Are logical truths empirical?

Anthony mentions in his comments here that he holds that logic itself is empirical, whereas I holds (he believes) that knowledge of logic is innate.

Well, I wouldn't exactly describe my position the way he does. I lean towards the Wittgensteinian position that there are no 'logical truths' as such, but rather principles like the Contradiction and Excluded Middle are built into the 'scaffolding' of our language, so that we can't describe them using language, but only show them, as it were. On the idea that 'logic itself is empirical' – by which I assume he means that logical truths are empirical – I don't know what to say. What does 'empirical' mean? If the idea is absurd, how would we demonstrate its absurdity?

Aristotle discussed the problem in book 4 of the Metaphysics. Aquinas' commentary on it is in the Logic Museum here. It includes links to Aristotle's original text.

Supposition theory

I have expanded the Logic Museum page on 'supposition' to include more about the various divisions of the subject, plus something on 'simple' supposition.  I need to write something about 'personal' supposition to complete it, and notice the red link on 'reference'.  Reference is a modern notion, no less vague than supposition, and needs careful treatment.

Lectura (Scotus)

Now in the Logic Museum, book I of the Lectura by Duns Scotus. These are Scotus' notes for lectures he gave on Books 1 and 2 of the Sentences as a bachelor theologian at Oxford. It is the only material from his Oxford lectures that were available for some parts of the Sentences, as the Ordinatio (the revised and edited version of the lectures) was never completed.  The work is also useful for presenting an earlier and generally simpler and less 'subtle' version of his thought.

As with much of the material in the museum, it is untranslated, I am afraid.

History of the infinite

Scotus' discussion of the infinite reminded me of a (very old) Logic Museum page on the same subject.  Many of the links, particularly to those involving Aquinas, are to material in external sites that is now in the Logic Museum itself.  There is other material that ought to be there but isn't (including the passages from Scotus that I quoted recently).  The picture of the corridor at the top was taken in Brompton Cemetery.

Scotus Quodlibetal Questions

I've been a bit quiet for a few days, which is because I located  a source for Scotus' difficult to obtain Quodlibetal Questions. Now in the Logic Museum.

Ockham and the London friaries

Three additions to the Logic Museum. First, a summary of Ockham's Summa of Logic. The material on part I is pretty much complete, but parts II and III, and particularly part III, need further work.  Part III has been little studied - even Boehner only got as far as chapter 2.  I wrote the Wikipedia article on the same subject some years ago, but that is a mere stub.

Next, London Greyfriars,  one of five proposed articles on London friaries.  This is an obvious continuation of the version I wrote in December 2010 for Wikipedia.  Unfortunately I was blocked by administrators, halfway through writing this section, which as you can see is still incomplete.  One of the administrators actually deleted the article, although it was soon restored.  This was all part of an ongoing feud with Wikipedia whose origins have long since been forgotten, as with most feuds.  The new article completes the section on the buildings and - very important - has a list of some of the books which John Leland found in the Greyfriars library before it was dispersed by King Henry's henchmen.  I am still fascinated by the idea that Ockham stayed at Greyfriars while he wrote Summa Logicae.  Many of his biographers think so, but I had a correspondence with William Courtenay who persuaded me that this is still not certain.  It is pretty certain that Ockham, Wodeham and Chatton were all together at some time.  What we are not certain about is where this was.  Note, however, that the Greyfriars library contained quite a few works by the venerable inceptor.

Finally, a stub on the Carmelite friary, which also had an extensive library.  The crypt of the friary is still visible under the offices of Freshfields in Whitefriars street, and there is a link to some photos.

Spamming in medieval Latin

The discussion continues on Wikipedia about whether links to the Logic Museum constitutes 'spam' or not.  It descends into ever deeper levels of absurdity.  E.g. "There is not much spamming in Medieval Latin these days".  Very true.

I see also that the article on Ockham's magnificient Summa Logicae has now been protected against vandalism.  When Wikipedia goes wrong, it goes very very wrong.

You are a donkey

New in the Logic Museum, fifteen Sophismata by the Oxford logician and mathematician William Heytesbury. Heytesbury also wrote a work proving that you are donkey (tu es asinus) in no fewer than 39 ways, called Sophismata Asinana. A sophisma is a statement where there are apparently reasonable arguments supporting both the statement and its denial. Resolving the sophisma involves close and careful attention to the meaning, possible ambiguities, and avoidance of fallacy. Latin only, for the moment.

Dici de omni

A new article in the Logic Museum on the dici de omni, a principle derived from Aristotle which was supposed by the medieval scholastic writers (such as Giles of Rome) to underlie all reasoning.  The article mentions the debased and inaccurate  version of the principle used by neo-scholastic writers and used in manuals of 'traditional logic' such as Mill's System of Logic.  It also mentions the current version of the Wikipedia article, which is seriously incomplete and inaccurate.  The irony, which I love, is that Wikipedia will be unable to link to the more comprehensive Logic Museum article because of the ban on all outward-bound links to the Logic Museum.  There is also a new category for 'dici de omni' so you can reference scholastic texts mentioning the principle, as well as a category for Wikipedia articles, linked from the Logic Museum, which need improvement.

