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Pensée rationnelle et responsabilité morale: Le Traité de sagesse dans La Logique de Port-Royal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Marie-Rose Carré
Marie-Rose Carré*
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
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Abstract

La Logique de Port-Royal is regarded by historians of this science as a treatise that does not fit into any of their categories; indeed, the art of Logic as an independent exercise of the mind seemed unacceptable to its authors. Writing at the end of the Aristotelian era and under the influence of Cartesian theories, but having their own convictions about man's nature and obligations, Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole saw logical reasoning as justifiable only if it trains the mind to distinguish between Good and Bad. They believed in the existence of an immutable, eternal truth; man's reason is intended to make this Truth a perceivable reality. Logic, most importantly, therefore, trains our word-using and concept-making faculty to acknowledge that the needs of man's soul belong to a much higher order of values than the science of “things”: it should thus give reason the strength to be “true” to its own nature. (In French)

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 89 , Issue 5 , October 1974 , pp. 1075 - 1083
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1974

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References

Note 1 in page 1083 Antoine Arnauld et Pierre Nicole, La Logique ou Part de penser, éd. Pierre Clair et François Girbal (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965). Toutes les références de page se rapportent à cette édition.

Note 2 in page 1083 La Logique et son Histoire (Paris: Armand Colin), 1970, p. 180.

Note 3 in page 1083 “Logique,” Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences et des arts (Neufchastel: Le Breton, 1765).

Note 4 in page 1083 Audience, Words and Art (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 66–70.

Note 5 in page 1083 Les Confessions (Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1968), i, 276.