Theodore Gracyk

Jazz After Jazz : Ken Burns and the Construction of Jazz History

As all action is by its nature to be figured as extended in breadth and in depth, as well as in length; and so spreads abroad on all hands . . . so all narrative is, by its nature, of only one dimension; only travels forward towards one, or towards successive points; narrative is linear, action is solid. Alas for our “chains” or chainlets, of “causes and effects.” —Thomas Carlyle, “On History,” 1830

Critique of Pure Music, by James O. Young

instead, he adopts the modern meta-level perspective to investigate properties of the systems as such. (What mediaeval logicians were first and foremost interested in was arguably the application of logical theories and principles, given that logic, broadly understood, provided the methodology for investigations in all fields of inquiry.) But others, including logicians, linguists, non-historian philosophers, and those scholars of mediaeval logic sympathetic to the systematic end of the spectrum, will likely view Parsons’s project in the book as one very much worth pursuing, and will be impressed by the mastery with which it is carried out. In effect, this is a book likely to provoke extreme reactions. Some will dislike it, and will worry in particular about the somewhat anachronistic picture of mediaeval logic painted in the book. Others will love it for its skilled application of modern logical and linguistic techniques to the mediaeval material, presenting it with a systematicity not to be found elsewhere (neither in the mediaeval authors themselves nor in the recent secondary literature). And some others might be of two minds, feeling the pull in both directions. But without a doubt, the book is a milestone in mediaeval logic scholarship.