Critics and artists (including performing artists) claim the title of 'interpreter' for themselves. Scientists do not so readily describe themselves in this way. But is the formulation of explanatory hypotheses in science so different from the interpretive work of artists? Making Sense recognizes that whenever interpretation occurs there may be a plurality of competing successful interpretations. It offers a philosophical theory that views the interpretive enterprise as an attempt to make sense of things by representing them in ways that can be accommodated within various...

The first full-length study of Robert Kilwardby's commentary on Aristotle's Prior Analytics, based on a study of the medieval manuscripts.

Aristotle's modal syllogistic has been an object of study ever since the time of Theophrastus; but these studies (apart from an intense flowering in the Middle Ages) have been somewhat desultory. Remarkably, in the 1990s several new lines of research have appeared, with series of original publications by Fred Johnson, Richard Patterson and Ulrich Nortmann. Johnson presented for the first time a formal semantics adequate to a de re reading of the apodeictic syllogistic; this was based on a simple intuition linking the modal syllogistic to Aristotelian metaphysics. Nortmann developed an...

Robert Kilwardby (d.1279) was an English scholar who lectured on logic and grammar at the University of Paris in the 1230s. His lectures earned him widespread fame in Europe. Throughout the thirteenth century and up to the sixteenth, Kilwardby's lectures on Aristotle's Prior Analytics were considered to contain the authoritative exposition of Aristotle's syllogistic logic. They were published at Venice in 1499.

Written in the heady atmosphere of the early 1200s, when long-forgotten Aristotelian works were being rediscovered, Kilwardby's commentary is the work of a penetrating...