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Notes
7 Nauta, In Defense of Common Sense, 211–12.
*Supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, Research Project FFI 2011-23125.
1 W. and M. Kneale, The Development of Logic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 298; R. Blanché and J. Dubucs, La logique e son histoire (Paris: Armand Colin, 1970, reprinted 1996), 169.
2 Kneale, Development, 300.
3 For a vindication of the significance of Valla's approach, see L. Nauta, In Defense of Common Sense. Lorenzo Valla's Humanist Critique of Scholastic Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 212: ‘Historians of logic should realize that the rise of disciplines such as informal logic, argumentation theory, and pragmatics in the twentieth century has demonstrated that there is room for another, more informal approach to language and reasoning that ties logic more closely to real language and real arguments, to the way people actually speak, write, and argue.’
4 C. Vasoli, La dialettica e la retorica dell'Umanesimo. ‘Invenzione’ e ‘Metodo’ nella cultura del XV e XVI secolo (Milan: Feltrinelli Editore, 1968); J. E. Seigel, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism: The Union of Eloquence and Wisdom, Petrarch to Valla (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968).
5 Rodolphus Agricola Phrisius (1444–1485). Proceedings of the International Conference at the University of Groningen, 28–30 October 1985, edited by F. Akkerman and A. J. Vanderjagdt (Leiden: Brill, 1988); P. Mack, Renaissance Argument: Valla and Agricola in the Traditions of Rhetoric and Dialectic (Leiden: Brill, 1993).
6 N. Bruyère, Méthode et dialectique dans l'oeuvre de La Ramée. Renaissance et Age Classique. (París: J. Vrin, 1984); K. Meerhoff and J. C. Moisan, Autour de Ramus: texte, théorie, commentaire (Quebec: Nuit Blanche éditeur, 1997); G. Oldrini, La disputa del metodo nel Rinascimento: indagini su Ramo e sul ramismo (Florence: Le Lettere, 1997).
8 L. Jardine, ‘Humanist Logic’, in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, edited by C. B. Schmitt, Q. Skinner, E. Kessler and J. Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 173–98.
9 Jardine, ‘Humanist Logic’, 191–2.
13 Ramus, Dialectique, 18 : ‘Mais à cause de ces deux espèces, Aristote a voulu faire deux Logiques, l'une pour la science, l'autre pour l'opinion, en quoi (sauf l'honneur d'un si grand maître) il a très grandement erré […] ainsi l'art de connaître, c'est-à-dire Dialectique ou Logique, est une seule et même doctrine pour apercevoir toutes choses.’
16 W. J. Ong, Ramus, Method and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1958, second edition, 1983), 102–3. Meerhoff has insisted on this point, offering a similar characterization of the divergence between the two authors: ‘The general theoretical approach is very different in both authors […]. For Agricola, the aim of dialectic is persuasion, fidem facere, and the means for persuasion is plausible discourse, probabiliter dicere; for Ramus dialectic means, instead, the search for truth.’ (‘L'approche théorique générale est très diverse dans les deux cas […] Pour Agricola, l'objectif de la dialectique est la persuasion, le fidem facere, et le moyen de la persuasion est le discours probable, le probabiliter dicere; là où pour Ramus, la dialectique est d'emblée une recherche de la vérité’), 273. See C. G. Meerhoff, ‘Agricola et Ramus: dialectique et rhétorique’, in Rodolphus Agricola Phrisius (1444–1485), edited by Akkerman and Vanderjagt, 270–80.
10 Jardine seems to accept the significance of the proposals made by Humanist dialecticians in so far as they keep themselves within such limits: ‘Agricola's De inventione dialectica is exclusively concerned with the analysis of the kind of texts, or the kind of discourse, which will be encountered by students of the liberal arts. But some post-Agricolan dialectic manuals do attempt to deal with scientific reasoning or “demonstration” […]. It was, however, the inadequacy (and sometimes incompetence) of this part of the “new” dialectic manual which attracted the scorn of sixteenth-century Aristotelian logicians.’ (Jardine, ‘Humanist Logic’, 191–2). However, Jardine gives a more positive account of Agricola's contribution in another text (see L. Jardine, ‘Distinctive Discipline: Rudolph Agricola's Influence on Methodical Thinking in the Humanities’, in Rodolphus Agricola Phrisius (1444–1485). Proceedings of the International Conference at the University of Groningen. 28–30 Oct. 1985, edited by F. Akkerman and A. J. Vanderjagdt (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988), 38–57) in which she states: ‘I remain convinced of the intrinsic originality and brilliance of the De inventione dialectica as a contribution to an emerging logic of plausibility’ (Jardine, ‘Distinctive Discipline’, 38), yet she ultimately emphasizes its links with other rhetorical works (those of Aphtonius or Erasmus, for example) more than its effective opposition to the Scholastic conception of logic.
