philosophy

Aristotle’s theory of the syllogism played an important role in the
western and near eastern intellectual traditions for more than two
thousand years, but it was during the Middle Ages that it became the
dominant model of correct argumentation.

Historically, medieval logic is divided into the old logic
(logica vetus), the tradition stretching from Boethius (c.
480–525) until Abelard (1079–1142), and the new logic (logica
nova), from the late twelfth century until the Renaissance. The
division reflects the availability of ancient logical texts. Before
Abelard, medieval logicians were only familiar with Aristotle’s
Categories and On Interpretation and Porphyry’s
Isagoge or Introduction to the Categories and not the
Prior Analytics, where Aristotle develops the theory of the
syllogism — though they did know something of his theory through
secondary sources. Once the Prior Analytics reappeared in the
West in the middle of the twelfth century, commentaries on it began
appearing in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.

Aristotle’s theory of the syllogism for assertoric sentences was a
remarkable achievement and virtually complete in the Prior
Analytics. To quote Kant, it was “a closed and completed body of
doctrine.” Medieval logicians could not add much to it, though small
changes were sometimes made and it was systematized in different ways.
It was not until the mid-fourteenth century, when John Buridan reworked
logic in general and placed the theory of the syllogism in the context
of the more comprehensive logic of consequence, that people’s
understanding of syllogistic logic began to change.

The theory of the modal syllogism, however, was incomplete in the
Prior Analytics, and in the hands of medieval logicians it saw
a remarkable development. The first commentators tried to save
Aristotle’s original theory and in the course of doing so produced some
interesting solutions, though in the end they were unable to make the
system work. The next generation of logicians simply abandoned the idea
of saving Aristotle and instead introduced new distinctions and
developed a completely new theory that subsumed the logic of
syllogisms.

• 1. Aristotle’s Theory and Its Shortcomings
• 2. Boethius
• 3. Peter Abelard
• 4. Early Commentators on the Prior Analytics
• 5. Richard of Campsall
• 6. William of Ockham
• 7. John Buridan
• 8. Later Medieval Developments of the Theory
• 9. Summary
• Bibliography
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

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1. Aristotle’s Theory and Its Shortcomings

In the Prior Analytics, Aristotle presents the first system of
logic, the theory of the syllogism (see the entry on
Aristotle’s logic
and ch. 1 of Lagerlund
2000 for the details). A syllogism is a deduction consisting of three
sentences: two premises and a conclusion. Syllogistic sentences are
categorical sentences involving a subject and a predicate connected by
a copula (verb). These are in turn divided into four different classes:
universal affirmative (A), particular affirmative (I), universal
negative (E) and particular negative (O), written by Aristotle as
follows:

The subject and predicate in the categorical sentences used in a
syllogism are called terms (horoi) by Aristotle. There are
three terms in a syllogism: a major, a minor, and a middle term. The
major and the minor are called the extremes (akra), i.e., the
major extreme (meizon akron) and the minor extreme
(elatton akron), and they form the predicate and the subject
of the conclusion. The middle (meson) term is what joins the
two premises. These three terms can be combined in different ways to
form three figures (skhemata), which Aristotle presents in the
Prior Analytics (A is the major, B the middle, and C the minor
term):

When the four categorical sentences are placed into these three
figures, Aristotle ends up with the following 14 valid moods (in
parentheses are the medieval mnemonic names for the valid moods; see
Spade 2002 (Other Internet Resources), pp. 29–33, for the significance
of these names):

First figure: AaB, BaC, therefore, AaC (Barbara); AeB, BaC,
therefore, AeC (Celarent); AaB, BiC, therefore, AiC (Darii); AeB, BiC,
therefore, AoC (Ferio).

Second figure: BaA, BeC, therefore, AeC (Camestres); BeA, BaC,
therefore, AeC (Cesare); BeA, BiC, therefore, AoC (Festino); BaA, BoC,
therefore, AoC (Baroco).

Third figure: AaB, CaB, therefore, AiC (Darapti); AeB, CaB,
therefore, AoC (Felapton); AiB, CaB, therefore, AiC (Disamis); AaB,
CiB, therefore, AiC (Datisi); AoB, CaB, therefore, AoC (Bocardo); AeB,
CiB, therefore, AoC (Ferison).

A fourth figure was discussed in ancient times as well as during the
Middle Ages. In Aristotelian syllogistic, it has the following
form:

By taking this figure into account we can derive additional valid
moods, all of which are mentioned by Aristotle in the Prior
Analytics (see, e.g., An. Pr. I.7, 29a19–29). The fourth
figure moods are the following:

Fourth figure: BaA, CaB, therefore, AiC (Bramantip); BaA,
CeB, therefore, AeC (Camenes); BiA, CaB, therefore, AiC (Dimaris); BeA,
CaB, therefore, AoC (Fesapo); BeA, CiB, therefore, AoC
(Fresison).

If we perform a simple calculation based on the four categorical
sentences and the four figures, we find that there are 256 possible
combinations of sentences. Of these, 24 have traditionally been thought
to yield valid deductions. To the 19 already mentioned we must add two
subalternate moods in the first figure (Barbari and Celaront), two
subalternate moods in the second figure (Camestrop and Cesaro), and one
subalternate mood in the fourth figure (Camenop).

The difference between the first figure and the other three figures
is that the syllogisms in the first figure are complete, meaning that
they are immediately evident and do not require proof. This distinction
is important in Aristotle’s theory, since it gives the first figure an
axiomatic character, so that the proofs of the incomplete syllogisms in
the other three figures are arrived at primarily through reduction to
the complete syllogisms.

The reductions of the incomplete syllogisms were made by Aristotle
through conversion rules. He states the following conversion rules in
the Prior Analytics (I.2, 25a1–26):

(1:1) AaB⊃BiA,

(1:2) AiB≡BiA,

(1:3) AeB≡BeA.

During the Middle Ages, (1:1) was called an accidental (per
accidens) conversion and (1:2) and (1:3) simple
(simpliciter) conversions. Particular negative sentences do
not convert, according to Aristotle.

Not all incomplete syllogisms were reduced to complete syllogisms;
Aristotle also gave other arguments for them. He used two methods to
prove the incomplete syllogisms: reductio ad impossibile and
ekthesis. Thus, he proves Baroco by impossibility, from the
assumption that the premises are true and the conclusion false (An.
Pr. I.5, 27a36-b1):

1. BaA Premise
2. BoC Premise
3. AaC Assumed as the negation of the conclusion
4. BaC From (i) and (iii) by Barbara
5. ⊥ From (ii) and (iv)
6. AoC From (iii) and (v)

Medieval logicians used this method as well, following
Aristotle.

The ekthesis proof is more complicated and was not commonly
used by medieval logicians, who preferred proofs through expository
syllogisms, a simplification and refinement of the ekthesis.
Aristotle’s method can be expressed in terms of the following rules
(Patzig 1968 and Smith 1982):

(1:4) AiB, therefore, AaC, BaC (where C does not occur
previously),

(1:5) AoB, therefore, AeC, BaC (where C does not occur previously),

(1:6) AaC, BaC, therefore, AiB,

(1:7) AeC, BaC, therefore, AoB.

Based on these rules, the ekthesis method permits
straightforward proofs of the third figure syllogisms. Aristotle proves
Darapti (An. Pr. I.6, 28a22–26) and mentions that Bocardo is
provable by ekthesis (An. Pr. I.6, 28b20–21). The
proof of Bocardo is as follows:

1. AoB Premise
2. CaB Premise
3. AeD From (i) and (1:5)
4. BaD From (i) and (1:5)
5. CaD From (ii), (iv) and Barbara
6. AoC From (iii), (v) and (1:7)

Yet this account of the ekthesis proof is not without its
problems. Even in antiquity, Aristotle was accused of arguing in a
circle, since (1:6) and (1:7) seem to correspond to the third figure
incomplete syllogisms Darapti and Felapton. (1:4)-(1:7) also seem
superfluous, and in fact Alexander of Aphrodisias (fl. c. 200 AD) was
able to show that ekthesis is really all Aristotle needed,
since all the valid moods can be proved with it. Aristotle also used
counterexamples to show that a mood is invalid.

In Chapters 3 and 8–22 of Book I of the Prior Analytics,
Aristotle extends his theory to include syllogisms with modally
qualified categorical sentences. An Aristotelian modal syllogism is a
syllogism that has at least one premise modalized, i.e., that in
addition to the standard terms also contains the modal words
‘necessarily’, ‘possibly’ or
‘contingently’. Aristotle’s terminology is not entirely
clear, however. He speaks only of necessity and possibility, though he
works with two notions of possibility. In what seems to be his
preferred sense, used primarily in the Prior Analytics,
possibility is defined as that which is not necessary and not
impossible. This sense of possibility was called contingency in the
Middle Ages. But there is another sense of possibility in Aristotle’s
On Interpretation according to which possibility is equivalent
to what is not impossible. The first concept of possibility, which I
will henceforth call ‘contingency’, is used in the modal syllogistic.
The second concept is not treated systematically in the Prior
Analytics.

If we follow this terminology we get eight modal categorical
sentences, which we can raise to twelve if the notion of possibility is
added. If we then perform the same calculation as before, taking into
account the four figures and also the non-modal propositions, we get
either 6,912 or 16,384 possible moods. It would be a gargantuan task,
of course, to go through them all and see which ones are valid.
Accordingly, Aristotle limits his discussion to those modal syllogisms
whose assertoric counterparts are valid, as did most medieval
logicians.

Aristotle treats modal syllogisms with (i) uniform necessity, (ii)
uniform contingency, (iii) mixed necessity and assertoric, (iv) mixed
contingency and assertoric, and (v) mixed necessity and contingency
premises. Possibility sentences are not treated as premises of modal
syllogisms. Sometimes, however, mixed syllogisms are only valid in
reaching a possibility conclusion.

Aristotle uses the same methods to prove the incomplete modal
syllogisms as he uses for the assertoric syllogisms, i.e., conversions,
reductio ad impossibile, and ekthesis. In An.
Pr. I.3, 25a27–25b26, he accepts the following conversion rules
for necessity, contingency, and possibility sentences:

(1:8) Necessarily AaB ⊃ Necessarily BiA,

(1:9) Necessarily AiB ≡ Necessarily BiA,

(1:10) Necessarily AeB ≡ Necessarily BeA,

(1:11) Contingently AaB ⊃ Contingently BiA,

(1:12) Contingently AiB ≡ Contingently BiA,

(1:13) Contingently AeB ⊃ Contingently BoA,

(1:14) Contingently AoB ≡ Contingently BoA,

(1:15) Possibly AaB ⊃ Possibly BiA,

(1:16) Possibly AiB ≡ Possibly BiA,

(1:17) Possibly AeB ≡ Possibly BeA.

Aristotle accepts no conversion rules for either necessity or
possibility particular negative sentences, though he does accept two
conversions to the opposite quality for contingency sentences (see
An. Pr. I.13, 32a30–32b2):

(1:18) Contingently AaB ≡ Contingently AeB,

(1:19) Contingently AiB ≡ Contingently AoB.

In the Prior Analytics Aristotle gives only vague hints
about how modal sentences are supposed to be interpreted. The problem
is best illustrated by what is often used as a test for all
interpretations of Aristotle, i.e., the problem of the two Barbara
syllogisms. They are discussed at An. Pr. I.9:

The problem is that Aristotle accepts the former but not the latter.
The question then is: Under which interpretation does the former come
out valid but not the latter?

To solve this problem, it has been common in contemporary
discussions to introduce the distinction between de dicto and
de re modal sentences. I have presented the two syllogisms
above with a de dicto reading of the modal sentences, i.e., so
that the modality concerns the way the sentence is or is not true. On
this reading, both Barbara syllogisms seem invalid. But what about the
de re reading? The modality in this reading of the sentences
applies to the manner in which the predicate belongs to the subject.
The two syllogisms will then have the following form:

It is equally obvious in these cases that the first syllogism is
valid whereas the latter is not, since the latter involves five
different terms. This suggests that Aristotle’s modal syllogistic
should be given a de re interpretation (Becker 1933).

However, if this interpretation is accepted, another problem
emerges, namely that the conversion rules are not valid under a de
re interpretation, for if the de re interpretation means
that the predicate is modified by the mode, the conversion rules will
never be valid. Consider the following example:

(A necessarily)aB,

which should convert to:

(B necessarily)iA.

‘Necessarily A’ has here been transformed to
‘A’, which is a valid move since necessity implies
actuality, but ‘B’ has been transformed to
‘necessarily B’, which is an invalid move. The same can be
said for all the modal conversion rules under a de re
interpretation. If, on the other hand, the de dicto reading is
maintained, it is easily seen that they are valid in view of the
validity of the non-modal conversion rules.

However, Aristotle probably did have something like a de re
reading of the categorical sentences in mind, as many scholars have
come to realize and as most medievals who read him thought. But if the
conversion rules must be given a de dicto interpretation and
the different syllogisms a de re interpretation, the whole
system seems to collapse. This problem makes a consistent
reconstruction of Aristotle’s modal syllogistic using modern modal
logic very difficult. (See Becker 1933, Lukasiewicz 1957, Rescher 1974,
van Rijen 1989, Patterson 1995, Thom 1996 and Nortmann 1996 for such
attempts, and see Hintikka 1973 and Lagerlund 2000 for critical
reflections on these attempts.)

2. Boethius

The medieval tradition of logic is generally thought to have begun with
Boethius (c. 475–526), who ambitiously tried to preserve what was left
of philosophical learning from the declining culture of late antiquity.
In fact, however, he was only able to save parts of ancient logic,
primarily Aristotelian logic (see Lee 1984 for a discussion of
Aristotle’s syllogistic in late ancient thought). He wrote extensively
on the theory of the syllogism, producing a Latin translation of the
Prior Analytics, though it was not used very much before the
twelfth century (see Aristotle, Analytica Priora, and the
introduction by Minio-Paluello). He also wrote two textbooks on the
categorical syllogism: On the Categorical Syllogism (De
syllogismo categorico) and Introduction to Categorical
Syllogisms (Introductio ad syllogismos categoricos) (for
the texts, see Migne 1847 and Thomsen Thörnqvist 2001). In
addition, he produced an interesting book called On Hypothetical
Syllogisms (De hypotheticis syllogismis), which will be
touched on in the discussion below (see Obertello 1969 for the text).

Boethius made no substantial contribution to the theory of the
syllogism, though he was an important transmitter of the theory to
later logicians and his works offer a clear presentation of the
Aristotelian account. But that presentation differs from Aristotle’s
in one important respect. In Boethius, the categorical sentences are
constructed using ‘is’ (’est’) and
not ‘belongs’, as in Aristotle. The four sentences thus
become:

A – Every B is A

I – Some B is A

E – No B is A

O – Some B is not A

Put in this way, it is more obvious that they are subject predicate
sentences, and moreover, that the syllogisms are deductions rather than
conditional sentences. As a result, the four figures look
different:

In systematic terms, Boethius’ change makes no difference and all
medieval logicians writing after him adopted it, even though it makes
the first figure syllogisms less evident. According to Aristotle, the
first syllogism of the first figure (Barbara) should read: ‘A
belongs to all B, B belongs to all C; therefore A belongs to all
C’. This is obviously valid by the transitivity of inclusion. But
if we line up the same syllogism using Boethian formulation we get:
‘Every B is A, Every C is B; therefore Every C is A’. This
is not at all as obvious and we have to switch the places of the
premises to get the same transitivity characteristic: ‘Every C is
B, Every B is A; therefore Every C is A’. Beyond this small but
significant change, Boethius does not contribute much to the theory,
though he is a little more interested than Aristotle in the different
kinds of conversion. His hypothetical syllogistic is, on the other
hand, rather novel.

