19th European Symposium on Medieval Logic and Semantics
“Formal approaches and Natural Language in Medieval logic”
12-16 June 2012, Geneva
Théâtre Les Salons, Rue Jean-François Bartholoni 6, 1204 Geneva
The late medieval period is now widely acknowkedged as one of the most salient moments of the history of logic: it not only placed logic at the center of knowledge, il also begot highly sophisticated theories. The last fifty years of increasingly intense research have brought about an ever more detailed knowledge of these theories, allowing for better reconstructions of medieval innovations, in the realms of argumentation and semantics. And yet, the questions as to what kind of logic is medieval logic, whether and to what extent it correponds to nowaday’s conception of logic, and even, what is the nature of its object, remain arduous ones.
Among the main characteristics usually granted to medieval logic is the formal character of its approaches of argumentation and semantics; but is it formal in the way modern logic is -- or believes it is? Medieval logic does not make recourse to symbolisms, after all, and the fact that the idea of formal validity might have appeared in the twelfth century does not mean that developping formal approaches was an aim of medieval logicians. The formal character of medieval approaches regards semantic theories as well: to what extent are they formal and what are they a semantics of? Medieval logicians use Latin to deal with Latin constructions, but do these constructions belong to natural language or are they enregimented to the point of forming some sort of ideal language?