ABSTRACT
By the latter half of the eleventh century, connections between Western intellectual traditions and their classical precursors are tenuous and in many cases broken. Virtually no one in the Latin West at this point read Greek, forcing intellectuals to rely on the small handful of translations that are available. Of the entire Greek logical tradition, all that is available is a pair of works by Aristotle: Categories and On Interpretation. Supplementing these were Porphyry’s introduction to Aristotelian logic, the Isogoge; a handful of commentaries written by Boethius on Aristotelian logic, and Cicero’s Topics; and a small number of monographs on related subjects, mostly by Boethius (e.g., On Topical Differences and On Division), Augustine (e.g., On Dialectic), and Apuleius (e.g., On Interpretation) (Ebbesen 104-5). Notably absent are any works on Stoic logic, which are at this point permanently lost (Lapidge 83). Also missing is the entire corpus of Plato’s writings, with the exception of a portion of the Timaeus, translated into Latin by Calcidius.