Like most things in the history of logic, hypothetical syllogistic
also begins with Aristotle. In the Prior Analytics, he says
that every syllogism is either direct or from a hypothesis. Traditional
syllogistic is direct and hence all syllogisms that do not fall into
the patterns of inference defined by the three Aristotelian figures,
but which are nevertheless valid syllogisms, must be hypothetical.
Aristotle’s principal example is a syllogism through impossibility. If
we reason from a hypothesis P via a syllogism to a conclusion Q that is
impossible, then we can conclude that not-P is true and P false
(An. Pr. 41a23–30).

In the second century A.D., Alexander of Aphrodisias tried to
develop this into a theory of the hypothetical syllogism. What emerged
from his attempt is something quite strange and even confused, though
it has been studied at great length (see esp. Speca 2001 and the list
of further references there). Boethius’ On the Hypothetical
Syllogisms is the only remaining early work on this topic.

A hypothetical syllogism is a syllogism in which one or more
premises are hypothetical sentences. Boethius draws the distinction
between categorical sentences and hypothetical sentences formally by
saying that a categorical sentence involves a predication whereas a
hypothetical sentence involves a condition, i.e., it says that
something is, if something else is. Typically such sentences
are conditional sentences such as ‘if P then Q’, though
Boethius also treats ‘P or Q’ as hypothetical, apparently
because he thinks that disjunction can be translated in terms of a
conditional sentence. Another characteristic of hypothetical sentences
is that they are made up of categorical sentences.

The basic hypothetical sentences he gives are:

(2:1) If it is A, then it is B

(2:2) If it is not-A, then it is not-B

(2:3) If it is A, then it is not-B

(2:4) If it is not-A, then it is B

He also considers sentences involving three terms:

(2:5) If, if it is A, then it is B, then it is C

(2:6) If it is A, then if it is B, then it is C

though a hypothetical sentence can be even more complicated:

(2:7) If, if it is A, then it is B, then if it is C, then
it is D.

Boethius also thinks that hypothetical sentences can be qualified by
modalities such as necessity or possibility, but he never develops this
idea.

In trying to establish what combination of premises form valid
inferences he proceeds like Aristotle and develops lists or tables in
which he can group the valid patterns. The basic sentences (2:1)-(2:4)
combined with a simple categorical sentence as the second premise boil
down to what we today know as modus ponens and modus
tollens. This led some modern interpreters to think that Boethius
was developing a sentential logic as the Stoics had done (Dürr
1951), but this idea has been rejected by more recent scholars
(Obertello 1969, Martin 1991 and Speca 2001). Whatever Boethius thought
he was doing, he was not trying to develop a sentential logic. This
becomes obvious if one considers a more complex hypothetical syllogism,
such as the following, which he accepts as valid:

If Boethius’ logic is a sentential logic his syllogism would be
translatable into the following:

But this is not a valid deduction, which means either that Boethius
was simply wrong to accept it or that he had something else in mind.
If, on the other hand, we use a term logic such as Aristotle’s
syllogistic, the above inference schema seems valid, since given the
two premises, if something that is A and B is also C and something that
is only B is not C, then that very same thing has to be not A as
well.

Boethius is conscious of a Stoic logical tradition in which the
logical forms of sentences were distinguished according to their
linguistic form, such that ‘if … then’ structures
indicate conditionals and ‘or’ structures indicate
disjunctions, making these terms rather like operators on sentences. He
seems to be using these ideas to demarcate his hypothetical sentences,
though he is still writing in an Aristotelian fashion and developing an
Aristotelian term logic (see Speca 2001 and Marenbon 2003: 50–56). This
mix makes his logic quite confused, and the confusion was not sorted
out until Abelard was able to develop a proper sentential logic out of
Boethius’ suggestions. (See Martin 2009 as well.)

3. Peter Abelard

Peter Abelard (1079–1142)was one of the first original medieval
logicians in the Latin West. His most thorough treatment of the theory
of the syllogism can be found in the Dialectica, though he
occasionally discusses it in other works as well, such as the
Logica ingredientibus (Minio-Paluello 1958). It is only in the
Dialectica, however, that the theory is outlined in full.

Since the logic of the Dialectica is based on Boethius’
commentaries and monographs, we find in it a treatise on categorical
sentences and categorical syllogisms (Tractatus II), and
another on hypothetical sentences and hypothetical syllogisms
(Tractatus IV). But neither of these discussions is very
extensive. Taken together, they are shorter than the discussion of
topical inferences, which indicates that Abelard was most interested in
developing a logic for sentences (Green-Pedersen 1984 and Martin 1987).
His presentation of syllogistic is condensed but highly original. It
reveals that he was not able to study the text of Aristotle’s Prior
Analytics in any detail. He must have seen it, but he cannot have
had access to a copy himself.

Abelard gives the four standard figures and shows how the second,
third, and fourth (he treats the fourth figure as part of the first
figure with the terms in the conclusion converted) can be reduced to
the first in the standard ways using conversion rules and proofs
through impossibility, but to clarify and simply the theory he also
presents rules showing the validity of the different moods. In the
first figure he gives these rules (I have included the terms A, B, C to
clarify the rules, though they are not in Abelard’s text):

To these he adds two more rules for the second figure:

There are three more rules for the third figure:

If we allow that the conjuncts in the antecedent of these
conditional statements can switch places, and that a universal implies
a particular, these rules exhaust the 24 valid syllogisms.

Abelard’s rules 1 and 2 are equivalent to the rules of class
inclusion that later became the subject of much discussion, i.e., the
so-called dici de omni et nullo rules. These rules are based
on the transitivity of class inclusion and were the standard way in
which later medieval logicians explained how the first figure moods are
perfect or evident.

It was elegant of Abelard to lay out these rules that entail the
valid moods, but then again, the theory of the syllogism is an elegant
and simple system. The simplicity of his nine rules reflects the
simplicity of Aristotelian syllogistic, since on Aristotle’s view only
the first two syllogisms and the rules of conversion plus the method of
proof by impossibility and a couple of other consequences are needed to
demonstrate all 24 valid moods.

Abelard’s hypothetical syllogistic does not repeat Boethius’ mistake
of mixing a term logic like the theory of the syllogism with a
sentential logic. Rather, Abelard’s work should be seen as a very
sophisticated development of a sentential logic. I will therefore not
treat it in this overview, since it belongs to the history of
sentential logic rather than syllogistic. It seems that the medievals
also rather quickly stopped associating the word
‘syllogism’ with this theory.

Abelard is also associated with the history of modal logic. He is
famous as the philosopher who introduced the distinction between de
dicto and de re modal sentences. The basic notions of
Abelard’s modal theory are to be found in the introduction to Chapters
XII and XIII of his longer commentary on Aristotle’s De
interpretatione (ed. Minio-Paluello 1958). Abelard concentrates
his analysis on the logical structure of modal sentences, introducing
some new distinctions and concepts that were later commonly used by
medieval logicians.

According to Abelard, modal terms are strictly speaking adverbs
expressing how something said of the subject is actualized, e.g.,
‘well’ or ‘quickly’ or
‘necessarily’. Adverbs that do not modify an actual
inherence, e.g., ‘possibly’, are called secondary modal
terms due to their position in a sentence. Abelard also noticed that in
De interpretatione 12–13, Aristotle operates with nominal
rather than adverbial modes, e.g. ‘it is necessary that’ or
‘it is possible that’. He seems to have assumed that
Aristotle did this because the nominal modes lead to many more problems
than simple adverbial modes. This is more clearly seen from the fact
that sentences including nominal modes, such as ‘Necesse est
Socratem currere’, can be understood either adverbially,
‘Socrates runs necessarily’, or, as suggested by the
grammar, ‘That Socrates runs is necessary’. He calls these
two alternatives de re necessity sentences and de
sensu (or de dicto) necessity sentences, respectively.
Abelard seems to be the first to employ this terminology. A de
re modal sentence expresses the mode through which the predicate
belongs to the subject. The mode is, therefore, associated with a
thing, whereas the mode in the de dicto case (as he also calls
it) is said of what is expressed by a non-modal sentence.

Abelard also referred to this distinction as the distinction between
personal and impersonal readings of a modal sentence, the de
re sense corresponding to the personal reading and the de
dicto sense to the impersonal reading because when the expression
‘necesse est’ or ‘possibile
est’ is used at the beginning of a sentence, it lacks a
personal subject. Abelard states that this distinction is related to
Aristotle’s distinction between per divisionem and per
compositionem in the Sophistici Elenchi (4, 166a23–31).
What is new is Abelard’s contention that modal discussions should
proceed by distinguishing the different possible readings of modal
sentences, moving on to consider their quantity, quality, and
conversion as well as their equipollence and any other relations
holding between them on these different readings. Abelard’s
program thus became the standard operating procedure in medieval
treatises on logic.

After Abelard, equipollence and other relations between modal
sentences were commonly presented with the help of the square of
opposition, which Abelard mentions though it does not appear as such in
his works. The square can be taken to refer to de dicto modal
sentences or to singular de re modal sentences. Although the
distinction between de dicto and de re modal
sentences was common in logical treatises on the properties of the
terms, syncategorematic terms, and the solution of sophisms, twelfth-
and thirteenth-century logicians were mainly interested in the logical
properties of singular de re modal sentences. There is no
detailed theory of quantified de re modal sentences from this
period, and the first movements in this direction by Abelard and his
followers were rather confused. A satisfactory theory of de re
modal sentences did not appear until the fourteenth century, when the
various relations between such sentences was presented by John Buridan
in his octagon of opposition.

Medieval logicians generally assumed that Aristotle dealt with
de dicto modal sentences in the De Interpretatione
and de re modal sentences in the Prior Analytics. In
early commentaries on the Prior Analytics, there is usually no
mention of Abelard’s distinction between them. One reason may be that
the only theory available concentrated on singular de re modal
sentences, which are not part of modal syllogistic as developed by
Aristotle.

While the de dicto/de re terminology was used, it was not
all that common. Medieval logicians preferred to use what they took to
be Aristotle’s terminology, talking about modal sentences in the
composite sense (in sensu composito) and divided sense (in
sensu diviso). The structure of a composite modal sentence can be
represented as follows:

(quantity/subject/copula,
[quality]/predicate)mode

A composite modal sentence corresponds to a de dicto modal
sentence. The word ‘composite’ is used because the mode is
said to qualify the composition of the subject and the predicate. The
structure of a divided modal sentence can be represented as
follows:

quantity/subject/copula, mode,
[quality]/predicate

Here, the mode is thought to qualify the copula and thus to divide
the sentence into two parts (hence the name, ‘divided modal sentence’).
This type of modal sentence was characterized as de re because
what is modified is how things (res) are related to each
other, rather than the truth of what is said by the sentence
(dictum) (see Lagerlund 2000: 35–39, and the entry on
medieval theories of modality
for
further details).

Like virtually all medievals, Abelard thought that Aristotle’s modal
syllogistic was a theory for de re modal sentences. He says
very little about it in his logical works, however. In less than five
pages in the Dialectica (245–249) he treats modal, oblique,
and temporal syllogistic logic. Earlier in the same work, he says a
little about conversion rules. He argues in both the
Dialectica (195–196) and the Logica (15–16) that the
conversion rules can be defended even on a de re reading, but
the conversions he discusses are not modal conversions since the mode
must be attached to the predicate and follow the term in the
conversion, making the conversion into the conversion of an assertoric
sentence. The conversions of de re modal sentences, as Abelard
has defined them, do not hold, as Paul Thom has convincingly shown.
(Thom 2003: 57–58.)

There is no modal syllogistic explicitly outlined in any of Abelard’s
logical works, though in the Dialectica, he exemplifies some
of the valid mixed moods: M–M in the first figure, MM– in
the second, and M–M in the third (M represents a possibility
sentence and ‘–’ an assertoric). He also shows that
uniform modal syllogisms are not generally valid, so that MMM is not
valid unless the middle term in the major premise is read with the
mode attached to it, as in:

A consequence of this, of course, is that the middle term in the
minor premise is ‘possibly B’ and hence no longer a modal
sentence. MMM is consequently reduced to M–M.

Anything more systematic than this has to be drawn out from
Abelard’s definition of modal sentences and their semantic
interpretation. Thom has done this in his book (Thom 2003), where he
claims that there is a very specific system developed that is not at
all similar to Aristotle’s modal system. Abelard was therefore not
attempting an interpretation of Aristotle, but must be seen as
developing a new system based on his reading of de re
sentences. But this project must overcome several problems,
particularly since Abelard cannot use the conversion rule.

4. The Early Commentators on the Prior Analytics

The first known commentary on the Prior Analytics in the Latin
West is an anonymous work that has not yet been edited and thus not
properly studied. The author has been called Anonymous Aurelianensis
III by Sten Ebbesen, who has studied parts of the work, which dates to
c. 1160–80 (Ebbesen 1981). The theory of the assertoric syllogism was
repeated and summarized in almost all logic works from this point into
the thirteenth century, but there are no major commentaries until the
1240’s when Robert Kilwardby (d. 1279) wrote his Literal Commentary
on the Books of the Prior Analytics (In libros Priorum
Analyticorum expositio).

Although Kilwardby added nothing of substance to the theory of the
assertoric syllogism, his interpretation of modal syllogistic is quite
remarkable. It was also very influential in the thirteenth and early
fourteenth centuries. Albert the Great, Simon of Faversham, and
Radulphus Brito — in other words, all of the major
thirteenth-century commentators on the Prior Analytics —
followed Kilwardby in their interpretations.

Throughout the commentary, Kilwardby assumes that Aristotle’s theory
is correct and makes it his project to find the interpretation that
shows this. He begins by considering a counterexample to the accidental
conversion of necessity sentences:

(5:1) Every literate being is necessarily a human
being.

According to the conversion rules accepted by Kilwardby, (5:1)
should convert to:

(5:2) Some human being is necessarily
literate.

But (5:1) is obviously true whereas (5:2) is false.

As we have seen, this is a common issue for de re readings
of the modal sentences. Kilwardby assumes that Aristotle’s modal
syllogistic is a logic for divided (de re) sentences. He
proceeds to give two separate solutions to this puzzle. The first is
based on a distinction between different readings of (5:1). Kilwardby
explains that the subject term of a sentence can stand for the subject
of the inherence (the suppositum), or for the qualification
through which the subject is specified (qualitas/forma). If
the term ‘white’ stands for its suppositum, it
refers to a thing that is white or to ‘that which is
white’, but if it stands for the quality or form, it refers to
the whiteness inhering in that which is white, rather than to the thing
in which it inheres. Kilwardby says that in (5:1), ‘literate
being’ stands for its suppositum, which explains why
(5:1) is true, whereas in (5:2) the term is taken differently as
standing for the quality or form. According to Kilwardby, the meaning
of the original subject term is changed when it no longer stands for
the suppositum (literate being), but for the abstract quality
of being literate, and it is this change that blocks the conversion.
(5:2) is true if it is read as:

(5:3) Something that is a human being is necessarily that
which is literate.

Kilwardby, however, preferred another solution to these difficulties
for the conversion rules of necessity sentences. The second solution is
based on a distinction between sentences that are necessary per
se and those that are necessary per accidens. He writes
(I, fol. 7rb):

When it is said: ‘Every literate being is necessarily
a human being’, the subject is not something that can be said
per se of the predicate, but since ‘literate
being’ is not separated from what belongs to a human being in
itself, the sentence is conceded as necessary, though when a sentence
is necessary in this way it is necessary per accidens.
Therefore, when Aristotle says that necessity sentences are
convertible, he means only sentences necessary per se are
convertible.

The idea is here that since ‘human being’ is not
predicated per se of its subject ‘literate being’,
the sentence (5:1) is not a per se necessity sentence and
therefore not convertible. (5:1) is a necessity sentence, though of the
per accidens type, since it is necessarily true only in the
sense that being human and being literate are not separable. Kilwardby
implies that the relation between the subject and predicate terms must
be of a special kind if a sentence is to be called necessary per
se. In (5:1), ‘literate being’ and ‘human
being’ do not have the close per se relation Kilwardby
demands of a convertible sentence.

