A warm welcome to Prof. Christopher Martin, University of Auckland, who is our 2013 CMS/PIMS Distinguished Visiting Scholar. Prof. Martin will be in Toronto from September to December. He has an international reputation as a historian of logic, especially for his groundbreaking work on Boethius and Abelard; and he is currently working with Peter King (CMS) on an edition of Abelard’s commentary on Porphyry’s Isagoge. Prof. Martin has been part of the team editing the works of Richard Rufus of Cornwall; he has worked extensively on the emergence of twelfth-century thought, including original manuscript research; he has written on topics as varied as the use of Avicenna’s ‘Flying Man’ argument in High Scholasticism, Peter John Olivi on knowing that one knows, the influence of John Major in the fifteenth century, and the nature of logical consequence. He has been a visiting fellow in philosophy at All Souls College (Oxford), a visiting professor at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, and most recently held a Leverhulme Visiting Professorship at the University of Cambridge.
During his time in Toronto, Prof. Martin will be available to students and present a lecture on November 1: “Flights of Fancy: Some Thirteenth-Century Discussions of the Certainty of Self-Knowledge”; Alumni Hall 400, 4pm.
He will also conduct two seminars on Abelard’s logic:
— Wednesday, October 16 “Inconvenient Consequences: Peter Abaelard’s Revolution in Logic and its Failure, Part I”; LI 310, 3-5pm
— Friday, October 25 “Inconvenient Consequences: Peter Abaelard’s Revolution in Logic and its Failure, Part II”; LI 310, 1-3pm