11 See, for example, Marc van der Poel's ‘Introduction’ to his edition and translation of Agricola's 1476 In laudem philosophiae et reliquarum artium oratio: ‘Taken together [the three arts of the trivium] jointly represent the concept of “eloquence” which, for Agricola, has a meaning that exceeds the common one of “speaking well in public”. Such a concept makes part of his general theory of argumentation, useful for any subject-matter and any kind of discourse, from the scientific prose written by and for specialized university scholars up to the religious sermons of the priests or the critical essays of the intellectuals’ (‘Combinées, elles sont désignées par le concept d’ “éloquence”, qui chez Agricola, a une signification plus large que celle, courante, de bien parler en public. Ce concept s'applique tout à fait à sa théorie universelle de l'argumentation, qui est utilisable pour tout sujet, dans toutes sortes de discours, depuis la prose scientifique destinée aux condisciples spécialisés de l'université jusqu'au sermon de l'ecclésiastique et l'essai critique de l'intellectuel.'), M. van der Poel, Écrits sur la dialectique et l'humanisme (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1997), 20.
12 P. Ramus, Dialectique (Paris, 1555), edited by N. Bruyère (Paris: J. Vrin, 1996). Regarding Ramus's many and evolving dialectical texts in French and Latin, see Bruyère, Méthode. We have mainly worked with his French 1555 text, Dialectique, for two reasons. First, it counts as a parallel to Simón Abril's efforts in spreading the study of logic in the vernacular (see, P. Olmos, ‘Humanist Aristotelianism in the Vernacular: Two Sixteenth-century Programmes’, Renaissance Studies, 25:4 (2011), 538–58). And second, it gathers its samples of argumentative usage from the French versions of classical verse written by his fellow contemporary poets (members of the group known as La Pléiade), thus showing in a very significant way which type of literary practice he was encouraging.
14 R. Agricola, De inventione dialectica libri tres. Drei Bücher über die Inventio dialectica, edited by L. Mundt based on the Alardus edition (Cologne, 1539), Frühe Neuzeit, 11 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1992), 212: ‘ars probabiliter de qualibet re proposita disserendi, prout cuiusque natura capax esse fidei poterit.’
15 Agricola, De inventione, 18: ‘omnia quae vel pro re quaque vel contra dicuntur, cohaerere et esse cum ea quadam, ut ita dicam, naturae societate coniuncta.’
17 Zabarella has been strongly defended by traditional historians of formal logic as almost the only original logician worth saving from this period (Kneale, Development, 306; Blanché and Dubucs, La Logique, 174).
18 Zabarella, De natura logicae, col. 52, in J. Zabarella, Opera logica (Cologne, 1597) facsimile edition by W. Risse (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1966): ‘Logic is, therefore, an intellectual and instrumental “habit”, that is, an instrumental discipline, created by philosophers in virtue of their philosophical habit, which conceives and creates secondary notions from the concepts of things that work as instruments through which we may know the truth in everything and discern it from falsehood.’ (‘Est enim logica habitus intellectualis instrumentalis, seu disciplina instrumentalis a Philosophis ex Philosophia habito genita, quae secundas notiones in conceptibus rerum fingit, et fabricat, ut sint instrumenta, quibus in omni re verum cognoscatur, et a falso discernatur.’)
19 See also Vasoli's critical prologue to his edition of two of Zabarella's logical treatises: J. Zabarella, De methodis libri quatuor. Liber de regressu (Venice, 1578) facsimile edition by C. Vasoli, Instrumenta Rationis, 1 (Bologna: Editrice CLUEB, 1985).
20 H. Mikkeli, An Aristotelian Response to Renaissance Humanism. Jacopo Zabarella on the Nature of Arts and Sciences, Studia Historica, 41 (Helsinki: Suomen Historiallinen Seura, 1992).