Kilwardby thinks that sentences per se should be understood
following An. Post. I.4–6, where Aristotle discusses four
different notions of per se (kath’ hauto)
predication, though Kilwardby seems only to have the first two in mind
when discussing per se necessity. Aristotle says that the
first type of per se predication (per se primo modo)
occurs when the definition of the subject includes the predicate. The
second type of per se predication (per se secundo
modo) occurs when the definition of the predicate includes the
subject. The best characterization of the first type is the
genus/species relation, where the definition of a species includes its
genus. The second type is often characterized by a proprium
(property), since a proprium is included in the definition of
a subject, as in ‘a human being is able to laugh’, where
the term ‘human being’ is included in the definition of the
predicate ‘able to laugh’. A sentence is per se
necessary if it involves either of these two predications, according to
Kilwardby. Necessity per accidens belongs to all other
necessity sentences, which lack this intrinsic relation between subject
and predicate.

Kilwardby also stresses that in a per se necessity sentence,
the subject must be ‘something belonging in itself to that
predicate’ (‘per se aliquod ipsius
predicati’), by which he seems to mean that the subject has
the predicate as an essential property, i.e., such that it has the
predicate as a necessary property through itself and not through
something else. A syllogistic necessity sentence is then understood as
a proposition expressing the essential properties of a thing in a
genus/species relationship. He seems to assume that in a per
se necessity sentence, the subject term is not an accidental term
but an essential or necessary term, and that the subject is
essentially (per se) linked to the predicate rather than
merely through the weaker relation of inseparability. Consequently, if
the subject term is necessary and the link is necessary, it follows
that the predicate term cannot be merely a contingent (accidental)
term. It must be necessary as well. The Aristotelian theory of
necessity syllogistic is thus limited to a special class of terms, all
of which stand for substances. The same terminology is also used to
explain syllogistic for contingency sentences, which suggests that
Kilwardby was trying to develop a uniform and highly original
interpretation of the theory. A number of recent scholars have offered
similar interpretations of Aristotle (see van Rijen 1989, Patterson
1995, Thom 1996, and Nortmann 1996).

When they interpreted Aristotle’s modal syllogistic, most medievals
saw the need to introduce a distinction between different kinds of
assertoric sentences. In the mixed syllogism L–L (L represents a
necessity sentence), the assertoric minor premise cannot be any kind of
assertoric sentence because then the terms could merely be accidentally
connected. Kilwardby therefore introduced a distinction between
absolutely (simpliciter) and as-of-now (ut nunc)
assertoric sentences. The origins of this distinction can be found in
Aristotle (An. Pr. I.15, 34b7–18), but Kilwardby of course
uses his own per se/per accidens terminology to spell out the
difference. An absolutely assertoric sentence involves a per
se predication whereas an as-of-now assertoric sentence involves a
per accidens predication. In this way, he can guarantee that
an essential connection between the terms in a valid L–L syllogisms is
preserved through to the conclusion. This is not unproblematic (see
Lagerlund 2000, 39–42), though the distinction between different
assertoric sentences needed somehow to be made and remained a problem
throughout the later Middle Ages.

In the end, Kilwardby did not arrive at just the moods accepted by
Aristotle. For example, he accepts –LL for the first figure, which is
not accepted by Aristotle, and does not manage to get –CC and LCC for
Disamis in the third figure. There are also some other moods he does
not succeed in validating and others still he grants but which are not
accepted by Aristotle. But perhaps Kilwardby gets as close as one can
possibly get to making Aristotle’s system consistent. (See Knuuttila
1996, Lagerlund 2000, and Thom 2003 and 2007.)

5. Richard of Campsall

An important figure in the history of syllogistic logic is Richard of
Campsall (c. 1280/90–1350/60). Sometime before 1308 he wrote his
Questions on the Books of the Prior Analytics (Questiones
super librum Priorum Analeticorum), a commentary on the first book
of the Prior Analytics that devotes 14 of its 20 questions to
modal syllogistic. He seems to think that there is nothing to add to
the theory of assertoric syllogistic and his presentation of it is
fairly standard, but he has lots of interesting things to say about
modal syllogistic.

The main development of modal syllogistic in Campsall’s work is his
systematic application of the distinction between composite (de
dicto) and divided (de re) modal sentences. Campsall
seems to have held that the system of modal syllogisms presented in the
Prior Analytics was intended for divided modal sentences, and
so he tries to prove that what Aristotle said is basically correct when
modal sentences are understood in this way. But this turns out to be a
very cumbersome task. It is no surprise that he does not quite succeed,
as he occasionally admits.

In his reply to one of the questions in his commentary, he makes a
brief remark about the difference between composite and divided modal
sentences. With regard to universal negative necessity sentences he
writes: “[Such a sentence] in the composite sense is singular and
signifies that the inherence which it modifies is necessary; in the
divided sense it is universal and does not signify that the inherence
that is modified is necessary, but solely that whatever is contained
under the predicate necessarily is removed from whatever is contained
under the subject” (5.38: 110). The universal negative modal sentence
is singular when it is taken in the composite sense, that is, when it
is read so that the modality is predicated of what a non-modal
proposition expresses (dictum) or, as Campsall says, when it
is predicated of the inherence. He goes on to explain that a necessity
sentence in the composite sense signifies that the corresponding
non-modal sentence is necessarily true. ‘That every B is not A is
necessary’ is thus not universal but singular. When the universal
negative necessity proposition is taken in the divided sense, it is
universal. The modality does not qualify the dictum as a
whole, but only the mode of removal of whatever is under the predicate
term from whatever is under the subject term.

Both the conversion rules and the syllogisms for modal sentences in
the composite sense are validated by a small number of consequences,
such as:

(6:1) If the antecedent is necessary, then the consequent
is necessary.

The corresponding non-modal sentence is here assumed to be valid.
Similar consequences can be formed for possibility and contingency
sentences. These exhaust the theory of syllogism for composite modal
sentences and Campsall accordingly spends little time elaborating
it.

It is natural to assume, as Campsall does, that Aristotle meant his
theory of modal syllogisms to cover divided modal sentences, since the
reading of composite sentences Campsall proposes entails that they are
all singular and that Aristotle’s theory is not a theory for singular
sentences. Therefore, he must show how the conversion rules can be made
to hold on such a reading of modal sentences.

In his attempt to give Aristotelian modal syllogistic a consistent
interpretation, Campsall is forced to adopt a very artificial reading
of divided modal sentences. He is clearly influenced by the
suppositum approach suggested by Kilwardby, but he thinks that
both subject and predicate terms should be taken in this way.
Furthermore, he states that the terms in divided modal sentences should
be taken as standing for that which is now under them. He believes that
with these conditions, the conversion rules and almost all of the moods
accepted by Aristotle can be shown to be valid.

Campsall also thinks that on such a reading, the following
holds:

(6:2) C can be one of those that are now under B;
therefore, it is one of those that are now under B.

Campsall takes the terms to signify how things actually are now. If
the terms in the sentence ‘A can be B’ are taken to stand
for the things that are at this very moment under them, then ‘A
can be B’ means the same as ‘A is B’. According to
Campsall, ‘Socrates can be white’ should read in the
divided sense ‘That which is Socrates can now be one of those
that are now white’. If that which is Socrates can be one of
those that are white now, it is one of them; otherwise, Socrates could
not have been that particular white being in the first place. Campsall
thinks that Socrates can be this white being (B1) or that white being
(B2) or …, that is, (B1, B2, … , Bn), and if Socrates is not
actually B1 now, he is B2 now, etc., but Socrates will be one of B1 to
Bn now. This is Campsall’s reason for stating (6:2).

This is not as crazy as it might first seem. Consider the following
schema in quantified modal logic:

(6:3) ∀x (Bx &
◊(c = x) ⊃
Bc).

If (6:3) is an accurate interpretation of (6:2), then it seems true
since (◊(t = t′) ⊃ (t
= t′)) is true for identity statements in Kripke’s S5
if t and t′ are rigid designators.

Given his interpretation of divided modal sentences and consequences
like (6:2), Campsall manages to prove the conversion rules. Like
Kilwardby, he approximates Aristotle’s original system but in the end
does not preserve all of its features. The most interesting features of
Campsall’s work, however, are not the result of his efforts to prove
Aristotle right, but of his apparently successful solutions. His
concept of contingency allows for simultaneous alternatives, such that
if something exists, it is possible for it not to exist at that very
same moment. Campsall thus abandons the fundamental Aristotelian
principle of the necessity of the present (see Knuuttila 1993 and the
entry on
medieval theories of modality
for discussion of criticisms of this principle in the late
thirteenth century). But Campsall’s analysis is complicated by the fact
that, as we have seen, he also accepts the principle that what can
exist now does exist now, and that what does not exist now is
necessarily non-existent now. In other words, he denies the necessity
of the present for affirmative sentences and accepts it for negative
ones. There is thus an asymmetry between affirmative and negative modal
sentences in Campsall’s system.

Accepting simultaneous alternatives and denying the necessity of the
present are typical of modal semantics and modal logic after Campsall,
especially in the work of figures such as William of Ockham and John
Buridan. It is historically interesting that Campsall employs these
principles in his work, even though they are embedded in a theory whose
elements point in another direction, towards Kilwardby. Campsall’s
problematization of the necessity of the present also indicates that he
wants to separate logic from ontology. In many respects, he paves the
way for the next generation of logicians. His complicated
interpretation also shows that no matter how hard one might try, there
is no way to give a consistent interpretation of what Aristotle says in
the Prior Analytics (for discussion, see Lagerlund 2000,
Thom 2003 and Knuuttila 2008).

6. William of Ockham

Around the time William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347) wrote his
Compendium of Logic (Summa logicae), medieval logic
began to change. More emphasis was placed on the theory of consequences
than the theory of syllogisms. A theory of consequences was developed
by Abelard in the course of his discussion of topical inferences and
hypothetical syllogisms, and during the thirteenth century the basic
idea was further developed in treatments of the topics, but in the
fourteenth century works devoted solely to consequences began to appear
(Green-Pedersen 1984). The most famous is John Buridan’s Treatise
on Consequences (Tractatus de consequentiis), though
earlier authors such as Walter Burley had also stressed consequences
over syllogisms. Burley probably wrote his On the Purity of the Art
of Logic (De puritate arte logicae) as a reply to
Ockham’s famous Summa. For Ockham, however, syllogisms are
still the most important formal inferences, and he devotes most of Book
III of the Summa to them (see Normore 1999 for a recent study
of Ockham’s logic).

Like Campsall, Ockham has nothing to add to the theory of assertoric
syllogisms, which was by then well understood. Let us, however, have a
look at the proof method using the expository syllogism that medieval
logicians such as Ockham seem to have preferred over Aristotle’s
cumbersome method of ekthesis. Ockham uses this method
frequently, though not as frequently as Buridan later did.

The method is used to prove the third figure moods. Expository
syllogisms are perfect for this because the middle term is the subject
of both premises in that figure. Darapti, for example, runs as
follows:

Proofs by expository syllogism are practically self-evident. To
prove Darapti, one has only to take a particular instantiation of the
two premises to get:

The resulting syllogism is an expository syllogism since it has
singular terms as subject terms, and so Darapti is proved. This method
is reminiscent of ekthesis since it involves particular
instantiation, though it is not the same method.

As we have seen, the theory of modal syllogisms was explored in
order to try to save Aristotle’s theory, and this was still the motive
of most logicians in the first half of the fourteenth century. But
Ockham himself seems no longer to be interested in this project. His
aim instead seems purely systematic, and in his desire to extend his
basic methods he manages to bring the theory into a whole new
light.

The most fundamental distinction in modal syllogistic is of course
that between composite and divided modal sentences, but divided modal
sentences are also equivocal according to Ockham. Using ideas developed
in the theory of supposition, he distinguishes between divided modal
sentences with an ampliated subject term and those with a non-ampliated
subject term. Let us look at how Ockham draws the more fundamental
distinction.

Ockham proceeds by dividing modal sentences into sentences with a
dictum (cum dicto) and those without a
dictum (sine dicto), dividing modal sentences with a
dictum into composite and divided senses. He adds that a modal
sentence cum dicto taken in the divided sense is always
equivalent to a modal sentence sine dicto. Ockham expresses
the dictum in Latin by an accusative and infinitive
construction. Thus, in the sentence ‘That every human being is an
animal is necessary’ (in Latin ‘Omnem hominem esse
animal est necessarium’), ‘That every human being is
an animal’ (’Omnem hominem esse animal’) is
the dictum of the sentence, which has the mode
‘necessity’ predicated of it. He treats the dictum
as the subject term of the modal sentence, and the mode as the
predicate term. It is important to distinguish between the
dictum and an assertoric sentence. The dictum is what
is asserted in an assertoric sentence. Thus, when the dictum
is said to be necessary or possible and there is a sentence asserting
it, such a sentence is necessarily or possibly true (Summa
logicae II, 9).

As noted by Campsall, the fact that both the dictum and the
mode are treated as terms has an important consequence for composite
modal sentences. ‘That every B is A is necessary’ is,
according to the reading suggested, not a universal affirmative but a
singular affirmative sentence. Ockham adds that one can also call such
sentences universal or particular, depending on whether the original
sentence — that is, the sentence referred to by the
dictum — is universal or particular.

The syllogistic for composite modal sentences is equally
straightforward and reduces to a few valid consequences. He explicitly
mentions the following six (Summa logicae III-1):

(7:4) and (7:5) are used by Ockham to get:

(7:6) A necessity sentence entails the corresponding
possibility sentence

It is consequences such as these that give Ockham a syllogistic for
composite modal sentences. He simply takes the standard assertoric
syllogistic and applies these rules to them. Ockham’s syllogistic for
divided modal sentences, however, is much less straightforward.

In Book III-1, Ockham expresses the equivocal nature of divided
modal sentences as follows:

But if the possibility proposition is taken in the divided
sense or if one takes a proposition equivalent to it — such as
the propositions, ‘Every human being can be white’,
‘A white being can be black’ and the like — then this
proposition must be distinguished by virtue of the third mode of
equivocation, in the way that a subject can supposit for those that are
or for those that can be, that is, in the way that a subject can
supposit for that about which a thing is verified with a word about the
present or for that about which a thing is verified with a word about
the possible; or else it denotes what it can supposit for, which I say
to exclude quibbling. If this is said about ‘Every white being
can be a human being’, then one sense is, ‘Everything that
is white can be a human being’, and in this sense it is true as
long as nothing is white except a human being. Another sense is,
‘Everything that can be white can be a human being’, and
this is false, provided either only a human being is white or something
other than a human being [is white].

Here he clearly states that a possibility sentence has two readings,
namely:

(7:7) (Quantity) what is B can be (quality) A

(7:8) (Quantity) what can be B can be (quality) A

(7:8) has generated some scholarly debate as to what Ockham really
meant by this reading of divided possibility sentences. Does he mean by
(7:8) that the subject term is ampliated to stand for possible beings
as well as for actual beings? Can a strict nominalist such as Ockham
really accept quantification over possible beings? (For the details,
see Karger 1980, Freddoso 1980, McGrade 1985, Knuuttila 1993: 139–49,
and Lagerlund 2000: 107–112.)

Ockham also thinks that contingency sentences are equivocal in the
same sense as possibility sentences, but not necessity sentences. The
only reading he accepts for these sentences is:

(7:10) (Quantity) what is B is necessarily (quality)
A.

(7:10) implies that only actually existing things have necessary
properties. It is unclear why he thinks this (see Lagerlund 2000:
112–114), but it gives his syllogistic an unattractive feature that has
awkward consequences. For example, no conversion rules for divided
necessity sentences are valid and there are also no valid moods in the
second figure.

Ockham also discusses syllogisms with mixed composite and divided
modal premises. He mentions some very interesting consequences in the
course of this discussion.

