Boethius (c.480-c.525/6), who is best known for his Consolation of Philosophy, has been accused of misinterpreting Aristotle’s logical works in his translations and commentaries thereof. Building on recent scholarship in the philosophy of late antiquity, this book challenges some of the past interpretations of Boethius and reveals significant features of his semantics and logic. With comparisons between his and contemporary arguments and attention to the terminology of late antiquity, this work is of use to those interested in semantics, logic and grammar from antiquity to the modern day. Furthermore, this book’s new conclusions aim to reinvigorate interest in this much-maligned and poorly understood philosopher.

Boethius gehört zu den herausragenden Denkern der spätantiken Geistesgeschichte. Anders, als man vielleicht meinen würde, ist diese Sicht auf Boethius in der Forschung allerdings nicht unumstritten und verhältnismäßig neu. Sie lässt eine Tendenz zur Neubewertung erkennen, die nicht nur Boethius, sondern auch das Denken seiner Zeit immer mehr in seiner Eigenständigkeit zu würdigen beginnt. So werden Boethius wie auch die Spätantike immer weniger nur als Instanzen der Vermittlung klassisch antiken Wissens in das christliche Mittelalter angesehen. Worin aber besteht die Originalität des Boethius und des durch ihn wesentlich geprägten spätantiken Denkens? Kann die Spätantike als eine eigene geistesgeschichtliche Epoche betrachtet werden? Wie ist sie dann zu charakterisieren? Inwiefern ist Boethius als eine oder vielleicht sogar die paradigmatische Gestalt der Spätantike zu beschreiben? Diesen und weiteren Fragen gehen die Autorinnen und Autoren des vorliegenden Sammelbandes nach.

In The Thirteenth-Century Notion of Signification, Ana María Mora-Márquez presents an exhaustive study of the three 13th-century discussions explicitly dealing with the notion of Significatio. Her study aims to show that the three discussions emerge because of apparently opposite claims about the signification of words in the authoritative literature of the period, namely in Aristotle, Boethius and Priscian. It also shows that the three discussions develop in the same direction – towards a unified use of the notion of signification, which keeps its explanatory role in semiotics, but loses its role in grammar and logic. Mora-Márquez offers us the first exhaustive analysis of the scholarly discussions around the notion of signification in the pre-nominalist medieval tradition.

Covers all the important aspects of Boethius's thought and his influence on poets as well as philosophers and theologians.

This book claims that Aristotle followed an aspect theory of predication. On it statements make a basic assertion of existence that can be more or less qualified. It is claimed that the aspect theory solves many puzzles about Aristotle's philosophy and gives a new unity to his logic and metaphysics. The book considers Aristotle's views on predication relative to Greek philology, Aristotle's philosophical milieu, and the history and philosophy of predication theory. It offers new perspectives on such issues as existential import; the relation of "Categories" 2 & 4; the place of "differentiae" and "propria"; the predication of matter; unnatural predication; and the square of opposition. It ends by comparing Aristotle's theory with current ones.

The articles in this volume focus upon Boethius's extant works: his De arithmetica and a fragmentary De musica, his translations and commentaries on logic, his five theological texts, and, of course, his Consolation of Philosophy. They examine the effects that Boethian thought has exercised upon the learning of later generations of scholars.

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.

Philosophers will be richly rewarded by reading John O’Callaghan’s new book, Thomistic Realism and the Linguistic Turn. Based on his broad knowledge of Aristotle and Aquinas, O’Callaghan provides not only an excellent treatment of Aquinas’s epistemology but also a superb demonstration of just how Aquinas might contribute to contemporary debates. Traditionally, the camps of realism and idealism fiercely engaged one another in the field of epistemology. Thomists participated in confronting idealism from their unique realist position. Post-Wittgenstein, the conflict has been dominated by a form of epistemology that grounds all knowledge in linguistic practice. Since Thomists work in a textual and historical mode, their response to the technical approach of the analytic philosophy in which most of the linguistic epistemologists write has been slow in coming. O’Callaghan expertly closes that gap by successfully bringing together these fields.

This study reads Anselm of Canterbury's enigmatic work De grammatico as his introduction to dialectic, covering a model for discourse, a theory of fallacies, and a theory of signification. It provides a new perspective on Anselm's dialectical thought, on dialectic in the 11th century, and on the continuity with 12th Century logical thought.