyula Klima provides a substantial introduction to Buridan's life and work and discusses his place in the history of logic. Through extensive notes Klima assists philosopher and medievalist alike to read Buridan with understanding and insight. Those with a philosophical interest in the relations among the structures of language, thought, and reality will find much to ponder in the Summulae. (shrink)

John Buridan was a fourteenth-century philosopher who enjoyed an enormous reputation for about two hundred years, was then totally neglected, and is now being 'rediscovered' through his relevance to contemporary work in philosophical logic. The final chapter of Buridan's Sophismata deals with problems about self-reference, and in particular with the semantic paradoxes. He offers his own distinctive solution to the well-known 'Liar Paradox' and introduces a number of other paradoxes that will be unfamiliar to most logicians. Buridan also moves on (...) from these problems to more general questions about the nature of propositions, the criteria of their truth and falsity and the concepts of validity and knowledge. This edition of that chapter is intended to make Buridan's ideas and arguments accessible to a wider range of readers. The volume should interest many philosophers, linguists and logicians, who are increasingly finding in medieval work striking anticipations of their own concerns. (shrink)

This publication offers the first critical edition of John Buridan’s second set of questions on Aristotle's “De generatione et corruptione”. The edition was made by Michiel Streijger, Paul Bakker and Hans Thijssen. First published as a printed book in 2010, the publication has been converted to open access with the CC BY-NC-ND license as of September 2023.

This entirely new English translation of Buridan's classic treatment of logical consequence aims to make accessible to the modern reader the foremost treatment of the subject in the middle ages. The translation is accompanied by an introduction in which Buridan's ideas are set in their historical context and clearly explained.

Buridan was a brilliant logician in an age of brilliant logicians, sensitive to formal and philosophical considerations. There is a need for critical editions and accurate translations of his works, for his philosophical voice speaks directly across the ages to problems of concern to analytic philosophers today. But his idiom is unfamiliar, so editions and trans lations alone will not bridge the gap of centuries. I have tried to make Buridan accessible to philosophers and logicians today by the introduc tory (...) essay, in which I survey Buridan's philosophy of logic. Several problems which Buridan touches on only marginally in the works trans lated herein are developed and discussed, citing other works of Buridan; some topics which he treats at length in the translated works, such as the semantic theory of oblique terms, I have touched on lightly or not at all. Such distortions are inevitable, and I hope that the idiosyncracies of my choice of philosophically relevant topics will not blind the reader to other topics of value Buridan considers. My goal in translating has been to produce an accurate renaering of the Latin. Often Buridan will couch a logical rule in terms of the grammatical form of a sentence, and I have endeavored to keep the translation consistent. Some strained phrases result, such as "A man I know" having a different logic from "I know a man. " This awkwardness cannot always be avoided, and I beg the reader's indulgence. All of the translations here are my own. (shrink)

John Buridan (d. ca. 1360) was one of the most talented and influential philosophers of the later Middle Ages. His Questions Commentary on the eight books of Aristotle's Physics is the most important witness to Buridan's teachings in the field of natural philosophy. This volume presents the first critical edition of books III and IV of the final redaction of Buridan's Questions Commentary on the Physics. The critical edition of the Latin text is accompanied by a detailed guide to the (...) contents of Buridan's questions by Edith D. Sylla. (shrink)

This critical edition is the first edition of John Buridan's commentary on Aristotle's Topics. The work is preserved in one complete manuscript of good quality and in four abbreviated versions. Buridan composed the work at the University of Paris in the first half of the fourteenth century, and the work illustrates very well how the commentators of this period took a freer attitude to Aristotle than previously and were selective about the passages which they commented upon. In book II Buridan (...) discussed a number of sophisms which are not found in his collection of sophisms. The commentary was quite influential in the fifteenth century, particularly on the teaching in the universities of Central and Eastern Europe. (shrink)

'De syllogismis' is the fifth treatise of John Buridan's 'Summulae dialecticae', a textbook he wrote for his logic course in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Paris. 'De syllogismis' contains material related to Aristotle's Analytica Priora and Boethius's 'De hypotheticis syllogismis'. The textbook discusses inferences involving not only propositions de inesse, but also propositions featuring oblique, reduplicative and infinite terms. Buridan displays a keen interest in modal inferences and inferences involving propositional attitudes. Buridan's De syllogismis continues along the (...) lines of his nominalist conception of the relations between mind, language and reality. (shrink)

Pref. and introd. in English; text in Latin.