(7:11) That every B is A is possible ⊃ Some B is
possibly A

(7:12) That some B is A is possible ⊃ Some B is possibly A

(7:13) That this is A is possible ≡ This is possibly A

(7:14) That this is A is contingent ≡ This is contingently A

(7:15) That this is A is necessary ≡ This is necessarily
A

In (7:11) and (7:12), the subject terms of divided modal sentences
must be ampliated for the consequences to hold. It is interesting to
note that for categorical sentences with singular subject terms, the
distinction between composite and divided senses collapses. His
example is ‘That Socrates is white is possible’ implies
‘Socrates is possibly white’. With the help of these
consequences he can prove some additional moods to be valid in the
different figures. (See Lagerlund 2000: 124–29, and for a systematic
reconstruction see Klima 2008.)

7. John Buridan

John Buridan (c. 1300–1361) was the foremost logician of the later
Middle Ages and in his hands the theory of the syllogism was reworked
and developed well beyond anything seen before in the history of logic.
His two most important logical works are the Treatise on
Consequence and the Summulae de Dialectica. The
presentation here is primarily based on the Treatise (for
further discussion, see Lagerlund 2000, Chapter 5, and Zupko 2003,
Chapters 5–6).

In the Treatise, Buridan bases his discussion of the
syllogism on a philosophical semantics that views syllogistic inference
as a special case of the much more comprehensive theory of
consequences. Like his immediate predecessors, he was for the most part
uninterested in assertoric syllogisms and moves on quickly to temporal,
oblique, variation, and modal syllogisms, though this does not prevent
him from making some original contributions to the theory of the
assertoric syllogism.

According to Buridan, a syllogism is a formal consequence, and so
syllogistic becomes a branch of the theory of formal consequence. As
consequences, syllogisms are distinguished by their conjunctive
antecedent and single-sentence consequent, and furthermore by their
three terms — though this last condition is not necessary since
Buridan also treats of syllogisms with more than three terms.

Buridan treats of the three famous figures and notes that a
conclusion can be either direct or indirect. In an indirect conclusion,
the minor term is predicated of the major instead of the other way
around. Since the premises are part of a conjunction and together form
the antecedent of a consequent, they can easily switch places, which
means that Buridan can define the fourth figure as a first figure with
transposed premises and an indirect conclusion. Hence, he does not need
to discuss it independently of the first figure.

For Buridan, a formal consequence holds by the principle of uniform
substitution. It is valid for any uniform substitution of its
categorematic terms. A syllogism is a special kind of formal
consequence since it requires for its validity that terms be conjoined
across sentences. How the principle of uniform substitution is supposed
to work here is a bit tricky and forces him to bring into play his
general semantics as well as the notion of distribution. To spell out
the relation of their terms and hence the validity of the first figure
syllogisms, he reformulates the traditional dici de omni et
nullo rules (see King 1985: 71):

One could say a great deal about these rules, but the term that does
most of the heavy lifting is ‘supposits’. Supposition is a theory
of reference and it is the coreferentiality of terms in the different
sentences in a syllogism that is the decisive factor in determining
whether the principle of uniform substitution is satisfied or not. It
is at this point that he introduces the theory of distribution.

The rules governing the distribution of terms in a sentence are
given as part of his account of common personal supposition. A term is
distributed in a sentence if it is taken to refer to everything it
signifies, such as if the term is in the scope of a universal
quantifier. To indicate when a term is distributed he gives five rules,
according to which universals distribute subjects, negatives distribute
predicates, and no other terms are distributed. If we stay within the
square of opposition (Buridan’s theory of distribution, and hence his
syllogistic, has wide application, extending far beyond the traditional
A, E, I, and O sentences), this implies that universal affirmative
sentences have their subject terms distributed, universal negatives
have both terms distributed, particular affirmatives have neither term
distributed, and particular negatives have only their predicate terms
distributed. (For an influential criticism of this theory of
distribution see Geach 1962, and King 1985 for a reply.)

With his theory of distribution in place, Buridan turns to the
syllogisms, and we see now that in order for a combination of premises
to be acceptable, the middle terms must be distributed —
otherwise we will not have a formally acceptable consequence. Buridan
approaches the problem in combinatorial fashion. Given the four
sentences and two possible positions for each we get 16 possible
combinations. Some of these can be ruled out immediately based on the
rules for distribution. A combination with only negative premises will
not work at all; hence EE, EO, OE, and OO must be rejected. II has both
middle terms undistributed and can thus be rejected. In the first
figure, IA, OA, and OI have an undistributed middle. The other eight
are accepted. In the second figure, we see that AA, AI, and IA must be
rejected because of an undistributed middle. The other eight are
accepted. In the third figure, IO and OI have an undistributed middle
but the remaining nine combinations are accepted.

At first glance, there are some surprises in Buridan’s presentation
of assertoric syllogistic. In the second figure he accepts indirect
conclusions for IEO (Tifesno) and OAO (Robaco), and in the third figure
indirect conclusions for AOO (Carbodo), AEO (Lapfeton), and IEO
(Rifeson). He also accepts syllogisms concluding to what he calls an
“uncommon idiom for negatives,” that is, when the predicate term
precedes the negation, as in ‘Some B A is not’ (Quaedam
B A est non). Such sentences make no sense in English, but Buridan
treats them as equivalent to sentences where the predicate term
quantified, as in ‘Some B is not some A’. He writes the
sentences in this way because otherwise they would violate his rules
for distribution and scope. Syllogisms concluding to an “uncommon idiom
for negatives” add another three valid forms in the first figure and
two in the second. If we tally this up and include all of the indirect
conclusions, we get 33 valid moods, as opposed to 19 in Aristotelian
syllogistic. If we then add the supplementary subalternate conclusions,
we get 24 valid moods in traditional syllogistic but 38 in Buridan’s
systematization.

Buridan is quite right to accept these additional 14 moods. They are
valid. But his result is not as dramatic as it seems since the middle
terms are either in the subject or predicate position. In the second
and third figure an indirect conclusion becomes equivalent to
transposing the premises. Hence Buridan’s Tifesno, Robaco, Carbodo,
Lapfeton, and Rifeson reduce to Festino, Baroco, Bocardo, Felapton, and
Ferison, respectively. This is also obvious if we look at the names of
these syllogisms, which suggest that Buridan has only reshuffled the
letters of the names of the standard Aristotelian syllogisms. After
having done all this over just a few pages — as mentioned above,
Buridan is rather uninterested in assertoric syllogistic — he
turns to the temporal, oblique, and modal syllogistic. Of these, it is
modal syllogistic to which he devotes the most time.

A temporal syllogism consists of sentences whose copulas involve
temporal ampliation. In such sentences, the supposition of the subject
term is extended to include past and future things as well as present
things. The syllogistic for sentences involving oblique terms is
important for Buridan’s general theory of consequence, since this is
where we find rules governing the behavior of oblique terms in
distributive contexts. His investigation is extraordinarily detailed
and extremely rigorous, qualities all the more impressive when we
consider that he did not have the representational tools of modern
symbolic logic.

The syllogistic for composite modal sentences is straightforward and
Buridan uses only a couple of pages in the Treatise to sketch
its basic structure. The theory of the syllogism for divided modal
sentences is given a much more thorough treatment. For Buridan, a modal
copula always ampliates its subject term to stand not only for present,
past, and future things but also possible things, unless the
supposition of the subject term is explicitly restricted to what is
actual. On this basis, he can give an exhaustive account of the logical
relations between quantified divided modal sentences, which he presents
in the octagon of opposition. Slightly simplified, and assuming that
the complete octagon can be formed by some trivial equivalences holding
between the modalities, it can be depicted as in Figure 1:

Figure 1

Together with the octagon he also uses some consequences to prove
the valid syllogisms. He first states the valid conversion rules:

(8:3) Every B is possibly A ⊃ Some A is possibly B

(8:4) Some B is possibly A ≡ Some A is possibly B

(8:5) Every B is necessarily not A ≡ Every A is necessarily not B

(8:6) (Quantity) B is contingently A ≡ (Quantity) B is
contingently not A

All these are valid assuming their subject terms are ampliated. He
also employs the following consequences:

(8:7) Every B is necessarily not A ⊃ Every B is not A

(8:8) (Quantity) which is B is necessarily A ⊃ (Quantity) B is A

(8:9) (Quantity) B is A ⊃ Some B is possibly A

(8:10) (Quantity) B is necessarily (quality) A ⊃ (Quantity) B is
possibly (quality) A

(8:11) (Quantity) B is contingently (quality) A ⊃ (Quantity) B is
possibly (quality) A

By stating these consequences and the octagon of opposition, Buridan
has presented a virtually exhaustive syntactical account of modal
logic, and, together with his semantics of supposition and
distribution, constructed a powerful logic unmatched by anything
presented in the history of logic before him.

Buridan uses four methods to prove the valid syllogistic moods. All
first figure moods are proved by the rules of class inclusion, that is,
the dici de omni and dici de nullo rules. The second
and third figure moods are proved using three different methods: either
by conversion — that is, by (8:3), (8:4), (8:5) or (8:6) —
by reductio ad impossibile, or by expository syllogism. Proof
by impossibility is used on a few occasions, but Buridan’s approach
here differs in no way from Aristotle’s. This fourth way is frequently
used to prove the valid third figure moods. Since the number of
possible combinations of premises and conclusions in modal syllogistic
is quite extensive, he limits himself to discussing those moods whose
assertoric counterparts are valid, but even so he manages to discuss a
large number of valid and invalid syllogisms (see Hughes 1989,
Lagerlund 2000, Thom 2003, Klima 2008, and Dutilh-Novaes 2008).

There has been considerable scholarly discussion of Buridan’s modal
syllogistic. It has been asked in particular whether it corresponds to
any modern system of modal logic. The most popular answer is S5 (King
1985). Some have argued that Buridan must have been thinking in terms
of some kind of possible worlds model (Hughes 1989 and Knuuttila 1993).
Such comparisons of course reflect the extent to which these scholars
have been impressed by Buridan’s modal logic, which was without equal
until the late twentieth century.

8. Later Medieval Developments of the Theory

Syllogistic logic reached the height of its development in Buridan and
for the next two hundred years, little was said about it. Buridan’s
younger associates at Paris, Albert of Saxony and Marsilius of Inghen,
were both competent logicians, but neither made any substantive
additions to the theory developed by their master. Paul of Venice was a
well-known early fifteenth-century logician, but he had little to say
about the theory of the syllogism. In the late fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, several very good logicians wrote books on logic, perhaps
the most skillful being Jodocus Trutfetter, a follower of Ockham who is
better known as a teacher of Martin Luther. But Trutfetter’s logic is
wholly based on Buridan. In his massive work, the modestly titled,
Little Compendium of the Whole of Logic (Summulae totius
logicae), he extends modal logic beyond Buridan to include
discussions of epistemic and doxastic modalities. His treatment of
syllogistic is perhaps the most extensive in the medieval tradition.

As noted above, the syllogistic logic of Ockham and Buridan was not
primarily aimed at saving Aristotle. But historical interest in
Aristotle returned in the latter part of the fifteenth century, and
some scholars, mainly from the Thomistic and Albertist traditions,
wanted to know what Aristotle had said about syllogistic. There was
also the nominalist commentator George of Brussels, who tried to offer
a historically accurate interpretation of Aristotle together with a
systematic account along the lines of Buridan. It is interesting to
note that the modal syllogistic these philosophers ascribe to Aristotle
is identical to that provided under Kilwardby’s interpretation. (For
further discussion of modal logic in the later Middle Ages, see Coombs
1990, Roncaglia 1996, and Lagerlund 2000, Chapter 8.)

9. Summary

The theory of the syllogism was the most important logical theory
during the Middle Ages and for a long time it was practically
synonymous with logic as a discipline. Buridan altered this picture by
making syllogistic part of a much larger and more complex logic of
consequence.

At first, medieval commentators on Aristotle’s Prior
Analytics sought to save what they took to be Aristotle’s original
system. Kilwardby thought this could be done by interpreting modal
sentences in light of Aristotle’s metaphysics of essence together with
his account of essential prediction in the Posterior
Analytics. This was a very influential interpretation, but it was
ultimately abandoned because it did not succeed in saving
Aristotle.

In the early fourteenth century, Campsall tried to save Aristotle by
developing a more radical interpretation restricting the supposition of
subject and predicate terms in modal sentences. This enabled him to
prove the conversion rules and many of the syllogistic moods accepted
by Aristotle, but not even this interpretation could make sense of the
Prior Analytics.

By the second quarter of the fourteenth century, modal logic had
begun to change and new distinctions were used to develop the theory of
the modal syllogism, such as the distinction between de dicto
and de re modal sentences. Ockham was the first simply to
abandon Aristotle’s theory in favor of a newer and more systematic
account. He was not quite successful, however, and it was left to
Buridan to subsume modal syllogistic as part of his larger project of
systematizing the whole of logic.

The history of syllogistic does not end with the Middle Ages, of
course, but it is fair to say that the theory did not really change in
the six centuries since Buridan. What did change, and for the worse,
was people’s knowledge of the original sources and hence also of the
richness and sophistication of medieval logic, a state of ignorance
that made the doctrine easy for logicians of the early twentieth
century to ridicule.

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• Roncaglia, G., 1996, Palaestra rationis. Discussioni su natura
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Other Internet Resources

• Spade, P.V., 2002, Thoughts, Words, and Things: An Introduction
  to Medieval Logic and Semantic Theory, version 1.1.
  [Download in PDF]
• Parsons, T., Formulating Medieval Logic

[Please contact the author with other suggestions.]

Related Entries

Abelard [Abailard], Peter |
Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, disciplines in: philosophy of language and logic |
Aristotle, General Topics: logic |
Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus |
Buridan, John [Jean] |
modality: medieval theories of |
Ockham [Occam], William |
square of opposition

Edmund Burke, author of Reflections on the Revolution in
France, is known to a wide public as a classic political thinker:
it is less well understood that his intellectual achievement depended
upon his understanding of philosophy and use of it in the practical
writings and speeches by which he is chiefly known. The present essay
explores the character and significance of the use of philosophy in
his thought.

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Life
• 3. Intellectual Orientation
• 4. Philosophical and Historical Writings
• 5. Political Style: Some Parliamentary Applications
• 6. Burke’s Practical Reasoning
• 7. Burke and the American Revolution
• 8. Philosophical Character of Political Disposition
• 9. The Revolution in France
• 10. Problems of Interpretation
• 11. Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Related Entries
• Other Internet Resources

---

1. Introduction

The name of Edmund Burke (1730-97)
^[1]
is not one that often figures in the history of philosophy
^.[2]
This is a curious fate for a writer of genius who was also the author
of a book entitled A Philosophical Enquiry. Besides the
Enquiry, Burke’s writings and some of his speeches contain
strongly philosophical elements — philosophical both in our
contemporary sense and in the eighteenth century sense, especially
‘philosophical’ history. These elements play a fundamental
role within his work, and help us to understand why Burke is a
political classic. His writings and speeches therefore merit attention
as examples of attention to both ideas and to history, and of the role
of this attention in practical thought. His work is also, as we see
shall see at the end of this entry, an achievement that challenges
assumptions held by many of our contemporaries.

2. Life

Burke was born at Dublin in Ireland, then part of the British Empire,
the son of a prosperous attorney, and, after an early education at
home, became a boarder at the school run by Abraham Shackleton, a
Quaker from Yorkshire, at Ballitore in County Kildare. Burke received
his university education at Trinity College, Dublin, a bastion of the
Anglican Church of Ireland. Thence he proceeded to the Middle Temple
at London, in order to qualify for the Bar, but legal practice was
less attractive to him than the broader perspective which had captured
his attention at university (or earlier). It was first as a writer,
and then as a public figure that he made his career. Burke’s
intellectual formation did not suggest that his career would be purely
philosophical. Indeed, for those without an independent income or a
clerical vocation  such a way of life was not very feasible in
Britain or Ireland. Only the Scottish universities offered posts that
did not require holy orders, but they were not very receptive to
non-presbyterians. Burke married in 1756, and had a son by 1758, so
that a career of Humean celibacy, in which philosophy was cultivated
on a little oatmeal, was not for him.

