Three 13th-century views of quantified modal logic

The Logic of Where and While in the 13th and 14th Centuries

Medieval analyses of molecular propositions include many non-truthfunctional connectives in addition to the standard modern binary connectives (conjunction, disjunction, and conditional). Two types of non-truthfunctional molecular propositions considered by a number of 13thand 14th-century authors are temporal and local propositions, which combine atomic propositions with ‘while’ and ‘where’. D...

Logic and the Condemnations of 1277

The struggle to delineate the relationship between theology and logic flourished in the thirteenth century and culminated in two condemnations in early 1277, one in Paris and the other in Oxford. To see how much and what kind of affect ecclessiastical actions such as condemnations and prohibitions to teach had on the development of logic in the Middle Ages, we investigate the events leading up ...

Quantified Modal Logic and the Plural De Re

within a language whose only modal operators are the box and the diamond; other modal idioms cannot be expressed within such a language at all. Nonetheless, quantified modal logic has enjoyed considerable success in uncovering and explaining ambiguities in modal sentences and fallacies in modal reasoning. A prime example of this success is the now standard analysis of the distinction between mo...

Suhrawardi's Modal Syllogisms

Suhrawardi’s logic of the Hikmat al-Ishraq is basically modal. So to understand his modal logic one first has to know the non-modal part upon which his modal logic is built. In my previous paper ‘Suhrawardi on Syllogisms’(3) I discussed the former in detail. The present paper is an exposition of his treatment of modal syllogisms. On the basis of some reasonable existential presuppositi...

Introducing Books/Rhyming and Rational: A Comparative Reading of Two 13th-Century Persian Treatises on Poetry, Shaghayegh Aruji