Valla’s attempt to transform or reform the scholastic study of language and argumentation, and indeed an entire mode of doing philosophy, will likely be met with hostility by the historian of medieval philosophy who is dedicated to the scholastic enterprise and argumentative rigor and conceptual analysis. It is not difficult to point to howlers in Valla’s argumentation, to superficial and unfair criticisms, to straw men types of arguments. For the logician, for example, who defines the rules of the game first and then - so to speak - starts to play, it is unfair or illegitimate to ignore the rules while playing (one is then no longer playing the same game as one’s opponent) or change the rules while playing and then accuses the others of cheating. This is what Valla often seems to do. He takes an Aristotelian doctrine in a way it was not designed for, for example, the syllogism, hypothetical syllogism, modal propositions, and the square of contraries. In all these cases we can see Valla starting, as it were, from the inside of the Aristotelian paradigm, from some basic assumptions and ideas of his opponents, in order to refute them by using a kind of reductio ad absurdum or submitting them to his own criteria that are external to the opponents’ paradigm. It makes his critique often seem unfair and inconsistent but such an interpretation only tells half of the story. It would miss a fundamental point, namely that in order to criticize a piece of established Aristotelian doctrine, Valla has to move in and out of the Aristotelian paradigm, so to speak. This moving inside and outside the Aristotelian paradigm can also explain (and perhaps excuse) Valla’s inconsistency, for it is an inconsistency that is closely tied to his tactics and agenda. Valla did not want to be consistent if this notion means only to comply with the rules of the scholastics, which in his view amounted to rigorously defining one’s terms and pressing these into the straightjacket of a syllogistic argument no matter what common sense and linguistic custom teach us. Behind this inconsistency thus lies a consistent program of replacing philosophical speculation and theorizing by an approach based on common linguistic practice and common sense. Its historical importance in the development of humanism is beyond doubt. But arguably it has also philosophical relevance. For throughout the history of philosophy a cautionary warning can be heard against abstraction, speculation, and formalization. One need not endorse this cautionary note in order to see that philosophy thrives on the creative tension between these two basic views on philosophical analysis - a tension between, on the one hand, abstraction and speculation and, on the other hand, a salubrious warning that the object of philosophical analysis should not be lost from sight.
See also: > Aristotelianism in the Greek, Latin, Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew Traditions > Categories > Syllogism, Theories of
World History
