Dialectical Disputations

Lorenzo Valla

Harvard University Press, Aug 13, 2012 - History - 599 pages

Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457) ranks among the greatest scholars and thinkers of the Renaissance. He secured lasting fame for his brilliant critical skills, most famously in his exposure of the “Donation of Constantine,” the forged document upon which the papacy based claims to political power. Lesser known in the English-speaking world is Valla’s work in the philosophy of language—the basis of his reputation as the greatest philosopher of the humanist movement.

Dialectical Disputations, translated here for the first time into any modern language, is his principal contribution to the philosophy of language and logic. With this savage attack on the scholastic tradition of Aristotelian logic, Valla aimed to supersede it with a new logic based on the actual historical usage of classical Latin and on a commonsense approach to semantics and argument. Valla provides a logic that could be used by lawyers, preachers, statesmen, and others who needed to succeed in public debate—one that was stylistically correct and rhetorically elegant, and thus could dispense with the technical language of the scholastics, a “tribe of Peripatetics, perverters of natural meanings.” Valla’s reformed dialectic became a milestone in the development of humanist logic and contains startling anticipations of modern theories of semantics and language.

Volume 2 contains Books II–III, in which Valla refutes Aristotle’s logical works on propositions, topics, and the syllogistic.

Contents

• Dialectical Disputation 113 ɣ: 429
• Vallas Letter to Giovanni Serra: 436
• Dialectic Propositions and the Square of Opposition: 449
• Some Features of Traditional Syllogistic and Place Logic: 456
• Note on the Text: 467
• Notes to the Text: 469
• Abbreviations: 473
• Notes to the Translation: 477
• Bibliography: 547
• Index: 549

About the author

Brian P. Copenhaver is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and History at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he directed the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, editor of History of Philosophy Quarterly, past president of the Journal of the History of Philosophy, and on the boards of Harvard's I Tatti Renaissance Library and the Italian Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Getty foundations and has authored many books, including Hermetica, The Book of Magic, and Magic in Western Culture. Lodi Nauta is Professor of the History of Philosophy, University of Groningen, the Netherlands.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Dialectical Disputations; Dialectical Disputations, Lorenzo Valla; Volume 2 of Dialectical Disputations, Volume 2; The I Tatti Renaissance library
• Author: Lorenzo Valla
• Editors: Brian P. Copenhaver, Lodi Nauta
• Translated by: Brian P. Copenhaver, Lodi Nauta
• Compiled by: Brian P. Copenhaver, Lodi Nauta
• Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2012
• ISBN: 0674061403, 9780674061408
• Length: 599 pages
• Subjects: History / Europe / Renaissance; Philosophy / General; Philosophy / History & Surveys / Modern; Philosophy / Language; Philosophy / Movements / Humanism