ABSTRACT
If humanists thought that they had discovered “the perfect language,” scholastics appear to have pursued the same elusive ideal. However, the idea of perfection raises diculties for scholastic logic. By denition, a thing is “perfect” if it fullls its purpose. But scholastic logicians rarely state the aims of their works and the purposes of several scholastic logic tracts have been called into question. How, then, could the language of scholastic logic be “the perfect language”? In “Why Don’t Mediaeval Logicians Ever Tell Us What ey’re Doing? Or What Is is, A Conspiracy?” Professor Paul Spade assembles four “exhibits” to illustrate his perplexity over what the medievals were up to. 1 “We know quite a lot about the logic of this period. But what we too oen don’t know is: Just what did they think they were doing?”2 Despite 50 years of research on one of the best textual bases of modern scholarship, at the end of the twentieth century we were no closer to understanding what the medievals were doing, or thought they were doing, than we were at mid-century. Upon reection Spade concludes, “Perhaps, as oen happens with philosophical problems, the real source of the diculty is not that we don’t know the answers to our questions but that we have the wrong ‘focus’ on things and are just asking the wrong questions to begin with.”3 He thus calls for reconsideration of the purpose of the various tracts of scholastic logic.
