Logic, Rhetoric and Language

In this article Giles of Rome’s commentaries on Aristotle’s "Rhetoric" and on some of his logical works, such as the "Sophistici elenchi" and the "Posterior Analytics", together with some short treatises, will be presented in their broad outlines and discussed. These works comprise Giles’s contribution to the philosophy of language and, taken together, demonstrate both continuity with, as well as departures from the older tradition. For instance, while Aristotle’s logical works had a longer or shorter tradition of commentaries in the 12th- and 13th-century universities, his treatise on rhetoric was an almost unknown work when Giles decided to write a commentary on it. Therefore, while Giles could count, in the case of the "Sophistici elenchi" and the "Posterior Analytics", on some previous models and on a standard set of questions discussed with reference to those texts, he had almost no tools for confronting the difficult task of ex- plaining and discussing Aristotle’s "Rhetoric".