Term Logic - Decline of Term Logic

Decline of Term Logic

Term logic began to decline in Europe during the Renaissance, when logicians like Rodolphus Agricola Phrisius (1444–1485) and Ramus began to promote place logics. The logical tradition called Port-Royal Logic, or sometimes "traditional logic", claimed that a proposition was a combination of ideas rather than terms, but otherwise followed many of the conventions of term logic. It was influential, especially in England, until the 19th century. Leibniz created a distinctive logical calculus, but nearly all of his work on logic was unpublished and unremarked until Louis Couturat went through the Leibniz Nachlass around 1900, publishing his pioneering studies in logic.

19th century attempts to algebratize logic, such as the work of Boole and Venn, typically yielded systems highly influenced by the term logic tradition. The first predicate logic was that of Frege's landmark Begriffsschrift, little read before 1950, in part because of its eccentric notation. Modern predicate logic as we know it began in the 1880s with the writings of Charles Sanders Peirce, who influenced Peano and even more, Ernst Schröder. It reached fruition in the hands of Bertrand Russell and A. N. Whitehead, whose Principia Mathematica (1910–13) made splendid use of a variant of Peano's predicate logic.

Term logic also survived to some extent in traditional Roman Catholic education, especially in seminaries. Medieval Catholic theology, especially the writings of Thomas Aquinas, had a powerfully Aristotelean cast, and thus term logic became a part of Catholic theological reasoning. For example, Joyce (1949), written for use in Catholic seminaries, made no mention of Frege or Bertrand Russell.