Street of straw

I gave an example in this post from June 2010 of the odd little details of a man’s life that occasionally obtrude from otherwise serious and impersonal work. I just found another in Buridan’s Summulae de dialectica Book I c. 7. Gerardus est cum Buridano; ergo ipse est in vico Straminum. What is he on about? Well, the Vicus Straminis or street of straw – so-called from the straw-strewn floors of the schools, was in the area still known as the Latin Quarter, the centre of the Arts schools of Paris. Petrach calls it the strepidulus straminum vicus, the noisy street of straws, presumably because of the incessant noise of the disputation going on. This was where Buridan would have conducted his lectures in the 1330s, and presumably spent so much time there that if Gerard is with Buridan, then he is in the Vicus Straminis.

The street is now called the Rue du Fouarre – there’s a bit about it in the French Wikipedia, but seems to have retained little of its former scholastic glory. The article quotes Balzac, who says that it was once the most famous street in Paris in the thirteenth century. But now (that is, in Balzac’s day), it is the poorest one.

Buridan's Summa Dialectica

Buridan's immense Summa of logic is now available at the Logic Museum. Latin only for the moment.

Augustine on language

More Augustine: The commentary on the Sermon on the mount, in parallel Latin-English. And The Teacher (De magistro), in Latin only at this point, except for a short paragraph at the beginning which I have tackled. It is an enquiry into the nature of language and signs, very difficult. Wittgenstein, as practically everyone knows, was profoundly influenced by Augustine, although I don't know if he had read this piece. When translated, it will be the first English version on the webs.

More Augustine

Now added in parallel text:

• De moribus ecclesiae catholicae
• De moribus Manichaeorum
• De duabus animabus

About the Manicheans, mostly.

Augustine - Soliloquies

I got round to a much-needed overhaul of the Augustine index in the Logic Museum.  This now has pretty much everything Augustine wrote, arranged in approximate date order, with links to Latin and English versions where available.  Logic museum parallel text versions are indicated in bold.  And there is the addition of the Soliloquies in parallel text.  Note that all Logic Museum texts are 'anchored', so that can link to any section of the text.  For example, section 20 of book I.

On the usefulness of believing

St Augustine's work, in parallel Latin English now at the Logic Museum here.  Scotus quotes this a number of times, so I thought it useful to include. My aim, one day, is to have a hypertext that covers all the 'authorities' (Aristotle, the Church Fathers, the Vulgate of course) linking to all the scholastic texts that quote them or refer to them in any way.

The price and the value of knowledge

Following my earlier comments about the availability of Latin philosophical texts, I found that a version of Wadding’s 1639 edition is available from a Tokyo bookseller.

Here is all you need to know about this edition. It was originally published in 1639. It was reprinted in 1895 by Vives (with minor changes). The Vives was reprinted by Gregg International in 1969, and that is the one for sale here. That’s right, $12,421.83 for a reprint of a reprint. How wrong. There are two values to a material book. One is the value of the knowledge contained in it, and that – in financial terms – should be free. That’s because, to employ a cliché, knowledge – or rather the means of acquiring it - should be free. The other value is the rarity or commodity value of the material book. I don’t mind paying for the latter – the most recent addition to my collection is a 1555 edition of the works of Horace, all of which are available in digital form off the net, but not in a beautiful way that you can look at and touch, and which I am willing to pay for. But paying a large sum for a recent reprint of no real material value, is absurd.

Oddly enough, the Heythrop actually does have the original Wadding 1639, which must be priceless. It is mouldering away in a basement, which flooded a few years ago, causing damage to not a few books. Parts of the Vatican edition are there, also in a bad state, with loose leaves all over the place. Ironically some parts have never been read, still in their uncut state. It is truly absurd that in the information age, this valuable commodity is still being held in material form that cannot be indexed, and which can be easily damaged, lost or stolen. But we have no better system, yet.

What’s up at the Logic Museum

The Logic Museum is now a wiki, although a closed one, meaning not everyone can edit.

It’s still in the experimental stage. It uses Semantic Mediawiki which means pages can be tagged and sorted in the database. This page shows the kinds of queries that can be run. And it includes a text editor that deals with tables better than a standard wiki – parallel non-English vs English texts are a key feature

The principles of the project are set out here, but essentially it is all about bringing key texts to a wider audience. In two ways.

(1) Specialists in medieval philosophy recognise the difficulty of obtaining sources even in Latin editions. Critical edition projects like Bonaventura and Vatican have a limited print run, and not all libraries purchase these. I have access to the finest libraries in London, including the Warburg, which specialises in medieval and renaissance texts, and the Heythrop, which has a separate theology and philosophy library. Even these are missing some of the texts I would like to read, including Mazzarella’s edition of Simon of Faversham, and Scotus’ Quodlibeta. (The British Museum would certainly have copies, but I have so far avoided this institution as a result of previous experience). So a project that brings Latin texts to the Internet would be useful even to specialists.

