From Valla's Dialectica to Stevin's Bewysconst: Humanist Philosophy of Language and the Emergence of Dutch Vernacular Logic

This project deals with the emergence of Dutch vernacular logic,
focusing on its philosophical, logical and linguistic aspects. While
there has been much research on the development of vernacular
logic traditions in Western Europe as well as on the development of
Dutch as a scientific language, hardly any work has been done on
the specific area of Dutch vernacular logic. In this project we will
study a corpus of about 10 logic textbooks from the period 1585 –
1685, which were either originally written in Dutch or translated from
Latin/French into Dutch. From a philosophical perspective, our goal is
to investigate to what extent humanist philosophy of language can
help to explain the emergence of Dutch vernacular logic. From a
logical perspective, our goal is to investigate where the Dutch
vernacular works stand with respect to certain general trends of logic
in that era (e.g. the interplay between Scholasticism and
Cartesianism). From a linguistic perspective, our goal is to explore
the various techniques that authors and translators used to create
new logical vocabulary, thereby contributing to the development of
Dutch as a scientific language. A special focus of the project will
concern the logical contributions of Simon Stevin (1548 – 1620).
While Stevin is widely celebrated for his contributions to mathematics
and Dutch mathematical vocabulary, hardly anyone knows that
Stevin is also the author of the first logic textbook in Dutch: Dialectike
ofte bewysconst (1585).