Abstract

The «reverse» in «Logic in Reverse» is there precisely to remind us that illegitimate argumentative moves reveal good argumentative rules and procedures to the same extent that they themselves are revealed by the standards they violate.

The standard story is that after Aristotle got off to a tentative start, the study of fallacies lay dormant until people at Port Royal and John Locke revived it. RevLog Redux will show that this narrative is misleading and will replace it with a new account which will bring to bear the full resources of medieval treatments of illegitimate argumentative moves within and across the Latin West and the Greek East, as well as in the Arabic and the Hebrew traditions.

To that end, RevLog Redux will develop an integrated computational infrastructure to manage the wealth and complexity of data, information and knowledge the project is expected to produce: namely, AskSten (as in «Ask Sten Ebbesen»), a multi-layered virtual research environment whose digital archive, knowledge base, Semantic Web architecture and on-line deployment will enhance the formal expressivness and coherence of the project’s findings.