1 Quoted in Simpson, Evelyn M., A Study of the Prose Works of John Donne (2d ed., Oxford, 1948), p. 316.Google Scholar

2 ‘The Technique and Function of the Renaissance Paradox', SP Lin (1956), 191-203. Donne's conception of the paradox was not unique; cf. the preface to a French translation of the Paradossi of Ortensio Lando made by Charles Estienne, Paradoxes, ce sont propos contre le commun opinion: debatus, en forme de declamations forëses (Paris, 1553): ‘A ceste cause ie t'ay ofFert en ce liuret le debat d'aucuns propos, que les anciens ont uoulu nommer paradoxes: c'est adire, contraires a l'opinion de la pluspart des hommes: affin que par le discours d'iceux, la uerité opposite t'en soit a l'aduenir plus clere & apparente: & aussi pour t'exerciter au debat des choses qui te contraignent a chercher diligemment & laborieusement raisons, preuues, authoritez, histoires & memoires fort diuerses & cachees' (quoted in Warner G. Rice, ‘The Paradossi of Ortensio Lando', Essays and Studies in English and Comparative Literature (Ann Arbor, 1932, Univ. of Michigan Publications, Language and Literature VIII), pp. 59-74).

3 ‘Paradox operates with especial vigour at the limits of discursive knowledge. What ever else the riddling Parmenides is, it is a demonstration of the problems at the limit of knowledge and of the linguistic and rhetorical problems arising from the attempt to overcome those limitations… . Even the simplest form of paradox, the defence of a belief generally unpopular, is not really very simple, since it involves an unspoken assumption of the wars of truth, an acceptance of pluralism in the truth of sublunary situations and at the same time a conviction that truth is only one and all competing “truths” are at best but appearances.’ (R. L. Colie, ‘Some Paradoxes in the Language of Things', Reason and the Imagination: Studies in the History of Ideas 1600-1800, ed. J. A. Mazzeo, New York, 1962, pp. 109-110.)

4 Summa Theologica, I, 84, 1 (Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, ed. Anton C. Pegis, New York, 1945).

5 ‘ … the Platonic argument requires an exact correlation of knowledge and the objective world of Ideas. Consequently, there must be a single corresponding Idea wherever we understand a common nature, a ratio communis, an unum-in-multis, a universal, a distinct quiddity, or where we use a common predicate, predicating an unum de multis.’ ( Henle, R. J., Saint Thomas and Platonism, The Hague, 1956, p. 354.CrossRefGoogle Scholar)

6 S. T., 1, 85, 1, ad 1; I, 85, 2, ad 2.

7 From Parmenides’ Way of Truth, in P. M. Cornford, Plato and Parmenides (Indianapolis, n.d.), p. 31.

8 Cornford, F. M., Plato's Theory of Knowledge (London, 1960), pp. 266–267.Google Scholar But Cornford admits elsewhere (regarding Sophist, 249D-251A) that the Stranger ‘has changed the subject from a metaphysical consideration of the nature of the real to a different field, which we should call Logic’ (p. 252).

9 The Age of Belief, ed. Fremantle, Anne (New York, 1955), p. 20.Google Scholar Cf. also Cornford, Plato's Theory of Knowledge, pp. 268-372, where it is shown how the Platonic dialectic leads to the doctrine of the plurality of forms, by which any material subsistent is ‘composed' of the various Forms in which it participates.

10 In his introduction to his translation of Proclus’ Elements of Theology (Oxford, 1933) E. R. Dodds comments (p. xxv): ‘I will only say that its fundamental weakness seems to me to lie in the assumption that the structure of the cosmos exactly reproduces the structure of Greek logic [speaking of Proclus’ system]. All rationalist systems are to some extent exposed to criticism on these lines; but in Proclus ontology becomes so manifestly the projected shadow of logic as to present what is almost a reductio ad absurdum of rationalism. In form a metaphysic of Being, the Elements embodies what is in substance a doctrine of categories: the cause is but a reflection of the “because”, and the Aristotelian apparatus of genus, species and differentia is transformed into an objectively conceived hierarchy of entities or forces.'

11 Ibid., p. 21.

12 Ibid., p. 35.

13 Ibid., p. 59.

14 Henle, p. 346.

15 Ong, Walter J., Ramus, Method and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), pp. 55–65.Google Scholar

16 Joseph P. Mullally, The Summulae logicales of Peter of Spain (Notre Dame, Ind., 1945, Pubs, in Medieval Stud. VIII).

17 Ibid., p. xl. One immediate source of Peter's terminist ‘realism’ is the Metalogicon of John of Salisbury, wherein he speaks of ‘this reciprocity between things and words, and words and things, whereby they mutually communicate their qualities, as by an exchange of gifts’ (The Metalogicon of John of Salisbury, tr. Daniel D. McGarry, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1955, 1, c. 16, p. 50).

18 Mullally, p. 3.

19 ‘Ockham himself was the very reverse of a Platonist; in point of fact, he was the perfect Anti-Plato; yet, like all opposites, Plato and Ockham belonged to the same species' (Etienne Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience, New York, 1937, p. 68).

20 William of Ockham, Summa totius logicae, 1, c. xv (Philosophical Writings, ed. Philotheus Boehner, Edinburgh, 1957, pp. 35-37).