Indeed, like Hume, Burke found that there was more money in
narrative works and in practical affairs than in philosophy. Burke’s
earliest writings include A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin
of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), and A
Vindication of Natural Society (1756). Thereafter he was co-author
of An Account of the European Settlements (1757) and began
An Abridgement of English History (c.1757-62). From 1758, at
least until 1765, he was the principal ‘conductor’ of the
new Annual Register. In 1765, Burke became private secretary
to the Marquis of Rockingham (who had just become First Lord of
the Treasury) and was elected to the British House of Commons in the
same year. He remained there, with a brief intermission in the Autumn
of 1780, for nearly twenty-nine years, retiring in the Summer of 1794.
Burke, who was always a prominent figure there and sometimes an
effective persuader, gave a great many parliamentary speeches. He
published versions of some of these, notably on American
Taxation (1774), Conciliation with America (1775), and
Fox’s East India Bill (1783). These printed speeches, though
anchored to specific occasions, and certainly intended to have a
practical effect in British politics, were also meant to embody
Burke’s thought in a durable form. In that respect, they parallel
his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770),
and Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), amongst
other non-oratorical writings.

Burke’s activity as a parliamentarian and political writer embraced a
great many concerns. Prominent amongst these were the problems of
British rule overseas, in North America, India and Ireland. His name,
however, has been linked most strongly by posterity to a critique of
the French Revolution. Burke was certainly more notable as a pundit
than an executive politician, holding office only twice, for a few
months in 1782 and 1783. His political life was punctuated in May 1791
by a break from some of his party colleagues over the significance of
the Revolution. Thereafter, assisted not least by the turn it took in
1792-3, he became a largely independent commentator on domestic
politics and international affairs in An Appeal from the New to
the Old Whigs (1791), Letters on a Regicide Peace
(1795-7), and A Letter to a Noble Lord (1796). Burke in his
last years, especially from 1792, turned his attention to his native
Ireland. He failed to found a political dynasty, and he left no
lasting school in parliamentary politics: the last politician who can
be regarded plausibly as a disciple, the addressee of A Letter to
William Elliot (1795), died in 1818. As Sidgwick observed,
‘though Burke lives, we meet with no Burkites’ (Sidgwick
2000, 195). Nor did Burke bequeath a straightforward legacy to any
political party or to any ideological brand of thought, though plenty
have tried to appropriate him wholly or partly. The difficulties that
they might find in colonising his thought are apparent from an account
of it that emphasizes its philosophical aspects.

3. Intellectual orientation

Burke’s mind, by the time he left Trinity, had two facets: one was an
orientation towards religion, improvement and politics, the other a
philosophical method. The latter derived from his university
education, the former from reflection on the Irish situation. Burke
was born into an Ireland where reflective intellect had its social
setting in a small educational elite, much of it connected with the
Church of Ireland. This elite contemplated a political class which
owned much of the land, and consisted primarily of a gentry and
peerage, headed by the King’s representative, the Lord-Lieutenant; but
it saw too a tiny professional class, and a huge, illiterate,
impoverished peasantry. The aim of the educational elite, which it
shared with some of the political class, was improvement in the
broadest sense, that is to say it connected self-improvement through
the influence of the arts & sciences, and through the development
of intellectual skills, with moral culture and with economic
development. The ability of the educated, the politicians and the rich
to take constructive initiatives contrasted starkly with the inability
of the peasantry to help itself: peasants relieved their misery
principally through spasms of savagery against their landlords’
representatives, but such violence was repressed sternly and helped
nobody. The Irish situation suggested a general rationale of practice
to those who wished to improve themselves and others: improvement, if
it was to spread outside the educational elite, must spring from the
guidance and good will of the possessing classes: from the landlord
who developed his property, from the priest who instructed and
consoled the poor, and from the lord lieutenant who used his power
benevolently. The only obvious alternative was violence – and that was
both destructive and fruitless. Burke retained all his life a sense of
the responsibility of the educated, rich and powerful to improve the
lot of those whom they directed; a sense that existing arrangements
were valuable insofar as they were the necessary preconditions for
improvement; and a strong sense of the importance of educated people
as agents for constructive change, change which he often contrasted
with the use of force, whether as method or as result.

This experiental orientation of Burke’s mind was turned from attitude
into articulate thought through the educational medium of the Irish
Enlightenment. For example, some points that may seem distinctively
Burkean, belonged first to Berkeley. Berkeley saw no advantages in
improper abstraction or in a mythical golden age. Thus Burke’s
unwillingness to judge institutions and practices without first
connecting them with other things, his disinclination ‘to give
praise or blame to any thing which relates to human actions, and human
concerns, on a simple view of the object in all the nakedness and
solitude of metaphysical abstraction’ (RRF, W & S 1981-,
viii.58) is a practical judgement that implies a conceptual
counterpart like Berkeley’s view that ‘when we attempt to
abstract extension and motion from all other qualities, and consider
them by themselves, we presently lose sight of them, and run into
great extravagancies’ (Berkeley, Principles of Human
Knowledge, 1948-57, vol. ii, 84.) In both cases, philosophical
wariness matched a distaste for considering aspects of objects in
permanent isolation from the other aspects with which they were
essentially connected. This suspicion of abstract ideas accompanied a
suspicion of schemes for considering people in abstraction from their
present situation, and accompanied too doubts about a golden past:
Berkeley rejected ‘the rude original of society’
(Berkeley, The Querist, 1948-57, vol. vi, 141) and had no
time for ‘declaimers against prejudice’ who ‘have
wrought themselves into a sort of esteem for savages, as a virtuous
and unprejudiced people’(Berkeley, Discourse addressed to
Magistrates, 1948-57, vol. vi, 206), and it need not be
emphasized that Burke shared this view. Both belonged to an elite
which considered improvement to be necessary, and sought to make it
through the agencies in church, state and education that were really
available at the time. Above all, they shared an intellectual temper: they
sought to see things how they are, with an eye to improving the the condition of society.
But Burke was not Berkeley, and though their similarities indicate a
shared philosophical orientation, Burke had his own way of developing
it. To individuate him, we must turn to what he acquired from the
Trinity syllabus, and how he used his acquisitions.

This syllabus, by the time Burke became an undergraduate
student at the age of fifteen (1744), not only gave attention to
Aristotelian manuals but also to ‘the way of ideas’
enshrined in Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding.
Such a syllabus, in its Aristotelian aspect, indicated the unity of all
departments of literature — or learning as we now call it —
which was congenial to one with Burke’s passion for knowledge —
he wrote of his furor mathematicus, furor logicus,
furor historicus, and furor poeticus
^.[3]
It also indicated the range of achievements, and the range of needs,
that people had generated. The extent and variety of human activity
impressed itself upon Burke. If his practical situation in Ireland
suggested that not reason alone but also Christianity and persuasion
were necessary to improvement, Burke could now understand these needs
in terms of a scheme of learning, and indeed had the opportunity to
develop the corresponding skills. At Trinity he founded a debating
society, where he developed his oratorical technique on theological, moral
and political topics, as well as commenting on the economic and
literary life of Ireland in a periodical run by himself and his
friends. This acquisition of skills was complemented by an opportunity for
philosophical development. This applied in particular to Burke’s
antecedent bent towards the imaginative branches of literature,
especially romances of chivalry, such as the Faerie Queen by
Edmund Spenser (the collateral ancestor from whom he derived his
Christian name). Creations of alternative worlds by the mind now
received a philosophical warrant from another part of the Trinity
syllabus. Locke had recognized that the mind devised complex
ideas. The mind had a power to receive simple ideas from the senses
and from its own reflection on them, and to make out of this material
further ideas that had no referent in the world of sensation. Burke’s
interest did not extend to the centaurs that Locke had mentioned, but
the ability to make complex ideas and to assemble them in new ways was
central to Burke’s way of proceeding. His philosophical method
involved thinking in terms of complex ideas about a connected range of
matters, matters connected by their place in a programme of human
improvement. Reason was fundamental to this method — but not
reason alone, as we see in Burke’s sole work devoted wholly to
philosophy, which made use of Locke on the way to an original
destination.

4. Philosophical and Historical Writings

Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding of 1690 was
the first attempt to give a survey of the mind’s workings that was both
comprehensive and post-aristotelian. It soon fostered intense interest in
epistemology, psychology and ethics. Burke seems to have worked on the
imagination — the faculty of devising and combining ideas —
as an undergraduate, and continued to do so into the 1750s. The
result, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful (1757) emphasized, unsurprisingly, the
activity of mind in making ideas and the influence of these upon
conduct. It was in the first place an exercise in clarifying
ideas, with an eye to refining the ways in which the arts affect the
passions: in other words, a refinement of complex ideas was taken to be
the precondition of a refinement of practice.

The roots of human activity, Burke thought, were the passions of
curiosity, pleasure and pain. Curiosity stimulated the activity of mind
on all matters. Ideas of pain and of pleasure corresponded respectively
to self-preservation and society, and society involved the passions of
sympathy, imitation and ambition. Imitation tended to establish habit,
and ambition to produce change. Sympathy did neither, but it did
establish an interest in other people’s welfare that extended to mental
identification with them. The scope of sympathy could embrace anyone,
unlike compassion, which applied only to those in a worse situation
than oneself. Such width of concern had an obvious reference to the
social order (and may express also Burke’s thinking about the theatre).
The passions, understood in Burke’s way, suggested at once that society as such
answered to natural instincts, and that it comprised elements of
continuity and improvement alike. Burke then proceeded to show that
self-preservation and its cognates suggested the complex idea of the
sublime, and not least the idea of a God who was both active and
terrible. Beauty, on the other hand, comprised a very different set of
simple ideas, which originated in pleasure. Sublime and beautiful
therefore sprang from very different origins.

The diverse views rejected by A Philosophical Enquiry were
united by the pervasive assumption that human nature in an unschooled
condition, as it came from the hand of nature, and understood without
direct reference to God, was in some sense adequate to the human
condition. Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality was at odds
with Burke’s view of the naturalness of society, and with his view
that solitude, because unnatural, was a source of pain, as well as
with Burke’s position that sympathy, rather than merely compassion,
was a key emotion. Burke’s view that the mind formed ideas of beauty
from the ideas of pleasure it received contradicted the view of
Shaftesbury and Hutcheson that beauty (like goodness) was a perception
presented by a sixth or moral sense. Burke’s further view that our
simple ideas of pain went towards a complex idea of a God who inspired
terror, was very distant from the deists’ view that He could be
understood by our natural faculty of reason alone and that as such He
was known to be benevolent and not much besides. These three
positions alike presumed that human faculties, unimproved by human effort
and considered with little relation to God, were sufficient to
inspire conduct. It is not surprising that Burke rejected them.

Burke not only thought that nature needed improvement, but also
recognized its ambiguity. Ambition, for instance, was the source of
enterprise and of improvement: but Burke did not suppose that
enterprise was in all its manifestations a benefit to its exponent, and
indeed once called it ‘the cause of the greatest disappointments,
miseries and misfortunes, and sometimes of dangerous
immoralities’
^[4].
If Burke had a forward-looking mind, and believed that human nature
both required and led to development, he did not think that progress
was necessarily an unqualified gain: for instance, in discussing the
civilizing of American savages, he saw a diminution of their courage as well
as an increase in their moral goodness.

A Philosophical Enquiry suggests that Burke was developing
the loyalties of his youth through the medium of philosophical
psychology. A God who presents Himself through nature in a way that is
often found in the Bible, and who devises and sustains nature in a way
that leads man to society and facilitates the improvement of that
society, has set Himself to support Christianity, power and
improvement, and probably education too. At the same time, however,
other aspects of the book suggest that this support was delivered to
them, not on their own terms, but on the terms of a philosophy which
recognizes the ability of the imagination to transform people’s
understandings of themselves and society.

Anyone who thinks in terms of complex ideas can see that these can
be framed easily in different ways, none of which need correspond to
anything found in the external world: combine the ideas of a man and a
horse, and you have the idea of a centaur. No one who reads romances
would find difficulty in imagining a society differing beyond
recognition from its current arrangements. A classic instance of
political imagination, indeed, is Burke’s own Vindication of
Natural Society, which presents as an alternative model of society
an organization — if that is the word — devoid of civil
government, church and significant private property.

Burke, in other words, could think through not only his own grouping
of propositions but also their inverse. This reflects, no doubt, other
features of his mind apart from his understanding of complex ideas,
such as the skill in seeing the strong side and the obverse of any
argument, which Burke had acquired in his undergraduate study of
rhetoric; and it reflects, too, a habit of versatility begun in his
debating society, for there speakers were called upon to play roles;
and no doubt it is reminiscent, again, of Burke’s undergraduate
interest in the theatre. Yet beyond all of these, it suggests that in
the large topics that experience had put before Burke — religion,
morals, arts and sciences — argument had not produced an
overwhelmingly decisive case. For A Vindication also seems to
make a case against everything he had espoused.

If argument did not deliver incontestable conclusions, where was one
to go? Burke’s answer, in his notebooks, was that where this was so,
that people should prefer the conclusions that accorded with
their natural feelings. The complement to this emphasis upon feeling
was to look to the results of affective preference — that is to
say, a criterion for conduct in such a case was what tended to make
people better and happier.

This was a judgement in the first place about personal conduct, and
the manner of applying it to matters on the larger scale of civil
society was less obvious. Here the judgement of benefit, whether
ethical or pleasurable, might be harder to discern. In order to make it
plain in A Vindication, Burke applied a reductio ad
absurdum to principles in theology that he had rejected by showing
their consequences for politics.

For that is what A Vindication provided. This short work
was written in the persona of the recently deceased Henry St. John,
Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751). Bolingbroke had been a Tory pillar of
the state, and therefore of the church too; but the posthumous
publication of his philosophical works revealed that far from being an
Anglican, he had not been a Christian – but rather a deist. A
Vindication suggested the ills that Bolingbroke had attributed to
the artifice of revealed religion could be paralleled by those
generated by civil society. One logic, indeed, was attributable on
these terms to both Christianity and civil society: that just as the
latter distributed the means of power unequally, so too did
Christianity distribute those of salvation unequally (for not everyone
had heard, and fewer believed, the Gospel). The deism of Bolingbroke
implied the principle that God treated everyone impartially, and that
the means to salvation were therefore to be found in a medium available
to all, and thus available from the earliest point of human history,
namely reason. It was easy to add, as Burke did, that if the principle
that such an original nature was the mature expression of God’s
ordinances were to be applied to civil society, the normative result
would be a regression from complex and therefore civilised forms to a
simple society, even to animal-like primitiveness — some of the
matter of A Vindication paraphrases Rousseau’s Discourse
on Inequality (Sewell 1938, 97-114). So Bolingbroke the deist and
Bolingbroke the politician could be made to look very much at odds with
each other. This gap offered Burke an opening. A
Vindication satirized Bolingbroke’s schizophrenic position,
employing a good deal of transparent exaggeration to make
‘his’ criticisms of civil (‘artificial’)
society seem very absurd: and Burke added a preface to the second
edition which made the disjunctive alternatives clear so that even he
who ran might read.

Yet it is hard not to recognize that Burke himself was telling the
reader, in a way that entered the consciousness all the more forcibly
because it accompanied entertainment, that civil society really did
imply some evils, just as he identified losses as well as
gains from progress in other connexions. Burke’s Vindication,
speaking in the voice of pseudo-Bolingbroke, lamented the situation of
miners: and ‘the innumerable servile, degrading, unseemly,
unmanly, and often most unwholesome and pestiferous occupations’
of ‘so many wretches’ was lamented by Burke without any
persona, thirty-four years later in Reflections on the Revolution
in France. Such criticism, taken in itself, is undoubtedly
telling. Burke never dissembled the existence of the real misery that
he observed in civil society. Instead, he pointed out that wretched
practices could not be detached from the larger pattern of habits and
institution in which they were implicated, and that this pattern had a
beneficial effect. Burke recognized misery, did not deny it, and
therefore had a lively sense of the imperfection of arrangements,
however civilized they might be. His sense of duality in nature and
society resembles Adam Smith’s.

