Logica laurentiana. Studio sui libri II e III della dialettica di Lorenzo Valla

Abstract

My PhD thesis is concerned with logic developed by Lorenzo Valla in the second and third book of the Dialectica, his main philosophical work. Valla’s logic, by himself named «logica laurentiana», aim to reform aristotelian and medieval logic introducing a series of principles borrowed by rhetoric and grammar. The purpose of my thesis is to show the deep influence of this principles on the aristotelian paradigm, at least on moments that Valla is concerned with. Far from separate rhetoric from logic, or the oratorical point of view from the philosophical/logical point of view, Valla intends to give birth to a new course of logic through a refoundation of old method. In light of that, it must be reviewed another exegetical topos widespread among Dialectica’s scholars: the reduction of dialectic to rhetoric. Valla mantains the autonomy (but not the indipendence) of dialectic from rhetoric, and he grants to the first a separate space from second because the obiect of these two artes is different. [edited by Author]