21 The significance of this edition has often been mentioned. Charles Lohr, for example, states: ‘A new epoch for German philosophy began in 1594 [this is the date of the prologue, although the date of publication is 1597] with the publication in Basle of Jacopo Zabarella's Opera logica by Johann Ludwig Hawenreuter’, C. H. Lohr, ‘Metaphysics’, in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, edited by C. B. Schmitt, Q. Skinner, E. Kessler and J. Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 537–638 (622). See also the article dedicated to Hawenreuter's prologue by S. Kusukawa, ‘Mediations of Zabarella in Northern Europe: The Preface of Johann Ludwig Hawenreuter’, in La presenza dell'aristotelismo padovano nella filosofia della prima modernità, edited by G. Piaia (Rome and Padua: Editrice Antenore, 2002), 199–214.
22 See Hawenreuter's preface to Zabarella, Opera logica, page 3 of 5 (s.n.), lines 20–40: ‘This wicked coldness of the earlier logicians was first defeated in Germany by Rudolph Agricola, who wrote his most erudite three books on dialectical invention: whose logic did not present itself as intended for learning only thorny and unimportant questions, but as useful in any kind of sermon. Once such darkness had been dispelled from logic, a few years later, Philip Melanchthon wrote his most stylish compendium on logic that was mainly conceived to demonstrate religious truth. And this brilliant logic produced countless men who excelled in the pulpits of the temples, the benches of the senates, the judicial courts, as doctors at the bedside [sc. of the sick], in the schools of the philosophers and even in private dwellings.’ (‘Lubricam illam priorum logicorum glaciem primus in Germania fregit Rudolphus Agricola conscriptis literatissimis tribus de dialectica inventione libris: quibus Logicam non spinosis tantum quaestiunculis disceoandis inservire: sed in omni votae genere usum habere monstravit. His Logicae tenebris depulsis, non multis post annis Philippus Melanchton compendium elegantissimum conscripsit Logicae, quod ad Religionis praecipue veritatem illustrandam aptavit. Et ista Logica luce innumeros in templorum suggestibus, curiarum subselliis, iudiciorum tribunalibus, medicorum tricliniis, philosophorum scholis, privatorum aedibus praestantissimos produxit viros.’)
25 Vives, In Pseudodialecticos, edited by Fantazzi, 97: ‘Nostros tamen Hispanos non tam moneo et hortor, quam per quicquid est sacrorum obtestor obsecroque, ut finem iam faciant ineptiendi ac delirandi, pulcherrima ingenia studio dedant rerum pulcherrimarum, ut quemadmodum multis dotibus sumus ceteris gentibus superiores, ita et simus eruditione, quae si aliqua ingenia decet, nostra profecto decet.’
23 An overview of these Spanish contributions can be found in P. Olmos, ‘La polémica antiescolástica y la lógica humanista en la España del siglo XVI’, Revista de Hispanismo Filosófico, 12 (2007), 65–83, with commentaries on the works of authors such as: Cristóbal de Villalón (El Scholastico, MS ca. 1535); Gregorio Arcisio, editor of Agricola's De inventione dialectica for the Spanish market (Burgos, 1554); Sebastián Fox Morcillo (De demonstratione, eiusque necessitate ac vi and De usu et exercitatione dialecticae, Basel, 1554); Pedro Juan Monzó (Enarrationes compositionis totius artis dialecticae, Valencia, 1556); Juan Costa y Beltrán (De utraque inventione oratoria et dialectica libellus, Pamplona, 1570); Pedro Núñez Vela (Disputationum logicarum libri tres, Geneva, 1578) and Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas (Organum dialecticum et rhetoricum, Lyon, 1579; Salamanca, 1588).
24 J. L. Vives, In pseudodialecticos (Louvain, 1519). For a modern critical edition, see Juan Luis Vives: In pseudodialecticos, edited by C. Fantazzi (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1979). See also Vasoli, La dialettica, 214–46; G. González, ‘La polémica antidialéctica de Alonso de Herrera y Luis Vives, ayer y hoy’, Cuadernos salmantinos de filosofía, 11 (1984), 353–64.
26 Vives's letter is rather more critical than constructive and we should also remember that his attitude tended to be even less optimistic as time went on. Indeed, his standpoint in his mature work, De disciplinis – J. L. Vives, Las disciplinas [De disciplinis, Amberes, 1531], edited by F. Magraner, C. Porcar, J. Serra and U. Perelló (Valencia: Ayuntamiento de Valencia, 1997) – is notably more sceptical about the possibilities of a ‘good’ argumentative discipline that would not encourage a taste for dispute and conceited eloquence.
