Theories of paradox in the Middle Ages

Paradoxes seized the attention of logicians in the middle ages, and were used both as tests for the viability of theories of logic, language, epistemology, and possibly every philosophical issue, and also in the specific genre of insolubles as needing a theoretical solution, usually involving issues about signification, truth, knowledge and modality. Numerous theories were developed, not only in the Latin West, but also in the Islamic world and in the Byzantine tradition. Some of these theories are well known, others barely investigated, if at all. The papers in this volume discuss and contrast a range of these theories and consider their advantages and drawbacks, and their relation to more recent theories of paradox and antinomy. Several of the papers were presented at a workshop organised at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, as part of the Leverhulme-funded project ‘Theories of Paradox in Fourteenth-Century Logic: Edition and Translation of Key Texts‘.