Aristotelian and Cartesian Logic at Harvard

by Kennedy, Rick

• ISBN13: 9780962073724
• ISBN10: 0962073725
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1995-08-01
• Publisher: Colonial Society of

Summary

Charles Morton was transatlantic Puritanism's most famous educator at the time of his arrival in Boston in 1686. His Logick System advocated the vigorous Aristotelian logic popularized by Melanchthon. William Brattle, a generation younger than Morton, was one of Harvard's most beloved tutors. Brattle introduced newly fashionable Cartesian logic into the Harvard curriculum. His Compendium of Logick ultimately superseded the text of his well known colleague and continued to be used at Harvard until the mid-eighteenth century. Although Harvard was a small provincial outpost in the history of logic, its position in America as a bastion of Puritanism makes it an excellent locale for the examination of one idiosyncratic strain of dogmatic, religiously-oriented logical thought. Morton's and Brattle's texts teach us much about the Puritans, especially about the epistemology, psychology, and theology that supported their particular form of religious rationalism.

Table of Contents

Preface, Notes, and Acknowledgments
Introduction	p. 1
Religiously-Oriented, Dogmatically-Inclined Humanistic Logics from the Renaissance to the Seventeenth Century	p. 10
Melanchthon and Aristotelianism	p. 10
Richardson and Ramism	p. 16
Aristotelianism, Ramism, and Schematic Thinking	p. 25
Puritan Favoritism From Ramus to Descartes	p. 32
Cartesian Logic and Christian Skepticism	p. 37
The Religious and Dogmatic Orientation of The Port-Royal Logic	p. 42
Cartesian Logic in British Textbooks	p. 52
Charles Morton and A Logick System	p. 61
Charles Morton	p. 62
Morton's A Logick System	p. 78
William Brattle and the Compendium of Logick	p. 91
Intellectual Reform in the Puritans' Collapsing World	p. 91
The Compendium of Logick	p. 93
Brattle: Tutor and Unofficial Professor of Divinity	p. 108
Epilogue: Later Constituencies of Religious Logics and The Separation of Logic and Divinity at Harvard	p. 133
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