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There are enough
unresolved metaphysical problems in the Categories and the Isagoge (a brilliantly
unsuccessful attempt to defuse these problems) to make a logic curriculum based
on these works a path to questions in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind.
Similarly, the De interpretatione, as presented by Boethius’s long commentary
(heavily based on Porphyry’s lost work), opens up the philosophy of language.9
In addition to logic, grammar also provided opportunities for philosophizing,
in two distinct ways (see Chapter 15). First, the textbook for the advanced study
of grammar was the Institutions, written by Priscian in the early sixth century.
Priscian was influenced by Stoic linguistic theory and, though most of the
work is about the particularities of Latin, some passages raise issues in semantics
that were taken up by medieval readers, especially by eleventh- and twelfthcentury
readers familiar with the Aristotelian semantics of De interpretatione.
Second, ancient Latin texts were studied as part of grammar. They included not
only poetry (Virgil, Ovid, Lucan), but also a quartet of philosophical works:
Plato’s Timaeus in Calcidius’s partial translation, along with his commentary;
Martianus Capella’s On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury, which prefaces its
encyclopedic treatment of the liberal arts with an allegorical account of an ascent
by learning to heaven; Macrobius’s commentary on The Dream of Scipio (the last
book of Cicero’s Republic), which combines astronomy, political philosophy, and
an account of some Platonic doctrines; and Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy –
the work of a Christian written, however, without recourse to revelation and as a
philosophical argument, drawing on Stoic ethics and Neoplatonic epistemology
and metaphysics
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