The Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at

King's College London and the Ella Munic. Online at www. History of Philosophy

dot net. Today's episode, Trivial Pursuits, 14th Century Logic.

When I arrived at the University of Notre Dame as a graduate student, I was asked to take a course on formal logic.

I'll admit that I had some mixed feelings about it.

On the one hand, I appreciated that logic is foundational to philosophy.

It was with good reason that the medievals made their

trivial of logical and linguistic arts foundational to university study. You can't

do philosophy without reasoning well and how can you do that without knowing the rules of reasoning?

On the other hand, I couldn't help feeling that if I had wanted to take courses involving proofs

in blackboards full of symbols, I could have just studied math instead.

I suspect some listeners may feel the same, and are coming to this episode on logic in 14th

century scholasticism, not so much with a degree in mathematical logic as with a degree of trepidation.

So let me offer the reassuring observation that in a way we've already been exploring medieval logic in considerable depth without even realizing it.

When we examined the debate between Occam's nominalism and Burley's realism,

discussed mental language and asked whether acknowledging truths about the future leads

to determinism, we were discussing problems raised in treatises on logic.

Take the nominalism realism debate.

This was really a controversy about logical issues, namely the categories, universals, and

supposition theory.

We were trying to decide whether general terms in our language, and especially in the propositions that make up a valid syllogism stand for, or supposite for, something real in the external world or merely universal concepts.

But of course, supposition theory was not only devoted to this sort of question, which we

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