## 1. Life and Works



Valla did not have an easy life. Equipped with a sharp and polemical
mind, an even sharper pen and a sense of self-importance verging on
the pathological, he made many enemies throughout his life. Born in
Rome in (most likely) 1406 to a family with ties to the papal curia,
Valla as a young man was already in close contact with some major
humanists working as papal secretaries such as Leonardo Bruni
(1370-1444) and Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459). Another
was his uncle Melchior Scrivani, whom Valla had hoped to succeed after
his death; but opposition from Poggio and Antonio Loschi
(1365/8-1441) must have led the pope to refuse to employ him.
Valla had criticized an elegy by Loschi, and had also boldly favored
Quintilian over Cicero in a treatise which has long considered to be
lost; but a lengthy anonymous prefatory letter has recently been found
and ascribed, convincingly, to the young Valla (Pagliaroli 2008; it
turns out not to be a comparison between Cicero's theory of
rhetoric and Quintilian's handbook, as scholars have always
assumed, but a comparison between a declamation of Ps-Quintilian,
*Gladiator*--the declamations were considered to be the
work of Quintilian in Valla's time--and one of
Cicero's orations, *Pro Ligario*.) Valla's Roman
experience of humanist conversations found an outlet in his dialogue
*De voluptate* (*On Pleasure*), in which the Christian
concepts of charity and beatitude are identified with hedonist
pleasure, while the "Stoic" concept of virtue is rejected
(see below). Valla would later revise the dialogue and change the
names of the interlocutors, but his Epicurean-Christian position
remained the same.



Meanwhile he had moved to Pavia in 1431, stimulated by his friend
Panormita (Antonio Beccadelli, 1394-1471)--with whom he was
soon to quarrel--and had begun to teach rhetoric. He had to flee
Pavia, however, in 1433 after having aroused the anger of the jurists.
In a letter to a humanist jurist friend of his, Catone Sacco
(1394-1463), Valla had attacked the language of one of the
lawyers' main authorities, Bartolus of Sassoferrato
(1313-1357). After some travelling, in 1435 Valla found
employment at the court of Alfonso of Aragon (1396-1458), who
was trying to capture Naples. Though complaining about the lack of
time, books and fellow humanists, Valla was immensely productive in
this phase of his career. In 1439 he finished the first version of his
critique of scholastic philosophy. Two years later he finished his
*Elegantiae linguae Latinae*, a manual for the correct use of
Latin syntax and vocabulary, which became a bestseller throughout
Europe. As a humanist in the court of a king who was fighting against
the pope, Valla demonstrated that the Donation of Constantine, which
had served the papacy to claim worldly power, was a forgery. In the
same years he composed a dialogue on free will and began working on
his annotations to the standard Latin translation of the Bible,
comparing it with the Greek text of the New Testament. He also wrote a
dialogue *On the Profession of the Religious* (*De
professione religiosorum*), in which he attacked the vow of
obedience and asceticism taken by members of religious orders.
Further, he worked on the text of Livy, wrote a history of the deeds
of Alfonso's father, and began re-reading and annotating
Quintilian's *Institutio oratoria* (*Education of the
Orator*) in a manuscript which is still extant (Paris,
Bibliotheque Nationale de France, lat. 7723). But Valla's
philological approach and his penchant for quarreling made him enemies
at the Aragonese court. After his patron Alfonso had made peace with
the pope in 1443, Valla's role as an anti-papal polemicist may
have shrunk. His enemies took advantage of the situation. The
immediate occasion was Valla's denial of the apostolic origin of
the *Symbolum Apostolicum* (Apostle's Creed). In a
letter, now lost, to the Neapolitan lawyers he argued that a passage
from Gratian's *Decretum* that formed the basis of the
belief in the apostolic origin of the Creed was corrupt and needed
emendation. Powerful men at the court staged an inquisitorial trial to
determine whether Valla's works contained heretical and
heterodox opinions. In preparation for the trial Valla wrote a
self-defense (and later an "Apology"), but was rescued
from this perilous situation by the intervention of the king. The
whole affair must have fuelled Valla's wish to return to Rome.
In 1447 he made peace with the pope and became an apostolic
*scriptor* (scribe), and later, in 1455, a papal secretary. In
these years he revised some of his earlier works such as the
*Repastinatio* and his notes on the New Testament, and
translated Thucydides and Herodotus into Latin; his work on
Thucydides, in particular, was to have an important impact on the
study of this difficult Greek author. Always an irascible man, he
continued to engage in quarrels and exchanged a series of invectives
with his arch-enemy Poggio. He died in 1457, still working on a second
revision of his *Dialectics* (that is, the third version). He
was buried in the Lateran, where his grave was removed in the
sixteenth century, probably between the 1560s and 1580s at a time when
his works were put on the Index; the present memorial is not Valla's
tombstone.



Valla's impact on the humanist movement was long-lasting and
varied. His philological approach was developed by subsequent
generations of humanists, and found, arguably, its first systematic
expression in the work of Angelo Poliziano (1454-1494). His
*Elegantiae* was printed many times, either in the original or
in one of its many adaptations and abridgments made by later scholars.
A copy of his annotations on the New Testament was found near Louvain
by Erasmus (1467?-1534), who published it. Though many
theologians complained about his ignorance of theology, Luther and
Leibniz, each for his own reasons, found occasion to refer to
Valla's dialogue on free will. Humanists found Valla's
criticisms of Aristotelian-scholastic thought congenial, though not a
few regarded his style as too aggressive and polemical. And though
some humanists such as Juan Luis Vives (1492-1540) and Johann
Eck (1486-1543) complained about Valla's lack of
philosophical acumen, his critique of scholasticism has a place in the
long transformation from medieval to modern thought--in which
humanism played an important though by no means exclusive role.


