12 - WALTER BURLEY: Obligations (selections)

Summary

Introduction

(For information on Burley's life and writings, see the introduction to his Consequences, Translation 9.)

Burley's Treatise on Obligations, portions of which are translated here, was written around 1302. It is a representative account of an intriguing part of medieval logic from a relatively early stage of its development. His treatment of obligations here is fundamental for understanding the many and varied later fourteenth-century accounts.

The notion of logical obligations developed in the context of the dialectical disputation in the highly structured form inherited from Aristotle's Topics. The job of the initiator of an obligational disputation (the ‘opponent’) is to present propositions to which his designated interlocutor (the ‘respondent’) is obliged to respond in certain ways. The opponent aims at trapping the respondent into maintaining contradictory propositions, and the respondent aims at getting through the stipulated time-period of the disputation without having contradicted himself. The respondent's obligatory responses are three: granting the proposition put to him by the opponent, denying it, ‘doubting’ it – i.e., claiming that his circumstances in the disputation do not support his granting or denying it. The respondent may also draw a distinction among senses of an ambiguous proposition put to him, but he must follow that distinguishing with granting, denying, or doubting the proposition in each of the senses distinguished.

Obligational disputations became important in fourteenth-century university education not only for the intellectual training they afforded but also because they gave rise to certain dialectical paradoxes that were philosophically interesting in their own right, some because they seemed to challenge the laws of logic.