Burke’s position, therefore, was poised. But it was not merely a
matter of pointing out what made for good and what for ill in civil
society: it was a matter of responsibility — of choosing morally
appropriate words. This was so for a philosophical reason, because of
the very nature of the words involved. Burke’s Philosophical
Enquiry divided words into three categories. First, there were
aggregate words, which signified groups of simple ideas united by
nature, e.g. man, horse, or tree. Second, there were simple abstract
words, each of which stood for one simple idea involved in such
unities, as red, blue, round or square. Thirdly, and most importantly
for our purpose, came abstract compound words. These united aggregate
words and simple abstract words. As such, they did not have a referent
that existed in nature. A Philosophical Enquiry argued that no
compound abstract nouns suggested ideas to the mind at all readily, and
that in many cases they did not correspond to any idea at all, but
instead produced in the mind only images of past experience connected
with these words. This category included virtue, vice, justice, honour,
and liberty, besides magistrate, docility and persuasion (Wecter 1940,
167-81). The centrality of such terms to a discussion of civil society
requires no emphasis. The obvious inference from Burke’s philosophy of
language was that to use abstract compound words was less to discuss
ideas than to raise images which touched the affections of the listener
or reader. To do this could scarcely to be thought part of a
speculative activity: the effect would not be cognitive, but practical:
not to develop ideas, but to influence conduct. The question was, with
what arrangements were these words, and therefore pleasurable images,
to be connected.

This understanding of the mind gave speakers and writers an
unusually powerful role. It was in their hands to connect words which
suggested pro-attitudes with arrangements of their choosing:
for these words had did not imply only one set of conceptual contents,
because they implied none. If one recollects the propensity to
imitation that Burke found in mankind, this choosing was likely also to
be leading. So Burke was exceptionally sensitive to the role of men of
letters and public speakers in moulding opinion. By the same measure,
he had an unusually lively sense of their responsibilities. It was
they who had the power to guide people to the proper ends, or
elsewhere. Guidance need not be directly didactic — indeed, it
could not be, because there could be no definitions to expound —
but would be a matter of providing a linguistic context which guided
listeners and readers to goals that were ethically and politically
beneficial.

One crucial approach that Burke himself developed was
historiographical. In works of history or in oratory, discussion
involving a compound abstract noun — such as
‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’— could take place in
connexion with aggregate words like ‘Indians’ or ‘the
English’, and, therefore, being discussed in relation to these,
connected that noun with definite ideas rather than with further ideas
that had no easily identifiable content — or no content at all.
Almost all of Burke’s writings and his more important speeches have a
strong historical element. That element is cast as a narrative in a way
that connects compound abstract words with specific persons and
specific transactions. Burke also wrote avowedly historical works in
the years immediately after publishing A Philosophical Enquiry
The content of these histories developed the preferences of his youth
for improvement by embodying these in a way that made them integral to
the origins and continuing character of modern arrangements in the
Americas and in England.

Burke, like Smith again, wrote ‘philosophical’ history,
that is to say gave a view of the key agencies that had shaped human
destiny over the long run of human society. Indeed, he casually
implied a four-stage theory of socio-economic history at a time when
Scottish stadial history, except that in Dalrymple’s Feudal
Property (1757), was either unwritten or unpublished. But his
attention, primarily, lay elsewhere, as appears in An Account of
the European Settlements. This work arose from the initiative of
‘booksellers’ alive to the reading public’s interest in
North America, where Britain was then at war with France, and the work
was co-written with Burke’s ‘cousin’ and friend William
Burke. Edmund’s pen is evident in the passages which contrast savagery
with civilization. The book emphasized that the coming of Europeans to
the New World brought with it a civilizing of savages, who were far
from noble, through the agency of institutionalised Christianity. This
implicit distance from the cult of the noble savage, and from
primitivism in general, provided an identifiable complement to the
implied rejections of A Philosophical Enquiry and the satire
about ‘natural society’ in A Vindication.

A stage of human history rather later than that of savages was
delineated within An Abridgement of English History, which
Burke wrote after 1757, but did not finish. So far as it goes, this
provided a continuous account that ran from the Roman landings to
Magna Carta. Christianity figured again in this narrative as a source
of civilization, but the significance of the tale was more
complex. This time the story was primarily political, and showed how
one of the values most prized by Burke’s contemporaries, civil
liberty, came to belong to England. The Norman Conquest of England
established a powerful executive government and brought with it a
uniform system of law; if these two were necessary conditions for the
matching grace of civil liberty for all, however, they were not
sufficient: the required addition came from an aristocracy, which had
been taught the value of liberty by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and
which had come to understand that its own power was insufficient to
extract the requisite concessions from the crown unless popular
support could be won. Burke’s sense of the double-edged character of
civilization thus developed into a sense that the political regime
required by an advanced society — the combination of strong
institutions with civil liberty — came from sources
that were contrary to each other, and not always beneficial in
isolation (aristocracy as a form of government was an ‘austere
and insolent domination’ (TCD, W & S, 1981-, ii. 268)): and
as both a strong executive and civil liberty were needed, by the same
token the forces making for each needed to be counterbalanced from the
other side on a continuing basis. This balance of forces provided a
context in which ‘liberty’ had an identifiable meaning,
namely the specific civil liberties secured through political struggle
and written into Magna Carta.

Burke’s narratives suggested that agencies antipathetic to each other,
if properly connected to one another, might produce results that were
both intelligible and valuable. One effect amongst several of this
conception of cooperative conflict was a rehabilitation of the
Catholicism that was the historic heritage of Burke’s family. An
Account and An Abridgement alike suggested that in its
historical time and place Roman Catholicism, and, indeed, clericalism,
whether embodied in Jesuit missionaries or in an English archbishop,
had been a constituent needed to produce social and political benefits
of a fundamental kind. As an historiographical exemplar, An
Abridgement therefore showed an exceptional appreciation of the
Middle Ages, which was to cause raptures to Lord Acton. It anticipated
both Richard Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762),
and, still more, a great work that set the bearings for Anglo-American
medievalists for many years, William Stubbs’ Constitutional
History of England (1875-8). Burke, however, could not think in
terms of an academic historiography, still less one that would be the
exclusive intellectual preoccupation of its exponents: neither of
these existed in his time. He could think, however, of subtly defusing
anti-Roman prejudice in Georgian Britain.

Burke himself was not a Roman Catholic, and viewed enquiry into his
personal background with alarm and suspicion. This was sensible enough
in a Britain which still subliminally linked civil liberty with
Protestantism, and therefore regarded Irishness as a likely pointer to
popish subversion of its political values. Burke’s argumentative
stance always benefited Roman Catholics, but he never found a kind
word for the Pope: his was a position which emphasized the priority of
civil interests over denominational claims in civil society. Indeed
Burke considered that ‘the truth of our common Christianity, is
not so clear as this proposition: that all men, at least the majority
of men in the society, ought to enjoy the common advantages of
it.’ (TPL, W & S 1981-, ix.464). This was a political
development of the centrality he gave to the claims of improvement,
and of the obvious necessity of its free development for the bettering
of the human condition. It also silently defused any papal claim to
civil dominance on theological grounds and, more audibly, suggested
that the penalisation of Catholic beliefs was wrong if these did not
cause Catholics to interfere with others’ civil interests. Burke’s
presumptions about the priority of civil interests and a sense of the
possible irrelevance of denominational opinion to civil society
suggest a reading of Locke’s Letter concerning Toleration
and Two Treatises of Government, the latter of which was
common, though not prescribed reading at Trinity. It also implies that
the proper terms in which to conceive civil interests are those of
natural jurisprudence, because there people are considered without
reference to any specific allegiances, religious or otherwise. Burke
referred to natural law and natural rights directly when such
reference advanced his own arguments, though he made no theoretical
contribution to natural jurisprudence until quite late in life. His
creative energies were mostly applied elsewhere.

Burke developed his thoughts about civil interests in a work that his
executors entitled Tracts on the Popery Laws, which he
drafted when he was employed as private secretary to the Chief
Secretary for Ireland in the early seventeen-sixties. After this,
Burke became involved more immediately in political practice, and, by
one means or another, contributed to it until his death and (through
the activities of his executors in publishing or reprinting his
writings) from beyond the grave. This was one obvious route for
practical development, even besides the amenities of status that it
brought to Burke. For his view of the compound abstract words involved
in civil discussion did not suggest that purely speculative study had
unlimited potential either for the mind or for personal satisfaction,
because a strictly speculative discussion was likely to be
inconclusive at best: such words became more readily intelligible in
connexion with the concrete, and therefore the practical. Hence,
perhaps, Burke concluded that ‘man is made for Speculation and
action; and when he pursues his nature he succeeds best in
both.’ (Somerset 1957, 87). There was, on this understanding,
intellectual benefit in political participation, and, equally,
political practice might benefit from the speculative mind. This is
likely to seem an implausible position nowadays, when political
activity is frenetic, and learning is a matter of speciality; but in
the eighteenth century, when an agile mind could manage at least the
basics of several branches of learning, and the British legislature
was often in session for less than six months in a year, it was more
plausible. Political participation, on Burke’s understanding, had
besides its intellectual possibilities, an ethical potential. To the
extent that thinking about politics was necessarily uncertain, the
proper conduct of affairs depended upon an honest as well as a
capacious mind, and on a well-disposed management of words.

It remains to show what Burke learnt from political activity, and
what he conferred upon it. The picture is one in which the claims of
practice enriched Burke’s mind and brought intellectual benefits to
practice itself.

5. Political style: some parliamentary applications

Burke’s life was spent in parliamentary affairs from the mid-1760s,
and this made a difference to his style of intellectual activity. This
did not lie primarily in developing the cast of his mind, and if in
1771 Burke stated that ‘I have endeavoured all my life to train
my understanding and my temper in the studies and habits of
Philosophy’, at the same time he concluded that ‘my
Principles are all settled and arranged’
^.[5]
This did not preclude intellectual innovation. The difference made by
participation lay not least in his reasons for applying his mind, and
consequently in how he did so. The reasons were to influence opinion,
both in Parliament and from his position as a member of the
legislative, and determine votes in the House of Commons itself. The
matter common to both of these was Burke’s view of the words central
to political understanding.

An obvious inference from Burke’s account of compound abstract words
is that to use these is to touch the experience of reader or listener,
and that persuasion was unavoidably central to discussing politics:
this befitted a practical rather than a speculative subject. Indeed,
these terms implied that the point of discussing politics must be to
influence action, and nothing much else. Burke developed great skill in
managing words, begun in debating at Trinity and carried forward
through other venues, including the House of Commons. As such language
was persuasive, its objective was to establish pro-attitudes and
con-attitudes in mind of listener or reader.

This was not the only philosophical aspect in Burke’s political
practice. A major conceptual tool in discussing politics was
relation. Relation is one of those terms which was common to both the
scholastics and to Locke. It denotes both comparison and connexion.
Comparison was an invaluable procedure because it enabled events,
institutions and persons to be placed in any number of lights which
would raise or lower their significance and standing. Connexion was
scarcely less valuable, because the place that someone or something
occupied could be used to sustain or criticise their role, as well as
to demonstrate the value of co-operative contraries. Best of all,
relation in either sense lent itself to a myriad of uses, for as
LeClerc had remarked in his Logic (which Burke had read at
Trinity) relations were beyond counting — sunt autem
innumerae relationes (Le Clerc 1692, pt. 1, ch. 4, s. 1, p.
19).

Burke’s conception of philosophical history was also fundamental to
his political practice. ‘Every age has its own manners and its
politicks dependent upon them’ (TCD, W & S, 1981-, ii 258.) The
manners Burke saw around him in England were continuous with those he
had seen in the middle ages, or projected backwards thither, in which a
powerful executive government was balanced by other agencies with the
effect of securing civil liberty. Those agencies most obvious in
Burke’s time had established the sovereignty of Parliament at the
Glorious Revolution (1688-9), reaffirmed it in the Bill of Rights
(1689) and the Act of Settlement (1701), and confirmed it by
suppressing the attempts made from 1708 to 1746 to reassert the
sovereignty of kings alone. Burke understood law in this arrangement as
the guarantor of interests of the governed because it was law passed
and secured by Parliament. It was secured in Parliament by the mutual
dependence of Commons, Lords and King. That sovereignty had this public
character made the British state a beneficiary of a very high degree of
financial credit, and this increased the power of Parliament. The long,
slow movement of British history from a conception of the realm
understood as royal property to the state conceived as the expression
of public will had in Burke’s time reached a stage at which this will
was expressed through the decisions of Parliament in a manner heavily
influenced by the monarch. Burke’s political activities therefore
assumed parliamentary sovereignty.

If Burke’s view of words and relations gave him practical
tools, and if parliamentary sovereignty provided him with a practical
postulate, what did he assume was the proper end of sovereignty? We
have seen that the relation between sovereign and the governed had for
a primary purpose the protection of the latter’s civil interests. This
much suggests continuity between Burke the philosopher/historian and
Burke the political participant. But the former might also see that
there were complications for the latter. One who sees the multiplicity
of civil interests, and the variety of relations in which they can be
considered, and the variety of contraries at work, will see that to put
society at ease with itself may well imply conflict and see that such
conflict is hard to avoid; he or she will see, too, that Parliament
forms an arena for conducting it in a stylised and moderated way
through the representation of interests, appropriate to a civilized
state of society; and, even while participating in such a conflict,
s/he might recognizes the necessity of both sides to the result. Here,
opponents may be not only enemies but also co-workers, sharing at least
some common assumptions about the system within which their lot was
cast, although separated from others by the role required of them. In
that situation, the question becomes, where do you take your place? The
answer may depend on your own connexions, and on how you
conceive them.

6. Burke’s practical reasoning

Burke’s method for written composition often combined (i)
identification of relations, with (ii) relevant history, and (iii)
treatment in language that would attach pro-attitudes to one side or
the other in a difference of opinion. This method is seen, for
instance, in his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present
Discontents (1770). Its central statement for our purpose is
about (i) relation in the form of connexion: that the British
constitution had been constructed in a manner that required the
connexion (in this case the interdependence) of the parts of the
sovereign in order to achieve mutual control. This statement
contrasted with (ii) the historical statement that there was a new
system of court politics which involved disconnecting those parts in
order to make the monarch independent of the other parts of the
political sovereign. Burke’s history showed the emergence of this new
system, and illustrated its pernicious results in both domestic and
foreign affairs. The contrast (iii) between the older system —
which was represented as having benign results — was clear, and
the disposition of pro-language obvious enough. Burke’s appeal lay to
the standards which his contemporaries would take for granted, namely
those implied in their beliefs about parliamentary sovereignty. As if
it were not enough, the picture of the older order was reinforced by a
sense of connexion in the Aristotelian mode that Burke’s society
recognized and approved — that man was sociable, rather than
being a solitary beast, and above all by the annexation of the key
term of
connexion to the side of the dispute that Burke favoured. All
of these considerations suggested the appropriateness of ‘the
good’ combining to counterbalance the efforts of court
politicians, and so to sustain parliamentary sovereignty and its
benefits.