(2) The second way involves translating these texts into English thus bringing them to a much wider audience.

The technical problems of the Logic Museum are now pretty much solved. The problem of getting it to work as a collaborative project are only starting. Wikipedia proved that crowdsourcing worked to a certain extent – although many of my posts here have been critical of the project, I still strongly believe it achieved something worthwhile and important. However, Wikipedia relies mostly on unskilled volunteers. By contrast, apart from document scanning, most of the skills involved in putting the Logic Museum together involve some sort of specialist skill. There is still no digitiser that understands Latin spelling and grammar. Thus a typical raw output looks like this. Correcting these texts means human spell-checking. Translating the texts into English requires a higher level of expertise. It’s not the grammar which is difficult. Rather, philosophical Latin employs a number of technical terms which are unintelligible even to a specialist in classical Latin. E.g. ‘dicuntur de quolibet’, which means nothing to someone brought up on the Latin of Cicero and Vergil.

Of course there is a large pool of specialist expertise in philosophy and theology departments across the world. But here you have the problem that crowdsourcing is a volunteer activity, whereas academic specialists depend for their career on publications in recognised sources. Actually they volunteer for that also – no one is paid for their contributions to journals, or for published books. The key is ‘recognised source’. Until someone can put on their CV that they have had a Logic Museum translation accepted, it is unlikely that the project will attract much interest from specialists. There is no reason in principle why this should not happen – think of the Logic Museum as potentially a sort of publishing house which has a review and acceptance process identifying which individual made which important contribution to the project.  But setting this up in the right way requires more thought, and more work.

The Logic Museum is excommunicated

Today is May 26, the anniversary of my namesake William of Ockham's flight from Avignon after a dispute with the Pope about Franciscan poverty.  That strangely coincides with two other related things. 

First, the excommunication of my website The Logic Museum from Wikipedia.  This means that any mention of the Museum, or any outbound link to it from Wikipedia, is now prohibited.  As my readers will know, the Museum is primarily a repository of primary sources on logic, mainly medieval texts, that are difficult to locate even in a good university library (some of the texts I plan on publishing are unavailable even in London).  What did the poor creature do to deserve this?  (I am told it is because of my criticism of Wikipedia here, and because of other criticism by the owner of the hosting site, Greg Kohs).

Second, Ockham's flight is mentioned on the main page of Wikipedia - see the in the 'on this day' column.  "On this day ... 1328 – William of Ockham, originator of the methodological principle Occam's razor, secretly left Avignon under threat from Pope John XXII".   This is ironic.  As every medieval scholar knows, Ockham was not the originator of this principle at all (although he often used it, and it bears his name). If they had been allowed to link to the Logic Museum, Wikipedians would have learned this.  They could have looked at this essay by Thorburn, who first debunked the claim nearly 100 years ago.  Or they could look in the article on Ockham in the Logic Museum.  But they can't.

And as I commented last year, there are many mistakes in the article itself.  Some were cleaned up (by someone I notified by email).  But, as of this morning, many errors or significant omissions remain. 

• The most significant error in the article still remained until this morning (when someone spotted a draft of this post and changed it.  It said that Ockham does accept the Principle of Sufficient Reason, when of course he clearly doesn't.  Until this morning, that mistake was there for five years.  And there is still a problem, because the claim is spliced with an unrelated one sourced from the Catholic Encyclopedia, about Ockham's view on the distinction between essence and existence, between the active and passive intellect.
• It stills contains the odd claim that Ockham has been called a "terminist", to distinguish him from a nominalist or a conceptualist, is from the Catholic Encyclopedia. Thus the article combines what is probably wrong ('terminism' can be consistent with nominalism**) with the section from the SEP which is intended for an academic audience, and is impenetrable out of context.
• As I commented just this week, the article on Durandus does not mention that Durandus was one of those assigned by John XXII to investigate Ockham’s nominalism. That is because the whole article was plagiarised from the Catholic Encyclopedia, written 100 years ago.  Nor does the article on Ockham.

Again, if readers of Wikipedia had access to other sources to check these claims, they would be better off. But there is an increasing tendency for Wikipedia to see itself as the only source of knowledge in the Internet, and to penalise - by this kind of blocking - those who do not wish, or who cannot contribute to its articles. Sort of, changing 'anyone can edit' into 'everyone must edit'.

If you feel strongly about this, and I think you should, you can comment on Jimmy Wales page here.

** Particularly in the case of Ockham's nominalism, defined as the view that we should not multiply entities according to the multiplicity of names.

The Monologion

Anselm's Monologion - all 80 chapters of it - is now in the Logic Museum, in parallel Latin English.  Ockham frequently refers to this work in the Summa Logicae.

More testing

http://www.logicmuseum.com/index.htm

This used to be a philosophy blog.