Juan Luis Vives Against the Pseudodialecticians: A Humanist Attack on Medieval Logic

The humanist treatises presented here are only peripheral to the history of logic, but I think historians of logic may read them with interest, if perhaps with irritation. In the early sixteenth century the humanists set about to demolish medieval logic based on syllogistic and disputation, and to replace it in the university curriculum with a 'rhetorical' logic based on the use of topics and persuasion. To a very large extent they succeeded. Although Aris­ totelian logic retained a vigorou...