Introduction

Perhaps one of the last really obscure areas of medieval logic is contained in the scholastic work on ‘obligations’. We know something about the authors and the contents of scholastic treatises on obligations (De obligationibus), and we think that these treatises came to be a standard, perhaps even an important part of medieval logic; but we do not yet fully understand the nature of the material contained in them. We are unclear about the function and purpose of obligations and its significance for other parts of medieval logic; and we have only a sketchy notion of the rich and complicated development of obligations from its beginnings in the late twelfth or early thirteenth centuries to the end of the scholastic period. There are as many guesses about the purpose and function of obligations as there are scholars who have written on the subject: it has been described variously as anything from ingenious schoolboy exercises to primitive axiomatised logic. My own account of obligations will emerge in the course of this chapter.

Historical survey

Even in the twelfth century, there is some use of terminology associated with obligations in discussion of disputation, and in some treatises from this period either disputation or obligations themselves are connected with fallacies or sophismata. In the first half of the thirteenth century, in the work of the terminists, the investigation of fallacies tends to contain a long discussion of disputation, and one of the species of disputation discussed there has as its gold redargutio: the forced denial of something previously granted or the granting of something previously denied in one and the same disputation – very similar to the stated gold of obligations in, for example, Walter Burley.