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

The main goal of this project is to study the earliest developments of Dutch vernacular logic. While there exists a large body of literature pertaining to the development of vernacular logic traditions in Western Europe as well as on the development of Dutch as a scientific language, hardly any research has been conducted on the specific area of Dutch vernacular logic. In order to address this gap, the project will focus on a corpus of about ten logic textbooks from the period 1585-1685 which were either originally written in Dutch or translated from Latin/French into Dutch and are the earliest works of logic known to be written in the Dutch language. On the linguistic side, the project aims to explore the various techniques that authors and translators used to create a new logical vocabulary, thereby contributing to the development of Dutch as a scientific language. On the logical side the project aims to investigate the relation between the vernacular works and the general trends of logic in the relevant era.