Food Ethics in the Middle Ages

Abstract

This chapter looks at what kind of foods medieval people ate and what impact on their habits religion had. It then looks closer at what they said about animals as food, but also looks at perhaps the most important aspect of medieval food ethics, namely, the moral aspect of eating itself. This is foremost governed by the virtue of fasting and the vice, or even deadly sin, of gluttony.

Boolean considerations on John Buridan's octagons of opposition

“…After all, maybe there are objects that do not actually exist, yet possibly have the property S. However, it has been a matter of some scholarly controversy whether Buridan admitted such bare possibilia (cf. Lagerlund 2000, p. 160, Read 2015a, and I will not delve into it further in the present paper. 6 Buridan goes on to determine the Aristotelian relations holding between these eight de re modal propositions, and finds that 'we have ten subalternations, five contrarieties, five subcontrarieties, four contradictions, and four disparities, which obey no law [of opposition].…”

“…'every donkey of every man runs'). Of these three diagrams, the modal octagon has received by far the most attention in the contemporary literature (Hughes 1987, Lagerlund 2000, 2011, Campos-Benítez 2012, Read 2015b, Johnston 2017, although there has also been some work on the octagon for the propositions of unusual construction (Campos-Benítez 2014 ). Furthermore, Read 2012 discusses all three octagons simultaneously.…”

Modality and folk psychology

“…This part of the logical science does not include the new approaches like possible worlds semantics. Syllogisms as forms of thinking were criticized [11] even by logicians themselves both in psychologistic and formalistic way. Psychological experiments show that syllogisms are not always appropriate in the human thinking, people do not think in this way; even more formal logicians themselves use methods that are far from the reasoning by these rules.…”