27 The first modern edition of the Spanish version of this text was published by A. Bonilla y San Martín, ‘Un antiaristotélico del Renacimiento: Hernando Alonso de Herrera y su Breve disputa en ocho levadas contra Aristótil y sus secuaces’, Revue Hispanique, 4 (1920), 61–189. González, ‘La polémica’, has studied its close relationship with Vives's texts and C. Baranda has published a very interesting study of its main claims (C. Baranda, ‘Un “manifiesto” castellano en defensa del humanismo: la Breve Disputa en ocho levadas contra Aristótil y sus secuaces, de Hernando Alonso de Herrera (Alcalá, 1517)’, Criticón, 55 (1992), 15–30). There is also a recent edition of the entire bilingual text in H. Alonso de Herrera, La disputa contra Aristóteles y sus seguidores [1517], edited by M. I. Lafuente and M. A. Sánchez (León: Junta de Castilla-León/Universidad de León, 2004).
28 Baranda, ‘Un “manifiesto”’, 19.
29 Alonso de Herrera, La disputa, 245–7 : ‘Mejor le fuera acortar, que con tantas prolixidades de reglillas cargar la memoria de los discipulos […] Y aquel doctor tienen en mas estima, y como a rio caudal de saber le ponen sobre su cabeça, cuyo libro llega a mil o dos mil pliegos, aunque este poblado de errores.’
30 Alonso de Herrera, La disputa, 257: ‘Y esta ignorancia os viene porque no teneys familiaridad con libros de rhetorica, y pensays que es possible sin rhetorica enseñar bien logica, al reves de lo que los antiguos pensaban.’
33 Alonso de Herrera, La disputa, 241: ‘Ésta es la verdadera y cierta manera de disputar, que huele a saber antiguo en todo y por todo, aristotélico y platónico, y quien quisiere ver qué artificio lleva, arremánguese a hazer otro tanto.’
35 Alonso de Herrera, La disputa, 241–3: ‘Como agora, por faltas de saber, hazen todos los estudios que están cabe el Norte, que las más de las vezes que disputan es por autoridades […] no sabiendo de do sacaran argumentos, echan mano de cavilaciones muy frias a fuer de niños que el oropel tienen por oro […] Ya los artistas se han tornado canonistas, que en lugar de razones arrojan textos.’
31 Baranda, ‘Un “manifiesto”’, 20–21.
32 In De causis corruptarum artium, I.7 (this is the title of the first part of De disciplinis) Vives says that this was the real aim of the academic disputatio, where triumph was appreciated more than the attainment of truth, and yielding and defeat were penalized more than sophistry.
34 Baranda, ‘Un “manifiesto”’, 30.
36 Simón Abril has not received much attention until very recently. So far, there was only one, rather old-fashioned, monographic work on him by M. Morreale de Castro, Pedro Simón Abril, Anejos de la Revista de Filología Española, 51 (Madrid: CSIC, 1949), and a few articles on his minor works and his views on language teaching. I devoted my doctoral thesis to his approach to logic and argumentation, and the book issuing from this research is P. Olmos, Los negocios y las ciencias: lógica, argumentación y metodología en la obra filosófica de Pedro Simón Abril (Madrid: CSIC, 2010), with a prologue by Sir Geoffrey Lloyd. I have also done some comparative work between his philosophical educational programme in the vernacular and that of Alessandro Piccolomini (P. Olmos, ‘Humanist Aristotelianism’). Other works by him have been reviewed in P. Olmos, ‘Las Sentencias de un renglón (1586) de Pedro Simón Abril: un repertorio al servicio de la gramática, la retórica y la dialéctica […] sin faltar a la moral’, Pandora. Revue d'Études Hispaniques (Université de Paris VIII), 7 (2008), 143–61; P. Olmos, ‘Pedro Simón Abril y la traducción métrica de la poesía grecolatina’, Res publica litterarum, 31 (2009), 131–60.
37 Philip II patronized several educational enterprises. In 1552, he established new chairs of cosmography and navigation and reformed the statutes at the Casa de Contratación de las Indias in Seville (founded in 1503). He also created the first Spanish botanical garden in Aranjuez, under the supervision of the humanist doctor Andrés Laguna (1499–1559), the translator of Dioscorides into Spanish, as well as an academy of mathematics (1583) in the Royal Palace of Madrid. In addition to all this, another medical man at his court, Cristobal Pérez de Herrera (1556–1620), convinced him to undertake a project to build a network of institutions all over Spain in order to offer (compulsory) housing and education for the poor. All of these projects started to fall by the wayside when Philip II died in 1598 and his less-intellectual son, Philip III, began his reign, supported by the most conservative elements of the aristocratic party.
