Introduction: Logic and Methodology in the Early Modern Period

Being mainly concerned with the origins and development of formal logic, current “histories of logic” often devote scarce, if any, space to logic in the early modern period. In standard narratives, emphasis is put, on one side, on Aristotle’s Organon and on the Stoics’ logic of propositions, and on the other side, on the development of mathematical logic from Boole and Frege on (Scholz 1931; Bochenski 1956; Kneale 1962; Blanché 1970). The picture often emerging from such reconstructions represents early modern philosophers— net of their criticisms of Aristotelian syllogism— as largely estranged from the discipline. It is true that, the medieval period’s concern with semantic and inference issues has been accounted for (Prantl 1855–1870; Ashworth 1988; Biard 1989, 1997; Gabbay and Woods 2008). But it is as if there were a “mise en sommeil de la logique” in the seventeenth century...