Plato in infinitum remisse incipit esse albus

Simo Knuuttila

Anja Inkeri Lehtinen

pp. 309-329

in: Esa Saarinen, Risto Hilpinen, Ilkka Niiniluoto, Merrill Provence Hintikka (eds), Essays in honour of Jaakko Hintikka, Berlin, Springer, 1979

Abstract

In the history of western philosophy there has never been as long a period of intensive study of logic and conceptual analysis as there was in the Middle Ages. In recent years the end results of this tradition, as they are to be seen in fourteenth-century philosophical logic and theory of science, have become an object of lively interest. The first results of this new interest have shown a perhaps surprisingly high standard of analysis of problems which have much in common with some of the basic problems of modern research on logic and theory of science. It suffices to mention as examples the problems, much discussed in the fourteenth century, of modal logic, epistemic logic, and deontic logic, questions of intensional identity and methods of individuation, the explanatory nature of scientific sentences and so on. Until recently many of these topics have been studied only occasionally, if at all.¹