''Port-Royal Logic'', or ''Logique de Port-Royal'', is the common name of ''La logique, ou l'art de penser'', an important textbook on logic first published anonymously in 1662 by
Antoine Arnauld
Antoine Arnauld (6 February 16128 August 1694) was a French Catholic theologian, philosopher and mathematician. He was one of the leading intellectuals of the Jansenist group of Port-Royal and had a very thorough knowledge of patristics. Cont ...
and
Pierre Nicole
Pierre Nicole (19 October 1625 – 16 November 1695) was one of the most distinguished of the French Jansenists.
Life
Born in Chartres, he was the son of a provincial barrister, who took in charge his education. Sent to Paris in 1642 to study t ...
, two prominent members of the
Jansenist
Jansenism was an early modern theological movement within Catholicism, primarily active in the Kingdom of France, that emphasized original sin, human depravity, the necessity of divine grace, and predestination. It was declared a heresy by th ...
movement, centered on
Port-Royal.
Blaise Pascal likely contributed considerable portions of the text. Its linguistic companion piece is the ''
Port-Royal Grammar
The ''Port-Royal Grammar'' (originally ''Grammaire générale et raisonnée contenant les fondemens de l'art de parler, expliqués d'une manière claire et naturelle'', "General and Rational Grammar, containing the fundamentals of the art of speaki ...
'' (1660) by Arnauld and Lancelot.
Written in French, it became quite popular and was in use up to the twentieth century, introducing the reader to logic, and exhibiting strong Cartesian elements in its metaphysics and
epistemology
Epistemology (; ), or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics.
Epis ...
(Arnauld having been one of the main philosophers whose objections were published, with replies, in
Descartes' ''
Meditations on First Philosophy''). The ''Port-Royal Logic'' is sometimes cited as a paradigmatic example of traditional
term logic.
The philosopher
Louis Marin particularly studied it in the 20th century (''La Critique du discours'', Éditions de Minuit, 1975), while
Michel Foucault considered it, in ''
The Order of Things
''The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences'' (Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines, 1966) by French philosopher Michel Foucault proposes that every historical period has underlying epistemic assumptions ...
'', one of the bases of the classical ''
épistémè
In philosophy, episteme (; french: épistémè) is a term that refers to a principle system of understanding (i.e., knowledge), such as scientific knowledge or practical knowledge. The term comes from the Ancient Greek verbs, Ancient Greek verb ...
''.
Among the contributions of the ''Port-Royal Logic'' is the popularization of the distinction between comprehension and
extension, which would later become a more refined distinction between
intension and
extension. Roughly speaking: a definition with more qualifications or features (the intension) denotes a class with fewer members (the extension), and vice versa.
The main idea traces back through the
scholastic philosophers
Scholastic may refer to:
* a philosopher or theologian in the tradition of scholasticism
* ''Scholastic'' (Notre Dame publication)
* Scholastic Corporation, an American publishing company of educational materials
* Scholastic Building
The Sc ...
to
Aristotle
Aristotle (; grc-gre, Ἀριστοτέλης ''Aristotélēs'', ; 384–322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Peripatetic school of ph ...
's ideas about
''genus'' and ''species'', and is fundamental in the philosophy of
Leibniz. More recently, it has been related to mathematical
lattice theory
A lattice is an abstract structure studied in the mathematical subdisciplines of order theory and abstract algebra. It consists of a partially ordered set in which every pair of elements has a unique supremum (also called a least upper bou ...
in
formal concept analysis, and independently formalized similarly by
Yu. Schreider's group in
Moscow
Moscow ( , US chiefly ; rus, links=no, Москва, r=Moskva, p=mɐskˈva, a=Москва.ogg) is the capital and largest city of Russia. The city stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, with a population estimated at 13.0 millio ...
,
Jon Barwise
Kenneth Jon Barwise (; June 29, 1942 – March 5, 2000) was an American mathematician, philosopher and logician who proposed some fundamental revisions to the way that logic is understood and used.
Education and career
Born in Independence, ...
& Jerry Seligman in ''Information Flow'',
[Jon Barwise and Jerry Seligman, ''Information Flow: The Logic of Distributed Systems'', Cambridge University Press, 1997, ] and others.
References
Bibliography
* Arnauld, Antoine, and Pierre Nicole. ''La logique ou l’Art de penser''. 1st ed. Paris: Jean Guignart, Charles Savreux, & Jean de Lavnay, 1662.
* Arnauld, Antoine, and Pierre Nicole. ''La logique ou l’Art de penser, contenant, outre les regles communes, plusieurs observations nouvelles, propres à former le jugement''. 6th ed. Amsterdam: Abraham Wolfgang, 1685.
* Arnauld, Antoine, and Pierre Nicole. ''Logic; or, The Art of Thinking''. Translated by Several Hands. 1st ed. London: H. Sawbridge, 1685.
* Arnauld, Antoine, and Pierre Nicole. ''Logic; or, The Art of Thinking''. Translated by John Ozell. London: William Taylor, 1717.
* Arnauld, Antoine, and Pierre Nicole. ''The Art of Thinking; Port-Royal Logic''. Translated, with an introduction by James Dickoff and Patricia James, and a foreword by Charles W. Hendel. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964.
* Arnauld, Antoine, and Pierre Nicole. ''Logic or the Art of Thinking''. Translated by Jill V. Buroker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
External links
*
*
*
History of logic
Term logic
Logic books
1662 books
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