38 Simón Abril developed these ideas in different texts (mostly in the prefatory materials of his printed works) and explicitly in his pamphlet Apuntamientos de cómo se deben reformar las doctrinas, (Madrid: Pedro Madrigal, 1589; 7th edition: Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, 1953), dedicated to the King.
39 Simón Abril was the author of the first translations made into Spanish directly from the Greek of Aristotle's Politics (Los ocho libros de Republica del filosofo Aristoteles, Zaragoza, 1584) and Nichomachean Ethics (La ética de Aristóteles traducida del griego y analizada por Pedro Simón Abril (Madrid: Real Academia de Ciencias Morales y Políticas, 1918). La ética was a manuscript, unpublished in Simón Abril's lifetime.
40 Rojo Vega has published the inventory of Simón Abril's personal library made after his death and kept in the Archivo de Simancas as a legal document: A. F. Rojo Vega, ‘La bibiloteca del maestro Pedro Simón Abril (1595)’, in El libro antiguo español VI (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 2002), 365–88.
41 See Monrreale, Pedro Simón; Olmos, Los negocios.
42 Simón Abril's Spanish text on logic was supposed to be the first of a series of three textbooks covering the three parts of philosophy in the vernacular. He actually completed the second of these texts: Segunda parte de la filosofía llamada la fisiología o filosofía natural, which was never published and of which we have an autograph manuscript (Biblioteca Real de Madrid, MS II/1158). However the expected third part (moral philosophy) was never written and Simón Abril contented himself with his own translations of Aristotle's practical philosophy. The aims and characteristics of this vernacular cursus philosophicus have been discussed in Olmos, ‘Humanist Aristotelianism’.
43 Due to the fact that it was intended as the first volume of a complete cursus philosophicus, the vernacular text adds an introductory Book I on philosophy in general, its parts and aims, which includes an interesting discussion on ‘method’ that has been reviewed in Olmos, Los negocios, 390–98.
44 Simón Abril, Primera parte, 178–86, chapter on the division of the quaestio.
45 Simón Abril, Primera parte, 222–3: ‘Tantas especies hay de pronunciados conjuntos, cuantas hay de conjunciones que los puedan ajuntar: pero las que más ordinarias son y más hacen al propósito son siete: el condicional, el adversativo, el copulativo, el disjuntivo, el correlativo, el semejante, el causal.’
46 Simón Abril, Primera parte, 226 : ‘El uso de estos pronunciados conjuntos, aunque Aristóteles no lo enseñó en su órgano lógico, es muy necesario así en las ciencias, como en el tratar de los negocios.’
47 Simón Abril, Primera parte, 265–6 : ‘Discurso conjunto pues decíamos ser aquel que contenía en sí algún pronunciado conjunto: la cual manera de discurso es más popular y más usado aún de los que solamente tienen lógica natural, que el discurso sencillo. Porque el discurso sencillo sabe mucho a escuelas y a artificio.’
48 Simón Abril, Primera parte, 271: ‘Será cosa muy útil ejercitarse en reducir discursos sencillos a conjuntos, y conjuntos a sencillos, para saber dar a comer a los hombres la verdad guisada de maneras diferentes.’
49 Simón Abril, Primera parte, 291: ‘Usan también los filósofos, y aun los demás hombres muy de ordinario en el tratar de los negocios, de una manera de demostración, que sirve para refutar deduciendo al que afirma alguna cosa a obligarle a admitir algún disparate, o alguna cosa imposible.’
50 Simón Abril, Primera parte, 71.
51 Simón Abril, Primera parte, 91.
52 Simón Abril, Primera parte, 164.
53 Simón Abril, Primera parte, 155.
54 Simón Abril, Primera parte, 239.
55 Simón Abril, Primera parte, 240.
56 Simón Abril, Apuntamientos, 294–5.
57 Simón Abril, Primera parte, 71: ‘La parte inventiva es sin comparación de mayor provecho que la disposición, pues nos servimos de ésta, como dice Aristóteles, para conversaciones, para negocios, para exhortaciones, para oraciones, para toda cosa, y de la disposición para solas las disputas de las escuelas. Y así la invención es cosa más familiar y popular, y la disposición huele más a puntos de escuela, y es para el pueblo de mucho menos gusto.’
