Dialectical Disputations

The Dialectical Disputations, translated here for the first time into any modern language, is Valla's principal contribution to the philosophy of language and logic. Valla sought to replace the scholastic tradition of Aristotelian logic with a new logic based on the historical usage of classical Latin and on a commonsense approach.

Valla's goal was to provide a logic that could be used by lawyers, preachers, statesmen, and others who needed to succeed in public debate--one that was both stylistically correct and rhetorically elegant, and thus could dispense with the technical language of the scholastics, a "tribe of Peripatetics, perverters of natural meanings." Valla's reformed dialectic became a milestone in the development of humanist logic and contained startling anticipations of certain modern theories of semantics and language.