4. Instantiae and the Parisian Schools

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of studying the logic of the twelfth-century Parisian schools, something to a great extent made possible by the work of Sten Ebbesen, is the development there of a strategy of producing and multiplying, endlessly so it seems, various kinds of argument known as instantiae . The discussion of instantiae in Ebbesen Anonymus Cantabrigiensis (AC) is brief but it can provide us with a tool to begin to understand the use of the technique in the twelfth century. The author in particular takes care to distinguish between instantiae which hold in general and those which hold only against one school or another. As he becomes better able to do this, he will become better able to understand the logical theories developed by each of them during one of the most productive periods in the history of logic. Keywords: Anonymus Cantabrigiensis (AC) ; instantiae ; logical theories; Sten Ebbesen; twelfth-century Parisian schools