This illustrates Burke’s remarkable ability to combine philosophical
method and philosophical history, as well as the practical purpose to
which he put them — forming an understanding of politics which
was practical in the very particular sense of calling for activity in
one direction to counterbalance forces coming from another. It was
also practical in relation to advancing very specific interests. These
considerations were used to situate quite another sense of connexion,
namely political party, and especially the party of Rockingham to
which and to whom Burke had attached himself. Indeed Present
Discontents was read in draft by its leading lights before
publication. On publication, the pamphlet was widely understood as a
manifesto for this party. After publication Present
Discontents became a manual from which fledging politicians
learnt the rationale of their party, and, indeed, a source book for
cat calls from the party colleagues from whom Burke separated himself
in 1791. The philosophical and historical element in Burke’s positions
is evident only to those who retrace all of his steps; an activity
which his contemporaries lacked the will, and (as not all of his major
works had been published) some of the means to do.

The educative effect of Burke’s writing is not to be underestimated
in a civil society, some of whose members were highly literate but had
no formal education in political science (except, sometimes, at
Scottish universities). Indeed, it is likely that Burke wrote in order
to educate. Yet at the same time that the strength of his conceptual
and historical arguments, and the skill with which he developed these,
excites the reader’s admiration, they create unease. This is not merely
because in Present Discontents the philosophical sense of
connexion is used to adumbrate the claims of a party connexion: it is a
more generalized disquiet. A politician inspires confidence, in part,
because s/he is honest: and a good way to be thought honest is to
convey the impression that you are not clever enough to deceive. As a
philosopher commands interest when s/he is intellectually powerful,
this impression is one that is naturally hard to achieve: but it can be
done. C.D. Broad suggested that ‘Locke, we feel, is not so much
cleverer than ourselves as to be capable of playing tricks with us even
if he wanted to do so. He is the Mr Baldwin
^[6]
of philosophy, and he derives from his literary style some of the
advantages which that statesman owed to his pipe and his pigs.’
(Broad 1952, 39). This judgement does not apply to Burke, even though
he did keep pigs. The reader carries away from Burke a sense of great
creative power, dialectical skill, and verbal ingenuity: in short, a
sense of being overborne by intellectual force. The listener probably
received other and unwelcome sensations when this was seconded by
personal raucousness. Such feelings generate unease, and unease is
increased by Burke’s prose.

His literary style is to argue clearly, but in doing so to include a
manifest carefulness of qualification that will permit subsequent
shifts of position — for instance his self-description as a
‘true but severe friend to monarchy’ is consistent with
his occupying any point within the generous spectrum of parliamentary
sovereignty — and, indeed, the sense of historical change which
pervades Present Discontents suggests that movement is a
common experience. Unease, perhaps, is increased even further: for
against one equipped with this intellectual repertoire, the accusation
of inconsistency is irresistibly tempting and utterly useless. Again,
Burke’s is a very sensible way for a statesman to think, but it is not
how the public wishes politicians to appear on most occasions. Still
less is it reassuring about Burke’s intellectual bona fides:
for this is not how people innocent of political experience, who are
the majority, conceive the role of political principles. Coleridge put
his finger on an important point when he suggested that from
‘principles exactly the same’ Burke could draw
‘practical inferences almost opposite’ in different
situations (Coleridge 1983, vol. i, 191). Burke’s philosophical and
historical positions are clear, but they do not translate, and were
not meant to translate, into a set of specific practical conclusions
of permanent validity.

There was the contrast, too, between the breadth of view and of
learning in the matured statements that Burke published, on the one
hand, and, on the other, the ways of the parliamentary pugilist who
was audible to fellow M.P.s and legible to others in the speeches
reported by the daily newspapers. Burke’s manner was anything but
‘philosophical’ as the public understands the word. Partly
this was, doubtless, because Burke was like that as a person, and not
least because he had a weak voice that had to be raised if it was to
be heard in the bear garden that was the House of Commons, but partly,
too, because his Philosophical Enquiry had suggested that the
best way to impart a mood to an audience was to display it
oneself. So, for instance, if Burke needed to plead for moderation, he
did so immoderately. Above all, perhaps, it was because this
philosopher- turned-participant was not exempt from the need to win to
his side enough minds to ensure that his side was not beaten (or, at
any rate, demonstrated enough strength to remain in contention), and
had at hand an exceptionally powerful range of persuasive tools. It is
an evident fact, too, that the resources of Western civilization were
sometimes invoked by Burke in order to produce votes in the House of
Commons — votes, which, whatever else they were, were in the
interests of his party. But, manifestly, these resources do not supply
a rationale for only one policy, still less for only one party. The
roles of thinker and party spokesman consort ill: and there were bound
to be doubts about one

Who born for the Universe, narrow’d his mind,

And to party gave up, what was meant for mankind.

Tho’ fraught with all learning, kept straining his throat,

To persuade Tommy Townshend to lend him a vote.

(Goldsmith, lines 31-34).

A disparity of this sort was always likely to suggest that Burke had
profoundly personal motives for narrowing his mind, and when he was
not being caricatured as an Irish Jesuit he was being satirized as a
corrupt hack
^[7].
Yet some sort of procedure of the type pursued by Burke was implied
in his sense of practical reasoning. The ‘philosopher in
action’ had the function of finding ‘proper means’
to ‘the proper ends of Government’ marked out by
‘the speculative philosopher’ (TCD, W & S, 1981-,
ii. 45-51). Parliamentary votes, in the situation that Burke found
himself, were amongst the proper means.

7. Burke and the American Revolution

Political participation generated scepticism about Burke as a
person, some of which was unjust, though all of it was to be expected.
What was perhaps less predictable, and is certainly more interesting
philosophically, is that this participation was a precondition of the
practical thought which made Burke famous in his own time and has given
him a leading place in the canon of Western political thought.

Burke’s practical thinking about the dispute between the British
parliament and its North American colonies began with a situation not
of his making, that is to say the rejection of the Stamp Act by the
colonists, and its withdrawal by the ministry headed by Lord Rockingham
in 1765-6. The Rockingham ministry followed up this concession of
letting the colonists alone with the assertion of Parliament’s right to
legislate for the colonies in the Declaratory Act of 1766. Burke’s task
was to demonstrate to the House of Commons the plausibility of this
package. He did so by combining two complex ideas — or at least
two abstract compound nouns — in a new way. One idea was empire,
which involved command. The other was liberty. These, Burke thought,
were ideas difficult to combine — a sound reflection as they are
diametrically opposed — but that they were combinable in the
further idea of a British empire — one which combined
legislative command with civil liberty. This idea implied letting alone
certain matters of concern to the colonists, and so allowing them in
some respects civil liberty on a de facto basis (SDR, W & S
1981-, ii.317-18). This idea is considerably more ingenious than the
average British position that ‘all the dominions of Great Britain
are bound by Acts of Parliament’
^.[8]
Burke’s view was explanatory, because it conceptualised the situation
before Parliament in a way that made intelligible the points involved
and established a connexion amongst them. It was also accommodating,
because it made the British executive’s policy intellectually and
therefore practically respectable at the same time that it made room
for colonial preferences. In short, it was a small masterpiece of
thinking about policy.

The repeal of the Stamp Act was followed by the passing of the
Declaratory Act. Burke was practically successful in 1766 with the
House of Commons because he was speaking for the executive, and a
majority amongst Members of Parliament, ceteris paribus,
tended to vote for the king’s ministers. In 1774 and 1775 he was
practically unsuccessful, because he was now in opposition, but his
conceptual achievement in dealing with the American question became
much greater. By 1774, the issues dividing some American colonists
from the British parliament had changed. The former now resented the
attempts of the latter to levy taxation on them directly, rather than
by the authority of their own colonial legislatures, and they resented
still more the project of backing the attempt, if need be, with
coercion. Burke’s speech of 1774 on
American Taxation did not delete the idea of imperial
command, but rather elaborated his complex idea of the British empire
in a new way in order to deal with the new situation.

Burke elaborated the complex idea in a way to which complex ideas lend
themselves, that is to say, by adding a qualification. The sovereignty
of the British parliament was an idea that certainly included a right
to tax: but a right to tax could be understood to be consistent on
principle with inaction as well as action. The right, in plainer
language, need not be applied. Burke could accommodate, therefore,
both the claims of Westminster and those of the colonists. To this
point, of course, one might reply that Burke was merely
making concessions. But observe: this situation provided a cue for
conceptual innovation — Burke inserted a distinction into the
idea of sovereignty. He distinguished ‘my idea of the
constitution of the British Empire’ from ‘the constitution
of Britain’ unconnected with overseas rule. It could be inferred
that

The Parliament of Great Britain sits at the head of her
extensive empire in two capacities: one of the local legislature of
this island, providing for all things at home…The
other…is what I call her imperial character, in
which…she superintends all the several inferior legislatures,
and guides, and controls them all without annihilating any. As all
these provincial legislatures are only co-ordinate to each other, they
ought all to be subordinate to her….It is necessary to coerce
the negligent, to restrain the violent, and to aid the weak and
deficient, by the over-ruling plenitude of her power. She is never to
intrude into the place of the others, whilst they are equal to the
common ends of their institution. But in order to enable parliament to
answer all these ends of provident and beneficent superintendence, her
powers must be boundless

so that Burke’s elaboration of the complex idea of the British
empire suggests complementary roles for the British parliament and the
colonial legislatures, an elaboration which would make the question of
taxation irrelevant at a stroke, whilst simultaneously emphasizing the
authority of Westminster.

Conceptual refinement provided a practical avenue that other, less
gifted politicians had not devised. Burke’s position was altogether
subtler than the implied tautology of a minister’s claim that ‘to
say we have a right to tax America and are never to exercise that right
is ridiculous’ (Sir Edward Thurlow, quoted in Gore-Brown 1953,
85), and of another politician’s despairing sense that ‘we must
either insist upon their submission to the authority of the Legislature
or give them up entirely to their own discretion.’
^.[9]
These pundits, by failing to conceive a sufficiently complex idea of
sovereignty and the sovereign’s right to tax, failed also to see that
sovereignty did not imply an unpleasant choice between abrogating this
right by disuse or applying it by force.

Events soon required a further elaboration of Burke’s idea of the
British empire. The continued use of coercion made the colonists more,
not less recalcitrant. The practical need seemed to be for terms on
which they would stay, at least nominally, under British rule. Their
crucial claim was now that their right to tax themselves by their own
legislatures rested on charters from the Crown, and that they were
subordinate to the Crown alone, and not to Parliament. Burke gave still
closer attention to the idea of sovereignty. It would be tactless to
emphasize the sovereignty of Parliament, but it would be self-defeating
to withdraw it explicitly and concede a sovereign right over taxation
to the colonial legislatures. So now, in Burke’s speech on
Conciliation with America (1775), he focussed upon only one
aspect of the complex idea of a parliamentary sovereign. The latter
comprised in the British instance not only Lords and Commons, but also
the king. Hence, by judicious emphasis, the item acquiesced in by the
colonists could do some conceptual work: ‘my idea of an
Empire…is…that an Empire is the aggregate of many States,
under one common head; whether this head be a monarch or a presiding
republick’; and it was emphasized that the rights of the colonists
depended on this superior, for ‘the claim of a privilege seems
rather, ex vi termini, to imply a superior power.’ As to
a right to tax, Burke added on a later occasion, that though it
‘was inherent in the supreme power of society, taken as
an aggregate, it did not follow that it must reside in any
particular power in that society’, and therefore
Parliament could delegate it to local legislatures. In short,
‘sovereignty was not in its nature an idea of abstract unity; but
was capable of great complexity and infinite modifications.’
(SSC, W & S 1981-, iii. 193).

Whether Burke’s ‘infinite modifications’ would have
assisted in keeping the thirteen colonies within the fold of the
British empire is unknowable, for nothing like his proposals were tried
until 1778, which was too late. It is clear, however, that Burke’s
ability to make conceptual changes depended on his philosophical
thinking. To think in terms of complex ideas is to recognize that they
can be elaborated by adding further ideas; to distinguish between the
roles of Parliament is to make that addition; and to analyse the powers
of a sovereign parliament as a preface to relocating one of them is to
use philosophy as a tool in practical reasoning. It is noteworthy,
also, that these philosophical exercises were the means of coping, as
Burke hoped, with practical changes. Neither was his work here
primarily ideological, for though Burke had a practical goal in view,
and at that one consistent with the Rockingham achievements of 1766, he
worked philosophically to modify the conceptions in terms of which his
contemporaries viewed their situation, rather than using his conceptual
tools as ways of defending those conceptions without modifying them.
Thus he added ideas to the stock of his day. It is fitting, though
Burke’s proposals were not implemented in time, and though his goal was
not attained, that his American speeches figured prominently in the
schools and universities of both the U.K. and the U.S.A. well into the
twentieth century. Burke, after all, was suspicious of poor ideas: he
concluded that ‘one of the main causes of our present
troubles’ was ‘general discourses, and vague
sentiments’, and urged instead study of ‘an exact detail of
particulars’ (SSC, W & S 1981-, iii. 185).

8. Philosophical Character of Political Disposition

Burke’s thinking about America also suggests a political disposition
that owed something to his philosophical conceptions. Burke’s complaint
in American Taxation against ministers was that ‘they
have taken things…without any regard to their relations or
dependencies’, and had ‘no one connected view.’ This
was in part a straightforwardly cognitive position being emphasized with prudential
point: the world with which politicians dealt was complex, and to use
ideas which were insufficiently complex to capture its contents and
their relations was a short way to meet the rough side of
reality. It was also, implicitly an ethical position: governments ought
not to apply force to existing relations, at least those that were
legitimate. This is, in one way, an obvious point from natural
jurisprudence, and one that Burke had made transparently with respect
to inroads by the government of Ireland against Catholic property. In
another, and more interesting way, it reflected his view that abstract
compound nouns and complex ideas evoke specific past experiences. To
interfere forcibly with someone’s experientially-based expectations
would be to break their mental association between experience and idea
or word: and so the idea or the word would become meaningless and cease
to influence action. If, therefore, ‘my hold of the Colonies, is
in the close affection which grows from common names’, amongst
other sources that were ‘though light as air…as strong as
links of iron’, then ‘let the Colonies always keep the idea
of their civil rights associated with your Government; — they
will cling and grapple to you…But let it be once understood,
that your Government may be one thing, and their Privileges another;
that these two things may exist without any mutual relation; the cement
is gone; the cohesion is loosened; and every thing hastens to decay and
dissolution.’ (CWA, W & S 1981-, iii. 164). To break such
mental associations was to break communities.

This point suggested that a genuinely prudent conduct of affairs
would proceed without assaulting the mental associations of the
governed, and, as change was omnipresent, would conduct its share under
accepted names — in other words, by gradual and by moderate
reform of institutions and practices rather than by immediate and total
replacement, which Burke stigmatised as ‘innovation’. This,
indeed, was what Burke claimed to be doing in his contributions of
1780-82 to the recasting of the royal household. The intellectual
counterpart of this prudent conduct, namely the refinement of our
existing ideas, rather than replacing them, is what he had done in his
revisions of the idea of sovereignty.

This style of thinking gave Burke a very lively sense of the
corrosive power of new ideas. Even new questions could have
unpleasant results. When the innovations of the British government
unsettled the colonists, ‘then…they questioned all the
parts of your legislative power; and by the battery of such questions
have shaken the solid structure of this Empire to its deepest
foundations.’ The proper way to avoid such shakes to civil
society was to ‘consult and follow your experience’ (ATX,
W & S 1981-, ii.411, 457), for ‘experience’ according to
Burke’s philosophy of language was a condition of continuity of mind,
and, on the basis of mind, of a sustainable practice. His was therefore
a philosophically conditioned attitude to practice, and one that was
very sensitive to the hiatus that speculation could cause in the
latter. Burke’s sensitivity can produce apodictic language in order to
persuade people to make use of the ideas they have inherited, by urging
‘a total renunciation of every speculation of my own; and…
[by recommending] a profound reverence for the wisdom of our
ancestors’ (CWA, W & S 1981-, iii.139). Indeed, Burke can be
found, sometimes, on rational grounds, deprecating all explicit appeal
to speculation of whatever hue, if it had a disturbing effect:
‘reason not at all — oppose the ancient policy and practice
of the empire, as a rampart against the speculations of innovators on
both sides of the question’ (italics added) (ATX,
W & S 1981-, ii.166). His deprecation of speculation was logically
anterior to taking sides in politics.

