A Note on the Title of Walter Burley' s On the Purity of the Art of Logic

Abstract

Philotheus Boehner suggested in 1955 that the puzzling title of Walter Burley's treatise "On the Purity of the Art of Logic" was an indication of Burley's intention to rid logic of what he regarded as Ockhamist contaminations. A closer look, however, shows that this conjecture cannot be right. We argue that Burley's title is simply an allusion to a phrase in Avicenna, and go on to explain why this explanation was not realized before.