Aristotelian and Cartesian Logic at Harvard: Charles Morton's Logick System & William Brattle's Compendium of Logick.

From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - Overall very good and clean. - The study of logic was central to a liberal education in the early modern world. Renaissance humanists liked to refer to logic as the �art� of thinking, by which they meant broad-minded strategies for decision-making, persuasion, and organizing knowledge. Logic was not just an arcane course taught only at universities and no more useful for most people than the airy realms of higher mathematics. Textbooks and manuals of logic were designed to be useful and even to be read at one�s leisure. Nor did the early modem world assume that logic and religion were necessarily opposed to one another. Key educational reformers like Philipp Melanchthon believed that revelations from God and divine testimony were absolutely certain forms of knowledge. English Puritans, in particular, yearned for rational religion: human beings were designed in the image of God and were, therefore, both rational and spiritual beings. Charles Morton was transatlantic Puritanism�s most famous educator at the time of his arrival in Boston in 1686. His Logick System advocated the vigorous Aristotelian logic popularized by Melanchthon. William Brattle, a generation younger than Morton, was one of Harvard�s most beloved tutors. Brattle introduced newly fashionable Cartesian logic into the Harvard curriculum. His Compendium of Logick ultimately superseded the text of his well known colleague and continued to be used at Harvard until the mid-eighteenth century. Although Harvard was a small provincial outpost in the history of logic, its position in America as a bastion of Puritanism makes it an excellent locale for the examination of one idiosyncratic strain of dogmatic, religiously-oriented logical thought. Morton�s and Brattle�s texts teach us much about the Puritans, especially about the epistemology, psychology, and theology that supported their particular form of religious rationalism. - Rick Kennedy is associate professor of history at Indiana University Southeast. Related articles by Kennedy have appeared in The Journal of the History of Ideas, The New England Quarterly, and Winterthur Portfolio. ISBN 9780962073724