Lorenzo Valla (1407 1457) ranks among the greatest scholars and
thinkers of the Renaissance. He secured lasting fame for his
brilliant critical skills, most famously in his exposure of the
Donation of Constantine, the forged document upon which the papacy
based claims to political power. Lesser known in the
English-speaking world is Valla s work in the philosophy of
language the basis of his reputation as the greatest philosopher of
the humanist movement.
"Dialectical Disputations, " translated here for the first time
into any modern language, is his principal contribution to the
philosophy of language and logic. With this savage attack on the
scholastic tradition of Aristotelian logic, Valla aimed to
supersede it with a new logic based on the actual historical usage
of classical Latin and on a commonsense approach to semantics and
argument. Valla provides a logic that could be used by lawyers,
preachers, statesmen, and others who needed to succeed in public
debate one that was stylistically correct and rhetorically elegant,
and thus could dispense with the technical language of the
scholastics, a tribe of Peripatetics, perverters of natural
meanings. Valla s reformed dialectic became a milestone in the
development of humanist logic and contains startling anticipations
of modern theories of semantics and language.
Volume 2 contains Books II III, in which Valla refutes
Aristotle s logical works on propositions, topics, and the
syllogistic."
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