Paul Schuurman
Associate professor in the history of philosophy at Erasmus School of Philosophy, Erasmus University Rotterdam (retired). Latest book: "Concepts of War, 1650-1900: From Free-Rider Strategies to Survival of the Fittest" (Leiden: Brill, 2023).
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The point about a rupture between old and new logic was not lost on such contemporaries as William Molyneux (1656-1698), who in the dedicatory letter to his Dioptrica Nova, published in 1693, wrote: ‘Logick has put on a Countenance clearly different from what it appeared in formerly: How unlike is its shape in the Ars Cogitandi, Recherches de la Verite, &c. from what it appears in Smigletius, and the Commentators of Aristotle? But to none do we owe for a greater Advancement in this Part of Philosophy, than to the incomparable Mr. Locke, Who, in his Essay concerning Humane Understanding, has rectified more received Mistakes, and delivered more profound Truths, established on Experience and Observation, for the Direction of Man’s mind in the Prosecution of Knowledge, (which I think may be properly term’d Logick) than are to be met with in all the Volumes of the Antients.’
Molyneux here makes a fundamental distinction between such Aristotelian textbooks on logic as produced by Martin Smiglecki (1564-1618), and such novel works as Arnauld’s L’Art de penser. La logique de Port-Royal, published in 1662 (Ars Cogitandi is the title of the second, and subsequent, Latin translations, 1674), Malebranche’s Recherche de la vérité (1674-1675) and Locke’s An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689). Another point of note is the broadness of Molyneux’s notion of logic. In addition to Arnauld’s Logique, he also considers Malebranche’s Recherche as a contribution towards the development of a new logic and he even rates Locke’s Essay as the crowning achievement of this process, although neither the Recherche nor the Essay were presented explicitly as systems of logic by their authors.
Taking my clue from Molyneux, I start chapter two with a discussion of Locke’s Essay as a work of logic and make an attempt at a new and extensive assessment of what John Yolton described, as early as 1955, as the ‘logic of ideas’. I shall begin with what I consider the three basic elements of the new logic: ideas (especially clear and distinct ideas), human faculties (e. g. sensory perception, memory, understanding) and method (both rationalist and empiricist) and I shall stress the intimate connection between these topics. Ideas, faculties and method figure in varying degrees in all specimens of the new logic, but none of these deserves the name ‘logic of ideas’ better than Locke’s Essay. Consequently, his work forms a suitable point of departure for a history of the logic of ideas—which does not imply, of course, that the Essay is nothing but a work of logic. I do agree with Molyneux, however, that the Essay is the most outspoken specimen of the new logic and I also hold that an analysis of the Essay as a work of logic can add to our understanding of this immensely rich work.
Once the Lockean paradigm is established, I turn to Locke’s predecessors. I shall argue that some of the elements of the new logic were already introduced by such Aristotelian logicians as Robert Sanderson, but I shall point to Descartes as the greatest source of influence on the new logic. I shall make a detailed comparison between the views of Descartes and Locke on the elements that are central to the new logic. I shall discuss the different epistemolgical thrust that they give to the notion of ‘clear and distinct ideas’ and I shall compare their methods. I shall argue that ascribing a rationalist method to Descartes and an empiricist method to Locke amounts to an oversimplification, and I shall defend the view that they each had two methods, their first method reflecting rationalist and the second empiricist strands.
Although Descartes was of seminal importance for the logic of ideas, he never produced a treatise that brought its main elements together in a single systematic structure. He never faced the task of finding a structure that did justice to the content of the the new logic. In chapter three I shall compare the three different answers given by Arnauld, Malebranche and Locke to the structural problems bequeathed by Descartes.
Taken together, chapters two and three amount to a discussion of the logic of ideas that concentrates on three elements (ideas, faculties and method) and on three wider issues or dimensions: the relation between the old (Aristotelian) and the new logic (of ideas); the discussion between rationalist and empiricist epistemologies and methodologies within the framework of the new logic; and the relation between logical structure and logical content.
With the three elements and the three dimensions of the new logic in place, roughly covering the period between 1630 and 1690, I move forward to the time after the publication of Locke’s Essay. I put the usefulness of my new characterization of the logic of ideas to the test by studying its reception in five logical textbooks that were published between 1690 and 1750 in the Dutch Republic. After an introductory chapter on the Dutch context (chapter four), I devote the remaining chapters (five-nine) to the textbooks of Jean le Clerc, Jean-Pierre de Crousaz, Nicolas Engelhard, Willem Jacob ’s Gravesande and Petrus van Musschenbroek. I shall argue that each of these textbooks was influenced by the three main elements of the logic of ideas and that each has its own unique position on the three axes that are determined by tradition and novelty, rationalism and empiricism, and structure and content.