It was also, in effect, an appeal for ideas adequate to governing.
This is evident in Burke’s criticism of ‘vulgar and mechanical
politicians’,

a sort of people who think that nothing exists but what is
gross and material; and who therefore, far from being qualified to be
directors of the great movement of empire, are not fit to turn a wheel
in the machine. But to men truly initiated and rightly
taught,…ruling and master principles, which, in the opinion of
such men as I have mentioned, have no substantial existence, are in
truth every thing, and all in all,

so that ‘little minds’ could not govern ‘a great
empire’ (CWA, W & S 1981-, iii.139), or, evidently, any
empire at all, whereas better results might be expected from
‘men truly initiated and rightly taught.’

Burke himself, however much he might try to hide the logic of his
thought under the rich foliage of words generated by his skill with
words — he is perhaps the only classic of political thought in
the English language who is also a literary classic — was a
philosophical thinker. As such, his practical conclusions could change,
and did, as we have seen. Practical conclusions changed because they
were meant to be serviceable in a world that itself was changing.
Burke’s philosophical equipment, however, served him in the face of all
external changes.

9. The Revolution in France

Burke’s name is indissolubly connected to his Reflections on the
Revolution in France, though a more perceptive account of the
causes of the Revolution of 1789 can be found in A Letter to
William Elliot (1795), and the Letters on a Regicide
Peace (1795-7) investigate the character and consequences of the
Revolution from 1791 in a more thoroughgoing way. In an important
sense, however, the judgement of posterity is right for our purposes,
because Reflections illustrates very clearly the central
importance of philosophy and ‘philosophical’ history for
Burke’s writing about one of the greatest changes of his day.

This is true, in the first place, in terms of insight.
Reflections was published on 1 November 1790, less than
eighteen months after the storming of the Bastille. The intervening
period had been characterised by a mixture of popular violence and
peaceable, if feverish political activity in France, as its absolute
monarchy gave way to a constitutional monarchy. A detached observer
would be unsure of the future — whether destruction and violence
would predominate or whether an enduring constitutional order would
emerge was a question which events had not answered. In the event, of
course, the Revolution would be characterised by both violence and
constitutional development, at different times, but this was as
unknowable in 1790 as it is obvious in 2009.

Burke’s Reflections may be divided (for the author did not
provide any formal divisions) into two portions of unequal length. Both
of these are concerned with relations. The first portion, about
two-thirds of the text, suggests that the French, in their enthusiasm
for the idea of liberty, had failed to understand that liberty was only
one amongst a range of benefits, all of which were required in
mutual connexion for a life under civil government that was civilized
in the proper sense. The results which flowed from this deficiency of
understanding included constitutional arrangements which, because they
did not reflect an understanding of liberty that was subtle enough to
grasp that the liberty of the many was power, did not qualify popular
sovereignty in a way that would restrain the demos
effectively. As if an unrestrained populace was not bad enough, an
understanding of life only in terms of liberty swept away preceding
elaborations of our ideas. This mattered, because the refinement of
ideas had been a precondition of refinement of conduct and therefore of
the progress of society in many respects. One key instance of these was
the respectful treatment of women encouraged since the middle ages by
Christian learning and by chivalry. But there was a newer philosophy:
‘on this scheme of things, a king is but a man; a queen is but a
woman; a woman is but an animal; and an animal not of the highest
order’. The retrogression of humanity itself to animality was not
far in the future with ‘a swinish multitude’. The result,
as people would no longer be moved by opinion, which had embodied
refined ideas, would be that they would need to be governed by force.
Force, too, was the ultimate destination of the second portion of
Reflections. This suggested that the idea of equality had been
connected only too pervasively with the institutional arrangements of
the judiciary, the legislative and the executive power — and
therefore had produced not the authority of command in government but
institutionalised feebleness. At the same time, the perverse results of
equality in fiscal arrangements had caused popular discontent and
financial instability. The result was a situation which could be
controlled only by the force of the military — if, indeed,
military order was sustainable when soldiers had absorbed the idea of
equality. France, it seemed, tended towards either the rule of force or
the disintegration of order.

Burke’s philosophical repertoire and historical understanding thus
provided the structure of Reflections, and, perhaps more
importantly, suggested insights into the character of the Revolution.
The inattention of the revolutionaries to the relations that needed to
be comprised in a modern government, especially in connexion with
liberty, was matched by the inappropriateness to a sovereign regime of
structuring its institutions around equality rather than around
effective command. These insights suggested that a mis-structuring of
the new constitution that proceeded from an inadequate philosophical
grasp. Such misunderstanding was matched by a failure to understand the
history which had produced the elaboration of ideas about conduct that
had underwritten government by opinion, and this failure suggested that
the Revolution would cause retrogression from this civilized condition
towards a less gentle way of proceeding, as well as a less effective
one. In other words, Burke’s understanding of philosophy, and of the
history of Europe, conceived ‘philosophically’, provided
grounds for making fundamental claims about the Revolution.

Whether Burke was right in these claims about the Revolution, of
course, is another question, and one that can never be answered:
French readers of Reflections could take its lessons to
heart, and, anyhow, events have a way of modifying tendencies
independently of intention and interpretation. Indeed, none of this is
to say that Reflections was intended as an academic work, or
even an accurate factual statement, about the Revolution. It was
calculated to produce a practical result, which was to dissuade the
British from admiring the Revolution and so to dampen any propensity
they might feel to imitate it: and thus to protect civilization in
Britain. In the course of pursuing this goal, Burke was willing to
satirize the Revolution and its English sympathizers unmercifully in
order to make them as unattractive as possible to any sane reader, and
he matched the satire with a panegyric on British social and political
arrangements. There is, indeed, much in Reflections besides
the elements that have been emphasized here (and indeed much in
Burke’s later views on the Revolution which is not
in Reflections): but without those elements, the book, and
Burke’s understanding of the Revolution would have been
impossible.

10. Problems of Interpretation

Whilst Burke’s thought has never lacked interpreters, on the whole
they have lacked the persistence of historical insight and the
strength of conceptual grasp required to do justice to him. Hence he
has suffered an ironic fate for one who urged breadth and precision of
thought. That is to say, he has figured as the spokesman for a very
limited number of points. This type of treatment began in the
nineteenth century, when Burke was invoked as an antidote to the
confidence of the French Revolution by liberal thinkers who prized its
principles, saw their narrowness, and required a sense of historical
development to situate them properly in a viable civil society. It was
continued when Matthew Arnold tried to treat Burke as a (pre-Home
Rule) Gladstonian spokesman about Ireland. It went further still in
the twentieth century, when Burke was pressed into service as a
counter-revolutionary agent in the anti-Communist cause, and when the
twenty-first dawned some treated Burke as proponent of
postmodernism. He himself could hardly have complained that his work
has been put to practical use, but it remains true that
academic justice has yet to be done to him. Chapters and essays on
individual themes in his writings have been more plausible than
attempts at general interpretation, which usually concentrate on a
theme of choice, or subordinate Burke’s thought to it, and give the
impression (deliberately or otherwise) that this is the whole of
Burke, or at any rate that this is what matters about him.

In attacking the Revolution, Burke constructed a rogues’ gallery for
French politicians, and stocked it also with quite a number of French
thinkers. The figures who appeared to be rogues, however, were most of
them really straw men, stuffed according to the prejudices of a
British audience. More significantly for our purposes, Burke’s censure
of the philosophes attributed to them complicity with the
style of thought that had set up a limited range of simple principles
as the norm for politics, and which was wholly inadequate to satisfy
the connected and various needs of human nature under modern
conditions. Burke preferred to emphasize that numerous principles, and
practical thinking to combine them, were necessary to meet these
needs, and so to sustain improvement, and emphasize, too, that such
accommodation involved much more practical activity than speculative
design. Correspondingly his own writings develop less a political
philosophy than a political style that had at its core philosophical
elements — a style which, indeed, implicitly suggested
that political philosophy was not a feasible activity, and,
if it was, certainly not one sufficient to the task of ‘the
philosopher in action’.

These views emphasize the importance of combining a wide range of
principles, and of remembering that principles, however numerous, are only
one element in a satisfactory conduct of practice. There can be no
doubt that analysis was involved in Burke’s proceedings: ‘let
this position be analysed,’ he instructed the House of Commons
critically in 1794, ‘for analysis is the deadly enemy of all
declamation.’
^[10]
Though Burke could certainly conduct effective analyses of ideas and
words even after more than twenty years at Westminster, as his
Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe (1792) demonstrates, his
accent lay upon the necessity of synthesising ideas, and including
non-conceptual elements in any adequate treatment of politics. There
is nothing in a style of doing philosophy that centres upon analysis
that is logically inconsistent with these procedures. One temper of
mind, however, which sometimes accompanies this manner of
philosophising is antipathetic to Burke, and there is much in
contemporary opinions about politics, including those held by some
analytical philosophers, that he would have found dangerously
naive. Amongst these a belief in a continuing popular sovereignty (the
modern term of art for this is ‘democracy’)—rather
than parliamentary sovereignty is only the most obvious example. If
Burke is unlikely at present to be the darling of some philosophers
and of some pundits; still less will he be of those who suppose that
in discussing a small number of principles they provide a prescriptive
and sufficient guidance for the conduct of policy; and even less of
anyone who supposes it logically adequate to claim that ‘one
very simple principle’ is ‘entitled to govern absolutely
the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion
and control’ or any other matter(Mill 1859,
‘Introductory’). The complex character of ideas, their
connexions with each other, the need to understand practice in terms
of such relations, and to conduct it with attention to habitual
linkages amongst people’s ideas and activities, suggest a different
sort of thinking. So it is not surprising that Burke has been quietly
ignored by many recent thinkers, or dismissed from consideration by
being labelled as a ‘conservative’ — but it is of
great interest that he has found many admirers amongst those who
succeed in the conduct of practical politics. Whilst Burke would have
been the first to point out that his specific conclusions belong to a
time and a place, his intellectual style, is one with which any
serious thinking about politics, whether reflective or practical,
needs to engage.

11. Conclusion

Burke’s thought is philosophical in at least two senses. One is that
it is constituted in part by thinking in terms of philosophical
conceptions, especially complex ideas, particularly those of relation,
as well as involving significant positions in philosophical psychology
and the philosophy of language. The other sense is that it develops an
account of the American, British and European past which is
philosophical history, as the eighteenth-century understood the
term. These senses, once put together, inform a style of practical
thinking about politics which emphasizes the importance of synthetic
as well as analytical thinking for practice, and suggests that a
progressive practice requires not only the yields of past effort but
also the intelligent application of mind to their further development
if progress, rather than regress, is to result. Burke is perhaps the
least studied of political classics, but he is certainly amongst the
small number with whom anyone who aspires to have an adequate
political education must engage.

Bibliography

Primary Literature

There is no complete edition of Burke’s works: their quantity, the
character of some of his manuscript materials and the manner in which
many of his parliamentary speeches are preserved all make it very
likely that this situation will continue. The fullest collection by
far, as well as the best edited, in nine, large substantive volumes,
is:

• Langford, P., 1981-, (general ed.), Writings and Speeches of
  Edmund Burke, Oxford, Clarendon Press, approaching
  completion. Cited as W & S

• [Burke, Edmund, and William Burke], 1757, An Account of the
  European Settlements, London (and later editions).
• Somerset, H.V.F, ed., 1957, A Notebook of Edmund Burke,
  Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Besides Burke’s writings, the most useful printed source for his
opinions is:

• Copeland, T.W., 1958-78, (general ed.), The Correspondence of
  Edmund Burke, Cambridge and Chicago, Cambridge University Press
  and University of Chicago Press, (ten volumes). Cited as Corr.

Smaller, but significant quantities of further letters have been
edited in:

• Lock, F.P., 1997, 1999, 2003 ‘Unpublished Burke
  Letters’, English Historical Review, 112: 119-141; 114:
  636-657; 118: 940-982

There is further unprinted correspondence in various repositories.
The primary collections of Burke manuscripts are at Sheffield Archives
and Northamptonshire Record Office, but there is further material by
Burke in a wider range of places; the material in manuscript bearing on
him is extremely bulky, diverse and scattered.

Secondary Literature

There is relatively little recent literature primarily on Burke’s
philosophical writings, however ‘philosophical’ is defined,
though there is much that makes reference to or use of them: thus a
bibliography of writings about his views on beauty, gender, and
political organization, as well as his literary temper and practical
activities would be disproportionately long. The reader is therefore
invited to range freely. The secondary literature as a whole is listed
up to about 1980 in Clara I. Gandy and Peter J. Stanlis, 1983,
Edmund Burke: A Bibliography of Secondary Studies to 1982, New
York, Garland. There are annual listings in the Modern Humanities
Research Association’s volumes.

For matters discussed here, the reader is referred to:

• Burke, Edmund, 1958, Philosophical Enquiry, ed. J.T.
  Boulton, London, Routledge (later edition, Oxford, Blackwell,
  1987)
• Canavan, F., 1957, ‘Edmund Burke’s College Study of
  Philosophy’, Notes and Queries, n.s.4: 538-543.
• Sewell Jr, R.B., 1938, ‘Rousseau’s Second Discourse in
  England from 1755 to 1762’, Philological Quarterly, 17:
  97-114.
• Wecter, D., 1940, ‘Burke’s Theory of Words, Images and
  Emotions’, Publications of the Modern Language
  Association, 55: 167-181.

Other works cited

• Berkeley, G, 1948-57, The Works of George Berkeley, eds.
  A.A.Luce and T.E.Jessop, 9 volumes, London, Nelson.
• Broad, C.D., 1952, Ethics and the History of Philosophy,
  London, Routledge.
• Coleridge, S.T., 1983, Biographica Literaria, eds. James
  Engell and W. Jackson Bate, Princeton, Princeton University Press.
• Freeman, M., 1992, ‘Edmund Burke’, in Laurence C.
  Becker and Charlotte B. Becker, eds., Encyclopaedia of Ethics,
  2 vols., Garland, New York, vol.i, pp.109-11.
• Gore-Brown, R, 1953, Chancellor Thurlow, London,
  Routledge.
• Goldsmith, Oliver, 1774, Retaliation: a poem, London, G.
  Kearsly.
  [Available online].
• Historical Manuscripts Commission, 1905, Report on the
  Manuscripts of the Marquess of Lothian, London, Stationery
  Office.
• Hull, C.H., and H.W.V. Temperley, eds., 1911-12, ‘Debates on
  the Declaratory Act and the Repeal of the Stamp Act’,
  American Historical Review, 17, pp.563-586.
• Le Clerc, J, 1692, Logica: sive ars ratiocinandi, London,
  Awnsham & John Churchill.
• Mill, J.S., 1859, On Liberty, London, Longman.
• Robinson, Nicholas K., 1996, Edmund Burke: a life in
  caricature, New Haven, Yale University Press.
• Sidgwick, H., 2000, Essays on Ethics and Method, ed.
  Marcus G. Singer, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
• Williamson, P., 1999, Stanley Baldwin, Cambridge,
  Cambridge University Press.

Other Internet Resources

• Search on “Edmund Burke” at the Bibliography of British and Irish History
  provides a selective listing of Burke’s works.
• The Edmund Burke Society
  sponsored by
  The Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal
  considers Burke with reference to modern conditions from a conservative point of view.
• Google Directory listing of Burke’s works on the Web,
  as well as some writings about him. The Liberty Fund’s Online Library
  of Liberty is especially helpful as a repository of Burke texts. It
  should be emphasized, however, that web versions of Burke’s works are
  not edited critically and are much less complete in scope than the
  printed ones.

Related Entries

Berkeley, George |
ethics: natural law tradition |