Medieval Aristotele
"The centuries between Aristotle and Porphyry bequeathed few logical works to the early Middle Ages. Cicero wrote a Topics, professedly based on Aristotle's work on the subject, but probably derived from a later source. The book was quite widely read in the Middle Ages, at the time when Aristotle's Topics was unknown. A work attributed to Apuleius, and bearing the same Greek title (transliterated) as the De Interpretatione – Peri hermeneias – enjoyed a certain vogue among the earliest medieval logicians. For modern scholars, it is a useful source of Stoic logical theories; but its philosophical content is slight.
By the time of Porphyry, however, a development had taken place in the status, rather than the doctrine, of Aristotelian logic, which would be of great importance for medieval philosophy. Aristotelian logic had been adopted by the Neoplatonists and given a definite place in their programme of teaching. Whereas their use of Aristotle's philosophical works was piecemeal and distorting, his logic was studied faithfully as a whole. Aristotle had rejected the notion of Platonic Ideas; and he had consequently treated genera and species in his logic purely as class-designations for individual things. The Neoplatonists assimilated this approach, which contradicted the very basis of their metaphysics, by limiting the application of Aristotelian logic to the world of concrete things. Stripped of its metaphysical relevance, the tendency was for logic to become more purely formal than it had been for Aristotle. However, the extra-logical aspects of the Categories and the De interpretatione were too intrinsic to these works to be ignored; and the result was the growth of a body of philosophical discussion and commentary within the Neoplatonic logical tradition, only vaguely related to Neoplatonic metaphysics, and sometimes seemingly antithetical to its principles.
Medieval Moon
