Privative Negation in The Port Royal Logic

Review of Symbolic Logic, 23 pp., in press

Abstract

In this paper I argue that negation in The Port Royal Logic is not a failed or incoherent approximation of Boolean complementation as maintained by Sylvain Auroux and Marc Dominicy, but is rather a version of privative negation from medieval logic, and that as such it has a perfectly coherent semantics. The discussion reviews the critiques of Auroux and Domincy as well as the semantics of privative negation as found in Aristotle, Proclus, Ockham, Buridan, Descartes, and Arnauld