Abstract
The best efforts of some of the best historians of logic have failed to find a clear source in material inherited from the ancient world for the earliest mediaeval discussions of the Liar paradox.1 The obvious candidates, and most importantly Aristotle’s reference to the puzzles of oath-breakers and liars in the Sophistical Refutations,seem to have been of little importance in the first theorising about insolubilia.2 Despite this I would like to suggest that there was at least a very distant cause in late antique logic for the appearance of the Liar and its relatives in the twelfth century. It cannot be emphasised enough, however, that twelfth century logicians devised the paradoxes for themselves and that their solutions were all their own work.
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Martin, C.J. (2001). Obligations and Liars. In: Yrjönsuuri, M. (eds) Medieval Formal Logic. The New Synthese Historical Library, vol 49. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9713-5_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9713-5_3
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