A short notice of a new edition of Peter Abelard's commentary on Aristotle's On interpretation was published in this Journal lxiv (2013), 596–7. Before Abelard turned to the study of theology he was an influential teacher of logic. His glosses on On interpretation analysed statement-making sentences and may first have been written up in about 1118–20, after he had become a monk, and later expanded during the 1120s and 1130s when he had also become a highly controversial teacher of theology. The present volume is a supplement to the 2010 volume containing those glosses and provides for the first time complete editions of two anonymous texts, themselves incomplete, stemming from the milieu in which Abelard's work was studied and disputed. The second, edited by Klaus Jacobi and Christian Strub, is an independent short treatise on modal propositions which seems to have been slipped in to one of the copies of Abelard's glosses by way of substitution. The first, far more substantial, are glosses on On interpretation edited by Peter King which open with the words Doctrinae sermonum and which were written in the shadow of Abelard's work, using perhaps a lost copy of his commentary but including much original material and independent discussion of contemporary ideas and positions which provide ‘a rare glimpse into the Parisian philosophical world of the early twelfth century’ (p. xxxix). Here there is extended analysis, grounded in the writings of Boethius, of foreknowledge and freedom of choice, of necessity, eternity and divine providence; and many citations of unnamed teachers and their views as well as citations of the teaching of Robert of Melun and Alberic of Paris. It need hardly be said that such discussions were the laboratory in which scholastic theologians with dialectical inclinations sharpened their skills. An electronic version of an Index verborum et rerum to the Glossae will become accessible at http://www.corpuschristianorum.org/series/cccm.html and will support further specialised studies of language and logic in the world in which medieval scholasticism was taking shape.
No CrossRef data available.