New perspectives on medieval dialectics
Now there is a book for those who are interested in learning more about how Aristotle's Topics were interpreted during the Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. This is a collection of papers that eleven researchers in the Topica project have written during six years of collaboration.
The chapters of the book Revisiting Medieval Dialectics deal with the medieval reception of Aristotelian dialectics within the Latin, Arabic and Hebrew traditions. The overall contributions are all about the reception of Aristotle's Topics with a focus on historical analyses of dialectics as a general argumentation and scientific method, a field that is understudied in comparison with other areas of the Aristotelian corpus.
Among the philosophers discussed are well-known names such as Alexander of Aphrodisias, Boethius, Buridan and Avicenna, to some lesser known, such as Radulphus Brito, Judah ben Shlomo ha Kohen and Ibn Tumlus, all of whom have left valuable interpretations of Aristotle's writings.
The book is an important contribution to the study of argumentation theory in the past, but also in the present. It can be used by academics who study the historical development of dialectical argumentation, as well as by contemporary argumentation theorists.
The editors of the book are Ana María Mora-Márquez and Gustavo Fernández Walker. It is published within the framework of the project Topica – Pragmatic approaches to Aristotle’s dialectics in the Topics and its medieval reception, at the Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and theory of Science Gothenburg. This research project was funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation.