58 Simón Abril, Primera parte, 69: ‘De manera que entre el que sabe este arte y el que no la sabe, no hay esta diferencia, que el uno use de razón y el otro no use, pues todos o bien o mal usan de razón aun los que no saben letras, sino esta, que el que no la sabe, va a tiento sin saber en qué estriba la fuerza de su razón, y sin saber llegarla a cabo: pero el que la entiende, hácelo perfectamente y sin error hasta mostrar la llaneza y claridad de su razón.’
59 In one of his educational programmes, included as a preface to his Spanish logic textbook under the title: ‘The order in which sciences should be learnt’ (‘Orden que se debe guardar en el aprender las ciencias’), he places the study of logic immediately after that of grammar (vernacular, Latin and Greek), around the age of 12.
60 Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, I.2.28. Quintilian, The Instituito Oratoria, Books I–III, translated by H. E. Butler (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 52–3.
61 Agricola, De inventione, 152–4: ‘Itaque cum legis Quintiliani illud: “Vascula oris angusti superfusam humoris copiam respuunt, sensim autem influentibus vel instillantibus etiam replentur”, non conficitur utique, debere propter hoc tenera puerorum ingenia pro modo virium suarum doceri, sed tamen concipiendo quisque rem apud animum suum sub hac imagine persuadet sibi, aliter fieri non posse.’
62 Ramus, Dialectique, 37. Ovid, Tristia, I.1.99–100: ‘For either nobody can remove them [sc. my misfortunes] or, in the fashion of Achilles, that man only who wounded me [sc. Caesar]’ (‘namque ea vel nemo, vel qui mihi vulnera fecit / solus Achilleo tollere more potest’). Ovid, Tristia, Ex Ponto, translated by A. L. Wheeler, second edition, revised by G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 8–11.
63 Simón Abril, Primera parte, 155: ‘Como se puede ver es los ejemplos ya propuestos de esta manera: así como un buen pastor se desvela mucho en defender su ganado de los lobos y fieras alimañas […] así también el rey se debe desvelar mucho en defender sus súbditos […] Item: así como en tiempo de maretas y tempestad son menester los más sabios marineros […] así también en tiempo de motines y alteraciones de la república son menester sabios y prudentes gobernadores.’
64 This audience-related approach is similar to Agricola's in his famous distinction between ‘exposition’ and ‘argumentation’. See Agricola, De inventione, 302: ‘Now, a discourse may just aim at presenting the object, whatever it is, about which it talks, sure of the commitment and opinion of those who listen to it, or be intended for obtaining the persuasion of a hesitant audience. The former is done through exposition, the latter through argumentation.’ (‘Sic et oratio aut satis habet explicare rem de qua dicit, cuiusmodi sit, secura fidei opinionisque eius qui audit, aut talem esse pervincere etiam renitente auditore conatur. Illud expositione fit, istud argumentatione.’)
65 Simón Abril, Primera parte, 156: ‘esta manera de argumento es más acomodada para persuasiones populares, y para enseñar un ánimo dócil, que para convencer al porfiado. Porque, o se puede negar ser en todo símil, o argüir que en semejantes negocios unos pronunciaron de una manera, y otros al contrario.’
66 Simón Abril, Primera parte, 157: ‘De este lugar como de una muy caudalosa fuente manan todas las metáforas, alegorías, enigmas, parábolas, y otras semejantes maneras de hablar, de que está lleno el uso de los hombres.’
67 Simón Abril, Primera parte, 159: ‘con la mucha lección ir observando estas maneras de símiles para enriquecerse con ellos, y tener muchos que poder aplicar en su tiempo y lugar.’
68 Simón Abril, Primera parte, xxviii: ‘comienzan [los niños] a tener algún uso de razón y dan razones de lo que dicen, conforme a lo que les ayuda su naturaleza, y así el arte que va imitando la naturaleza los ha de instruir, luego después del conocimiento de las lenguas, en el uso de la razón, que es lo que la lógica profesa.’
69 See, for example, R. B. Brandom, Making It Explicit. Reasoning, Representing and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1994), 158: ‘What makes something that is done according to a practice – for instance the production of a performance or the acquisition of a status – deserve to count as inferring? The answer developed here is that inferring is to be distinguished as a certain kind of move in the game of giving and asking for reasons. To say this is to say that inferring should be understood in an interpersonal context, as an aspect of an essentially social practice of communication.’