Port-Royal Logic

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Port-Royal Logic, or Logique de Port-Royal, is the common name of La logique, ou l'art de penser, an important textbook on logic first published anonymously in 1662 by Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, two prominent members of the Jansenist movement, centered around Port-Royal. Blaise Pascal likely contributed considerable portions of the text.

Written in the vernacular, it became quite popular and was in use up to the twentieth century, introducing the reader to logic, and exhibiting strong Cartesian elements in its metaphysics and epistemology (Arnauld having been one of the main philosophers whose objections were published, with replies, in Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy). The Port-Royal Logic is sometimes cited as a paradigmatic example of traditional term logic.

The philosopher Louis Marin particularly studied it in the 20th century (La Critique du discours, Éditions de Minuit, 1975), while Michel Foucault considered it, in The Order of Things, one of the base of modern épistémè.

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