Logicae artis compendium

Oxford: Leon, Lichfield, 1680. Ninth ed. Woodcut diagrams, headpiece, and initials. Contemporary calf, spine rubbed, otherwise a very nice copy. From the library of Thomas Smith, with his manuscript annotations on the title and last page. Ninth edition of Sanderson’s excellent textbook of logic, one of the most important tools used by seventeenth-century Cambridge and Oxford students (including John Locke). First published in 1615, it enjoyed at least ten editions during the seventeenth century. Divided into three parts, the first contains a discussion on predicables and the ten Aristotelian categories; the second part treats propositions, especially concerned with the medieval notions of supposition, ampliation, restriction and exponible propositions; and the third is a discourse on the nature of arguments. This work, the result of lectures Sanderson gave at Lincoln College, remained popular as a standard treatise on the subject even after the appearance of the influential Port-Royal Logic.

Sanderson (1587-1662) was an English theologian. He became a fellow of Lincoln College in Oxford in 1600 and reader in Logic. He was also Bishop of Lincoln. In her introduction to the 1985 facsimile edition E. J. Ashworth writes that “The young Isaac Newton studied Sanderson’s logic at Cambridge.