Richard Kilvington and the theory of obligations
Abstract
Kretzmann and Spade were led by Richard Kilvington’s proposed revisions to the rules of obligations in his discussion of the 47th sophism in his Sophismata to claim that the purpose of obligational disputations was the same as that of counterfactual reasoning. Angel d’Ors challenged this interpretation, realising that the reason for Kilvington’s revision was precisely that he found the art of obligation unsuited to the kind of reasoning which lay at the heart of the sophismatic argument. In his criticism, Kilvington focussed on a technique used by Walter Burley to force a respondent to grant an arbitrary falsehood and similar to Lewis and Langford’s famous defence of ex impossibili quodlibet. Kilvington observes that just as in obligational disputation, one may be obliged to grant a false proposition and deny a true one, so in counterfactual reasoning one may be obliged to doubt a proposition whose truth or falsity one knows, on pain of contradiction.
Citation
Read , S 2015 , ' Richard Kilvington and the theory of obligations ' , Vivarium , vol. 53 , no. 3 , pp. 391-404 . https://doi.org/10.1163/15685349-12341306
Publication
Vivarium
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0042-7543Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2015 Brill. This work is made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the author created, accepted version manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15685349-12341306
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