21 Ong, p. 102.

22 Ibid., p. 104. Agricola lists twenty-four topics: definition, genus, species, property, whole, parts, conjugates, adjacents, act, subjects, efficient agent, end, consequences, intended effects, place, time, connections, contingents, name, pronunciation, compared things, like things, opposites, differences (ibid., p. 122).

23 A typical argument can be found in Thomas Wilson's Rule of Reason (1551), a textbook heavily indebted to Agricola. The question is whether or not priests should marry. His technique is to draw the two words ‘priest’ and ‘wife’ through various topics in order to find a common term to unite them. As might be expected the argument devolves into a syllogistic chain. Having defined a preacher as one, among other things, who is 'desierouse to lyue vertuousely', and a wife, also among other things, as one ‘to auoide fornication', Wilson proceeds to set up his syllogism: ‘Whosoeuer desireth to Hue vertuously, desireth to auoide fornication. Whosoeuer desireth to auoyde fornication, desireth mariage. Ergo whosoeuer desireth to lyue vertuousely desiereth mariage.’ This argument is summarized with quotations in Howell, W. S., Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700 (Princeton, 1956), pp. 25–27.Google Scholar

24 Ong, p. 21.

25 Ibid., p. 197.

26 This passage is actually by Omer Talon, Ramus’ alter ego, though Ong (p. 209) finds it ‘the sum and substance of the Ramist position on universals'.

27 Ibid., pp. 182-186.

28 ‘ [Ramus] does not include in his logic any theory of the concept, without which it is impossible to have meaningful statements. By virtue of this omission Ramus's logic is indeed nominalistic, and lends itself to the rhetorical manipulation of words. However, as we read through the Diakctica we observe that it is soon tacitly proceeding on the basis of a corrupted Platonism. For in sweeping aside the categories as a means of analyzing experience and differentiating between types of predication, Ramus did not escape the necessity of ordering experience for the purposes of discourse. In place of the categories he offered his famous dichotomies, which are nothing but Porphyry's tree in rank and riotous growth.’ (Norman E. Nelson, ‘Peter Ramus and the Confusion of Logic, Rhetoric, and Poetry', Ann Arbor, 1957, Univ. of Michigan Contributions in Modern Philology no. 2, p. 7.) This study also mrows light on Ramus’ taking every statement arrived at by dichotomizing as reflecting the actual fact (p. 9): ‘There seemed to Aristotle to be a significant difference between the statements: Man is a rational animal; Socrates is a philosopher; Socrates is at the seashore. Now Ramus by rejecting or ignoring these distinctions collapsed the terms—all words are logically equal in his vocabulary. There is no distinction in his logic between propositions which define essence and those which predicate property, or accidents of time, place, or condition.'

29 Epistemology, tr. Imelda Choquette Byrne (New York, 1959), p. 29.

30 One notable example of an answer to the problem of concept-object relation which avoids univocalist conceptualism is the epistemology of Aquinas. In brief his solution is this. The problem of the mental knowledge of material things, as Aquinas saw it, was the problem of how an immaterial substance (the mind) can have knowledge of a material substance. He sets up the problem by opposing materialists such as Heraclitus to their polar opposite, Plato. For Heraclitus all reality is material and subject to eternal flux; as such the mind may know this shifting reality by being itself also material. Plato, on the other hand, hypostatizes the structure of mind and insists that the ‘real’ is disembodied 'Forms'. In both cases we find the demand for correspondence between mind and thing. Aquinas’ position is midway between these two, and is founded upon the Aristotelian notion of man as a composite of body and soul, yielding this solution: ‘So, too, the intellect, according to its own mode, receives under conditions of immateriality and immobility the species of material and movable bodies; for the received is in the receiver according to the mode of the receiver. We must conclude, therefore, that the soul knows bodies through the intellect by a knowledge which is immaterial, universal, and necessary' (S. T., 1, 84,1). In other words, the concepts in the mind and the intelligible forms of material things bear, not a univocal, but an analogical relation to each other: the first reflects the second (thereby yielding truth), but according to its own modes.

31 Donne, John and Blake, William, The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne & The Complete Poetry of William Blake (New York, 1941), pp. 277–278.Google Scholar

32 The Poems of John Donne, ed. Grierson, Herbert J. C. (Oxford, 1912), 1, 36, II. 8-14.Google Scholar

33 Ibid., I, 40-41.

34 Ibid., 1, 32-33,1. 3.

35 Extensive material on this problem is given in I. M. Bochenski, A History of Formal Logic, tr. Ivo Thomas (Notre Dame, Ind., 1961), pp. 238-247.

36 The theory of supposition was developed by late scholastic logicians to handle the various sign functions of concepts and words in propositions and in relation to extramental things. Some such theory was necessary once the equivocation between the structures of things and concepts was admitted. Thus it was necessary to distinguish among signs which stood for (supponere) real material entities (personal supposition), those which stood for mental concepts (simple supposition), and those which stood for terms (material supposition); this in order to avoid, for example, the realist interpretation of such propositions as ‘Man is a species'. Cf. Ockham, Summa totius logicae, cc. Ixii-lxiv, lxviii ( Boehner, , Philosophical Writings, pp. 64–74;Google Scholar Bochenski, pp. 163-176).

37 Bochenski, p. 245.

38 Grierson, I, 69-70. Cf. also ‘A nocturnall upon S. Lucies day', to which the liar insoluhilium is also relevant.

39 Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi, tr. Mervyn Savill.