The Logical treatise’s influence on Boethius’s Contra Eutychen

Abstract

The article is about the influence exerted by Boethius’s logical treatises on his theological treatises. The chronology of Boethius’s works is certainly propitious, for the theological treatises were written after the logical treatises or at most in parallel. The idea is to recognize within the theological treatises the presence of those logical elements Boethius commented on in his treatises on categorical logic (De syllogismo categorico and the Introductio ad syllogismos categoricos), hypothetical logic (De hypotheticis syllogismis), and his commentaries on Aristotle’s logical writings (basically on the Categories and De Interpretatione). It has long been known that Boethius’s methodology in his theological treatises is Aristotelian logic. In this article, I focus on the logical tools he uses in the fifth theological treatise entitled Contra Eutychen. The work wants to contribute to clarify what should be the attitude for making Aristotelian logic an instrument of truth, and what the Boethian method in theology is.