Introduction

The era from 1050 to 1500 was one of remarkable philosophical activity in the West—certainly the most intensive such period prior to the twentieth century. Equipped with logic as expressive as contemporary first-order logic (see Parsons 2014), and with many of the classics of earlier Greek and Islamic philosophy at hand, thinkers from the Middle Ages developed a huge variety of innovative theories in almost all areas of the discipline. The institutional context was the early university, organized, much like the modern one, around a standard undergraduate liberal arts curriculum (at the time largely comprising training in logic and philosophy of language), followed by study in one of the professional graduate schools (medicine, law, or theology). The combination of medieval and modern topics will, we hope, make the volume useful to the reader with a basic grounding in contemporary philosophy.