Albert von Sachsen: Logik (lateinisch-deutsche Parallelausgabe)

This bilingual edition of the Logica by Albert of Saxony (d. 1390) fills a gap, what has long been desired by the community of historians of medieval philosophy. The critical edition of the Latin Text from medieval manuscripts meets the requirements of modern special research. The annotated translation into German makes the work accessable to a broader public, and the extensive introduction gives an up-to-date presentation of the author and his work, including recent results of the editor`s own research. The author was an eminent scholar of the later Middle Ages with a remarkable career. He was professor and rector of the universities of Paris (1351-1362) and Vienna (1365/66) before he was appointed bishop of Halberstadt in 1366. The work, composed in the early 1350ies, is a handbook of the complete scholastic logic, indeed one of the most successful of its kind, as can be seen by the text tradition (nearly 40 manuscripts and an early print of 1522) as well as by the contemporary and subsequent reception of the work. Ever since Carl Prantl`s Geschichte der Logik im Abendlande, vol. IV (1870), Albert`s Logica has been one of the main sources for the history of logic, as e. g. most recently in the Handbook of the History of Logic, vol. 2, Amsterdam etc.: Elsevier 2008. In addition it is also an important source for the history of philosophy and the history of ideas in general, due to the fact that the scholastic concept of logic is by far broader than our present concept. The comprehensive handbook consists of six treatises that develop the subject matter from simple or incomplex elements to complex expressions: terms, properties of terms, sentences, consequences, fallacies, insolubles and obligations. All this is well organized (and in a different way than e. g. in Peter of Spain, William of Ockham, and John Buridan) and presented with clarity, what, additionally to the merits of the contents, is the reason for the great and long lasting success that has been achieved by the work. Regarding contents, the work is an organic combination of the Aristotelian logic (Organon, together with its subsequent tradition) with the own achievements by the scholastics beginning in the 12th century. Especially regarding the latter achievements Albert`s work is informative again, for he is e. g. the first continental, Non- English author of a treatise on obligations in the 14th century. All these things are specified in detail in the editor`s introduction.