Revisiting Medieval Dialectics

This book presents a collection of essays by prominent young researchers and established scholars on the medieval reception of Aristotle’s Topics in the Latin, Arabic and Hebraic traditions, as well as on its late-ancient sources in Alexander of Aphrodisias and Boethius.

This book presents a collection of essays by prominent young researchers and established scholars on the medieval reception of Aristotle’s Topics in the Latin, Arabic and Hebraic traditions, as well as on its late-ancient sources in Alexander of Aphrodisias and Boethius. The book thus provides a fruitful engagement with the late-ancient to medieval reception of the Topics, a tradition that has been understudied in recent scholarship. The collected contributions revisit the reception of the Topics focusing on historical analyses of dialectics as a general method of argumentation and as a scientific method. The authors studied in this book range from well-known figures such as Alexander, Boethius, Buridan and Avicenna, to the lesser-known Radulphus Brito, Judah ben Shlomo ha Kohen, and Ibn Tumlus. This book is an important contribution to the study of argumentation theory in the historical past and is of interest to scholars of the historical development of dialectical argumentation and argumentation theorists.