SIXTEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY anathema and bloodshed Questions of authority, of course, are easier to understand and more diYcult to arbitrate than questions of doctrine But the unity of Christendom could have been maintained under a constitutional papacy subject to general councils, such as Ockham had suggested, such as had been the practice in the Wfteenth century, and such as even Thomas More, for the greater part of his life, believed to be the divine design for the Church The Decline of Logic The combined eVects of the Renaissance and the Reformation made the sixteenth century a barren one in most areas of philosophy Logic was perhaps the branch of philosophy that suVered most severely Logic did continue to be taught in the universities, but humanist scholars were impatient of it, regarding its terminology as barbarous and its complexities as pettifogging Rabelais spoke for them when in Pantagruel (1532) he mocked logicians for inquiring whether a chimera bombinating in a vacuum could devour second intentions Most of the advances in the subject that had been made by Stoic and medieval logicians were lost for four centuries Instead, a bowdlerized version of Aristotle was taught at an elementary level in popular textbooks In the mid-century these began to be published in vernacular languages The Wrst in English was Thomas Wilson’s The Rule of Reason, dedicated to Edward VI in 1551: he was the Wrst to use the English words that are now the common terms of logic, such as ‘proposition’ Others rejected such Latinisms and did their best to invent a solid Anglo-Saxon terminology Ralphe Lever thought that logic should be called ‘Witcraft’; and when he wanted to explain in his textbook that a contradictory proposition consisted of two propositions, one aYrmative and one negative, with similar subject, predicate and verb, he produced the following: ‘Gaynsaying shewsayes are two shewsayes, the one a yeasaye and the other a naysaye, changing neither foreset, backset nor verbe.’4 These English logic texts left little mark Matters were diVerent in France: Peter Ramus (Pierre de la Rame´e, 1515–72) achieved lasting fame W and M Kneale, The Development of Logic (1979), p 299 11