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. 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.

Introduction.- Chapter 1. Laura Castelli (Munich/Cambridge): Alexander of Aphrodisias on Aristotle’s Topics.- Chapter 2. Fosca Mariani Zini (Lille): Boethius’ Topics.- Chapter 3. Barbara Bartocci (Geneva): Latin Medievals on Dialectica Docens.- Chapter 4. Gustavo Fernández Walker (Gothenburg): Premises and Problems in Medieval Dialectics.- Chapter 5. Ana María Mora-Márquez (Gothenburg): The Predicable of the Accident. The Metaphysics of Argumentation.- Chapter 6. Rodrigo Guerizoli (Rio de Janeiro): Quidditative and Causal Definitions in John Buridan.- Chapter 7. Julie Brumberg-Chaumont (CNRS): Disputational Theories and Practices During the 13th Century.- Chapter 8. Alexander Lamprakis (Würtzburg): Aristotle’s Topics in the Arabic Tradition.- Chapter 9. Yehuda Halper (Ramat Gan): The Hebrew Tradition of Aristotelian Dialectics.

Ana María Mora-Márquez holds a PhD in Philosophy from University Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne. Since February 2025 she works as senior lecturer in Theoretical Philosophy at Lund University. Since 2016 she has been the principal investigator of two research projects: one on pragmatic approaches to Aristotelian dialectics (2016—2022, KAW) and another one on socio-epistemic approaches to Aristotelian science (2022-2027, KAW). She has published extensively on logic and epistemology in the Aristotelian tradition and is the author of The Thirteenth-Century Notion of Signification. The Discussions and Their Sources and Development (Brill, 2015).

Gustavo Fernández Walker holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina) and a PhD in Classical Philology from the University of Salerno (Italy) and the University of San Martín (Argentina). From 2017 he has been a postdoc at the University of Gothenburg, working in projects about medieval logic and dialectics. He is the editor of Robert Kilwardby’s commentary on the Topics (forthcoming).