Logic Teaching at the University of Oxford from the Sixteenth to Early Eighteenth Century

Abstract

This paper considers the nature of the changes that took place in logic teaching at the University of Oxford from the beginning of the sixteenth century, when students attended university lectures on Aristotle’s texts as well as studying short works dealing with specifically medieval developments, to the beginning of the eighteenth century when teaching was centred in the colleges, the medieval developments had largely disappeared, and manuals summarizing Aristotelian logic were used. The paper also considers the reasons for these changes, including changes in English society, and the effect of humanism and the more scholarly Aristotelianism that it produced.