Dialectic as the doctrine/art of disputing for and against a given thesis held a central position at the medieval schools and universities. The intensive examination of medieval manuscript sources in recent years has revealed the fertility and subtlety of scholastic thinking and its relevance to the modern study of logic and the philosophy of language. The contributions to this volume focus on a series of questions which were central to scholastic logic, the questions concerning the validity of argumentation and proof.
The 35 papers - written partly in English and partly in German - range from examinations of basic questions of syntax and semantics and of the theory of inference through presentations of the rules which define logical consistency, to treatments on the use of logic in the natural sciences, in practical discourse and in theology. Some of the texts being thoroughly analysed and interpreted are edited in this volume for the first time.
The authors include most of the established experts in the field and their papers provide a survey of the current state of research in both its historical and systematic aspects. The parallel English and German introductions by the editor link the individual papers to give an introduction to the scholastic theory of argumentation, which should also be comprehensible to non-specialists.