Description
Book SynopsisThe
Dialectical Disputations, translated here for the first time into any modern language, is Lorenzo Valla’s principal contribution to the philosophy of language and logic. Valla sought to replace the scholastic tradition of Aristotelian logic with a new logic based on the historical usage of classical Latin and on a commonsense approach.
Trade ReviewCopenhaver and Nauta have found precisely Valla’s inimitable voice. Throughout their
Dialectical Disputations, the reader can hear the utterly infectious immediacy with which Valla read the works of the ancient world. The glowing gift of the Renaissance was its refusal to think of those works as dead—buoyed by the ongoing re-discovery of manuscripts and armed with a revived knowledge of Greek and Latin, scholars and bookworms like Valla embarked on entirely new ways of reading, and our translators perfectly capture how
personal an endeavor it was… Readers seeking lively, challenging company can’t do much better than Valla, and now they have his greatest work in an English language version he would have loved. -- Steve Donoghue * Open Letters Monthly *
