Logic

The critical judgment to which Albert has often been subjected as a philosopher has been seen as especially justified in the case of his logic, so that S. Ebbesen (Zimmerman and Villemain-Diem 1981), following Prantl’s critique, goes as far as asking whether Albert ‘‘the Great’’ received this appellation according to the greatness of his thought, or, more probably, because of a labeling (‘‘Great’’) which was supposed to distinguish members of the Dominican order from those of the Franciscan one (minor friars). Albert’s dependence toward Kilwardby’s commentaries on logic is beyond question, long extracts of his paraphrases being almost copied from Kilwardby’s questions. This is true in particular for the Analytics, the Peri hermeneias and the Sophistici elenchi. But in others works, such as the commentaries on Porphyry’s Isagoge and on Categories, Albert’s writings are much less dependent, and represent a novelty in medieval Latin logic, because of their intensive use of Arabic texts, especially Avicenna’s Logica, together with al-(GazalI, al-FarabI, and Averroes (for his commentary on metaphysics) - the question of Albert’s knowledge of Averroes’ middle commentaries on logic remains unsettled. Despite Avicenna’s overall influence, the Dominican master produced a personal synthesis for important questions such as the division of philosophy and the place of logic, the division of logic (he adopts the Arabic ‘‘long Organon,’’ which includes rhetorics and poetics), the object of logic (syllogism?, language?, reasoning?, secondary intentions?), the universals, etc. He does maintain those general theoretical choices within the commentaries marked by Kilwardby’s influence so that he is led also in those texts to personal reformulations. One can say, in general, that Albert is much more interested in the ontological and noetical questions underlying semantic and logical problems, as it can be seen in the way he deals with the problem of the universals (see the section on metaphysics). His logic has been widely read, but has had no great influence on a philosophical point of view during the thirteenth century. His work encounters nonetheless some important echoes during the early fourteenth century, as shown by the sharp debate over the secondary intentions as the subject of logic where his position (and his ambiguities) is an obvious starting point.