WILLIAM OF SHERWOOD

also Shyreswood, Shirewode

(fl. Oxford, thirteenth century), logic.

William was active as a master of logic at a time when that subject was making remarkable progress. He probably was born in Nottinghamshire between 1200 and 1210 and is most likely to have studied at Oxford or Paris, or both. His only extant works are treatises on logic explicitly attributed to him in the manuscripts: the Introductio in logicam, a compendium of Aristotelian-Boethian logic together with the main topics of terminist logic; and Syncategoremata, a more advanced treatise on the semantic and logical properties of syncategorematic words (words that have special logicalsemantic effects on subjects, predicates, or their combinations). The Paris manuscript B.N. Lat. 16.617 contains, besides the works mentioned above, four logical treatises, three of which may in all probability be ascribed to William: the first of two treatises entitled De insolubilibus (works dealing with the paradoxes of self-reference, as in the Proposition “What I am saying now is false”); De obligationibus, a work on the rules to be observed in formal disputations (its authenticity is certain); and Petitioner contrariorum, on the solution of logical puzzles, called sophismata in medieval usage, that arise from hidden ambiguity in the premises of an inference. The last three works have not been printed so far.

William’s teaching at the University of Paris is uncertain and cannot be deduced, as is usually done, from any influence on Paris logicians and metaphysicians, since such influence cannot be shown. It is certain, however, that he was an active master at Oxford sometime before 27 January 1249, when his name is found in a deed. He certainly was there during the great disturbance between the northern and the Irish scholars. William was treasurer of the cathedral church of Lincoln at least from about 1256 to 1265. He is mentioned as rector of Aylesbury, in Buckinghamshire, in October 1266 and of Attleborough, Norfolk. He must have died sometime between 1266 and 1271.

As a writer of a compendium on logic, William can be compared with two other authors of such works, Peter of Spain (ca. 1205–1277) and Lambert of Auxerre, who wrote his compendium between 1253 and 1257. Accurate investigations have shown that they worked quite independently of each other; the dissimilarities are numerous, and the resemblances can be explained by the authors’ sharing a common tradition of logical teaching.

William’s compendium, unlike that by Peter of Spain, was not very influential in later times. His impact on his contemporaries can be deduced only from a passage in Roger Bacon’s Opus tertium (1267), in which William is described as “one of the famous wise men in Christendom” who was “much wiser than Albert the Great in what is called philosophia communis” (logic); Bacon even calls him the greatest logician. Elsewhere (Compendium studii philosophie, written in 1271 or 1272) Bacon mentions William as one of the wise and solid philosophers and theologians of the older generation. His evaluation of William as a first-rate logician is the more remarkable since his opinion of contemporary philosophers tended to be disdainful. The importance of William’s work in the development of logic has not yet been fully investigated.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. The Introductiones in logicam was edited by M. Grabmann as Sitzungsberichte der Bayerischen Akademic der Wissenschaften zu München,Phil.-hist. Ant. (1937), no. 10 (unreliable), and was translated by Norman Kretzmann as William of Sherwood’s Introduction to Logic (Minneapolis, 1968), with introd. and notes. The Syncategoremata was edited by J.R.O.’Donnell, in Mediaeval Studies,3 (1941), 46–93.

II. Secondary Literature. kretzmann’s introd. to his trans. is fundamental for evidence on William’s career. On William as a logician, see the work of Kretzmann and also L.M. de Rijk, Logica modernorum, II, The Origin and Early Development of the Theory of Supposition, (Assen, Netherlands, 1967), 567–591; and “The Development of Suppositio naturalis in Mediaeval Logic, I: Natural Supposition as Non-Contextual Supposition,” in Vivarium,9 (1971), 71–107.

L. M. De Rijk