🎉 New to MixCache.com? Sign up now and get $5.00 FREE CREDIT towards any ebook purchase!* Create Account →

The Insolubilia: How Medieval Logicians Tamed the Liar Paradox
The Rise and Fall of a Scholastic Obsession

Book Details
About this book:

The Insolubilia: How Medieval Logicians Tamed the Liar Paradox "This statement is false." Four words that shattered the foundations of logic—and the medievals spent two centuries putting the pieces back together. Long before Russell, Tarski, or Gödel, the scholars of Paris and Oxford turned the Liar Paradox into the ultimate stress test for human reason. *The Insolubilia* recounts the astonishing, forgotten saga of how twelfth-century masters, armed with newly recovered Aristotelian logic, transformed an ancient riddle into a sophisticated science of meaning, truth, and self-reference.

From the radical *cassantes* who declared paradoxes meaningless, to Thomas Bradwardine's revolutionary insight that every proposition implicitly asserts its own truth, to John Buridan's context-sensitive semantics that prefigured modern solutions by six centuries—this book traces a high-stakes intellectual arms race played out in university disputations and manuscript margins. You'll encounter the Oxford Calculators quantifying truth, Ockham's mental language slicing through ambiguity, and the humanist critics who finally buried the genre, not because it was solved, but because fashion changed.

Written with the narrative verve of intellectual history at its best, *The Insolubilia* reveals that the medieval obsession with "unsolvable problems" wasn't scholastic hair-splitting—it was the crucible in which our modern understanding of logic, language, and the limits of formal systems was forged. Essential reading for philosophers, historians of science, and anyone who has ever wondered how a sentence can devour its own truth.

Table of Contents:
  • Introduction
  • Chapter 1: The Shadow of Eubulides: Inheriting the Paradoxes of Antiquity
  • Chapter 2: Insolubilia Revealed: The First Medieval Encounters with Self-Reference
  • Chapter 3: The Twelfth-Century Classroom: Logic in the Shadow of Paris and Oxford
  • Chapter 4: Transcensus and Truth: Early Syntactic Approaches to the Liar
  • Chapter 5: The Cassantes: Solving Paradoxes by Declaring Them Void
  • Chapter 6: The Restringentes: Early Attempts to Ban Self-Referential Propositions
  • Chapter 7: The Rise of the Disputation: Obligationes and the Mechanics of Academic Debate
  • Chapter 8: William of Sherwood and the Mid-Thirteenth Century Consensus
  • Chapter 9: Peter of Spain and the Logical Foundations of the Tractatus
  • Chapter 10: Roger Bacon on the Deceptions of Equivocation and Ambiguity
  • Chapter 11: Thomas Bradwardine and the Fourteenth-Century Revolution
  • Chapter 12: The Oxford Calculators: Quantifying Truth and Meaning
  • Chapter 13: "Everything That Signifies Itself to Be False Is False": The Bradwardinian Turn
  • Chapter 14: Richard Kilvington’s Sophismata: Pushing the Boundaries of Meaning
  • Chapter 15: William of Ockham: Nominalism, Mental Language, and the Liar
  • Chapter 16: John Buridan and the Parisian Response: Truth-Conditions and Context
  • Chapter 17: The Virtue of Virtual Implication: Buridan's Final Solution
  • Chapter 18: Albert of Saxony: Systematizing Insolubilia for the University Curriculum
  • Chapter 19: Marsilius of Inghen and the Spread of Western Logic to Central Europe
  • Chapter 20: The Epistemic Paradoxes: "You Know That This Proposition Is Unknown"
  • Chapter 21: Paul of Venice and the Late Medieval Synthesis
  • Chapter 22: Institutionalizing Paradox: Insolubilia as the Ultimate Test of Academic Logic
  • Chapter 23: The Humanist Critique: Rhetoric, Pedagogy, and the Rejection of Scholastic Logic
  • Chapter 24: The Decline of the Insolubilia Genre in the Early Modern Era
  • Chapter 25: Echoes across the Centuries: Medieval Insolubilia and Modern Formal Logic
Extended Catalog title. This book is part of our extended catalog and is sourced after you order. Usually this process takes less than an hour to a few hours. We'll email you when your ebook is ready.
Author:

Anthony Z. Weaver

Published By:

MixCache.com Extended Catalog

Type:

Nonfiction

Date Published:

October 21, 2026

Sample:

Read Sample

🎁 Includes the ebook FREE
Read it the moment it's ready, while you wait for your paperback — no extra charge.
🚚 FREE Shipping in the USA
$7 flat rate per book to all other countries
Order:

Click to order this paperback:

Buy Now
Ebook included · Printed to order Secure Payment
$