This book offers a major reassessment of Abelard’s modal logic and theory of modalities, and provides a comprehensive study of the 12th-century context in which his views originated and developed, by analysing many logical sources that are still unedited and mostly unexplored.

The first book-length study to address issues in modal logic at the eve of the Renaissance, this monograph provides important new insights into the way the debates on modal logic during the post-medieval period tied in with the so-called Wegestreit, the divide between the via antiqua and via moderna that dominated the discourse on logic during the 15th and early 16th centuries. The focus of the book is on the logic and philosophy of language of John Fabri of Valenciennes (fl. c. 1500), one of the last exponents of the terminist approach to logic that was bitterly criticized by the humanist movement. By means of a careful reconstruction of Fabri’s text, the book argues that Fabri's modal logic ultimately goes back to the work of John Buridan, and represents the same approach to the topic as the modal logics that were developed by adherents of the via moderna in Paris. This has significant implications for the historiography of post-medieval philosophy. Fabri was active in Louvain, which until the late 16th century was the most important intellectual center in the Low Countries. According to a long-standing tradition in the scholarship, Louvain was one of the few bulwarks of via antiqua logic on the map of post-medieval Europe. The book argues that this thesis is at least in part a scholarly fiction, and thus in need of revision. By shedding light on an author whose thought has thus far remained entirely unstudied, it also constitutes a valuable step towards a history of philosophy without any gaps. The book is aimed at graduate students and researchers in the history of logic and philosophy, but will also be of interest to intellectual historians, historians of ideas, and to any contemporary modal logician who is interested in the historical roots of their discipline.

This book offers a major reassessment of the philosophy of Peter Abelard (1079-1142) which shows that he was a far more constructive and wider-ranging thinker than has usually been supposed. It combines detailed historical discussion, based on published and manuscript sources, with philosophical analysis which aims to make clear Abelard's central arguments about the nature of things, language and the mind, and about morality. Although the book concentrates on these philosophical questions, it places them within their theological and wider intellectual context.

Interest in the metaphysics and logic of possible worlds goes back at least as far as Aristotle, but few books address the history of these important concepts. This volume offers new essays on the theories about the logical modalities (necessity and possibility) held by leading philosophers from Aristotle in ancient Greece to Rudolf Carnap in the twentieth century. The story begins with an illuminating discussion of Aristotle's views on the connection between logic and metaphysics, continues through the Stoic and mediaeval (including Arabic) traditions, and then moves to the early modern period with particular attention to Locke and Leibniz. The views of Kant, Peirce, C. I. Lewis and Carnap complete the volume. Many of the essays illuminate the connection between the historical figures studied, and recent or current work in the philosophy of modality. The result is a rich and wide-ranging picture of the history of the logical modalities.

This volume evaluates Thomas Bradwardine's view of time as a mathematical, philosophical and theological concept within the context of ancient and medieval discussions of the problem of time. The book begins with an historiographical analysis of Bradwardine's mathematical and theological works, followed by an examination of the problem of time in classical, early medieval and thirteenth-century texts. Next, a series of chapters surveys Bradwardine's view of time as it related to proportionality, contingency, continuity and predestination. A final chapter establishes Bradwardine's place among fourteenth-century natural philosophers and theologians. As it uses a wide range of Bradwardine's writings, this book is able to show how Bradwardine's philosophical and theological views converged. This study is especially useful for historians of late medieval science, philosophy and theology.

The first general study of Peter Lombard (c. 1100-1160) in a century, this book places Peter's thought in the context of the intellectual debates of his time in the effort to understand the substance of Lombardian theology and the reasons why his principal work, the Sentences , immediately became a classic of early scholastic theology with a durable influence, doing more to shape the education of university theologians and philosophers than any other work of systematic theology for the next four centuries. Attention is paid to the sentence collection as a genre of theological literature, the problem of theological language with which Peter and his contemporaries wrestled, and his contribution to early scholastic biblical exegesis as well as to the development of his systematic theology in the Sentences .