History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps HoP 487 Showing Good Judgment: The Port Royal Logic
Feb 22, 2026
A tour of how Arnauld and Nicole rewrote logic to sharpen human judgment using Cartesian ideas. A global view of how logicians from Islamic, Indian, and Chinese traditions pursued technical problems. Critiques of scholastic logic and why syllogisms still matter when premises are true. Debate over sensation, innateness, and how language and signs map onto ideas.
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Grad School Logic Humbling Experience
- Peter Adamson recounts struggling in a graduate-level advanced logic course and barely passing with help from better-prepared classmates.
- He forgot most of it by the next year but still values learning basic logic for philosophy and understanding symbols and notations.
Scholastic Logic Became Arcane and Impractical
- Technical logical investigations often drift from practical use into arcane problems with little application, a long-standing critique of scholastic logic.
- Humanists like Valla mocked schoolmen for exploring absurdly artificial statements and using grotesque Latin that obscured usefulness.
Port Royal Logic as Cartesian Standard
- Descartes and his followers pushed for a simpler, more intuitive logic suited to science, contrasting with scholastic complexity.
- Arnauld and Nicole's Port Royal Logic (first 1662, final 1683) became the leading statement of Cartesian logic.