## 2. Valla's Critique of Scholastic Philosophy



In his *Repastinatio dialectice et philosophie*, which is
extant in three versions with slightly different titles, Valla attacks
what he sees as the foundations of scholastic-Aristotelian philosophy
and sets out to transform Aristotelian dialectic. As the title of the
first version clearly indicates, he wants to "re-plough"
the ground traditionally covered by the Aristotelian scholastics. The
term *repastinatio* means not only "re-ploughing"
or "re-tilling" but also "cutting back" and
"weeding out." Valla desires to weed out everything he
regards as barren and infertile in scholastic thought and to
re-cultivate the ground by sprinkling it with the fertile waters of
rhetoric and grammar. His use of *repastinatio* indicates that
he is setting out a program of reform rather than of destruction, in
spite of his often aggressive and polemical tone. Book I is devoted
mainly to metaphysics, but also contains chapters on natural
philosophy and moral philosophy, as well a controversial chapter on
the Trinity. In Books II and III Valla discusses propositions and
forms of argumentation such as the syllogism.



His main concern in the first book is to simplify the
Aristotelian-scholastic apparatus. For Valla, the world consists of
things, simply called *res*. Things have qualities and do or
undergo things (which he refers to as "things"). Hence,
there are three basic categories: substance, quality, and action. At
the back of Valla's mind are the grammatical categories of noun,
adjective, and verb; but in many places he points out that we cannot
assume that, for instance, an adjective always refer to a quality or a
verb to an action (*Repastinatio*, 1:134-156;
425-442; *DD* 1:240-80). These three categories are the
only ones Valla admits; the other Aristotelian categories of accidents
such as place, time, relation and quantity can all be reduced to
quality or action. Here, too, grammar plays a leading role in
Valla's thought. From a grammatical point of view, qualities
such as being a father, being in the classroom, or being six-feet tall
all tell us something about how a particular man is qualified; and
there is, consequently, no need to preserve the other Aristotelian
categories.



In reducing the categories to his triad of substance, quality, and
action, Valla does not seem to have in mind "realist"
philosophers who accepted the independent existence of entities such
as relations and quantities over and above individual things. Instead,
his aim is to show that many terms traditionally placed in other
categories, in fact, point to qualities or actions: linguistic usage
(*loquendi* *consuetudo*) teaches us, for example, that
quality is the overarching category. Thus, to the question "of
what kind", we often give answers containing quantitative
expressions. Take, for instance, the question: what sort of horse
should I buy? It may be answered: erect, tall, with a broad chest, and
so on. Valla's reduction of the categories often assumes the
form of grammatical surveys of certain groups of words associated with
a particular category: thus, in his discussion of time, he studies
words like "day," "year," and a host of
others; and his discussion of quantitative words treats mathematical
terms such as line, point and circle. Of course, Valla does not deny
that we can speak of quantity or time or place. But the rich array of
Latin terms signify, in the final analysis, the qualities or actions
of things, and nothing exists apart from concrete things. (Substance
is a shady category for Valla, who says that he cannot give an example
of it, much as Locke was later to maintain that "a substance is
something I know not what").



It is tempting to connect this lean ontology to that of William of
Ockham (c. 1287-1347). The interests, approach and arguments of
the two thinkers, however, differ considerably. Unlike Valla, Ockham
does not want to get rid of the system of categories. As long as one
realizes, Ockham says, that categories do not describe things in the
world but categorize *terms* by which we signify real
substances or real inhering qualities in different ways, the
categories can be maintained and the specific features of, for
example, relational or quantitative terms can be explored. Thus,
Ockham's rejection of a realist interpretation of the categories
is accompanied by a wish to *defend* the categories as distinct
groups of terms. Valla, on the other hand, sees the categories as
summing up the real aspects of things: hence, there are only
substances, qualities, and actions, and his reductive program consists
in showing that we have a vast and rich vocabulary in Latin that we
can use for referring to these things. His questions about words and
classes of words are not unlike those of Priscian (fl. 500-530)
and other grammarians. (Priscian, for instance, had stated that a noun
signifies substance plus quality, and pronouns substance without
quality.)



Another good example of Valla's reduction of scholastic
terminology, distinctions, and concepts is his critique of the
transcendental terms (*Repastinatio* 1:11-21; *DD*
1:18-36). According to Valla, the traditional six
terms--"being," "thing,"
"something," "one," "true," and
"good"--should be reduced to "thing"
(Latin *res*) since everything that exists, including a quality
or an action of a thing (also called a "thing") is a
thing. A good thing, for example, is a thing, and so, too, is a true
thing. From a grammatical point of view, such terms as
"good" and "true" are adjectives, and when
used as substantives (the good, the one), they refer to qualities;
hence, there is nothing "transcendental" about them.
Valla's grammatical approach is evident in his rejection of the
scholastic term *ens*. Just as "running"
(*currens*) can be resolved into "he who runs"
(*is qui currit*), so "being" (*ens*) can be
resolved into "that which is" (*id quod est*).
"That," however, is nothing other than "that
thing" (*ea* *res*); so we get as a result the
laborious formula: "that thing which is".
(*Repastinatio* 1:14; *DD* 1:23-25.) We do not, however,
need the phrase "that which is" (*ea que est*):
"a stone is a being" (*lapis est ens*), or the
equivalent phrase into which it can be resolved, "a stone is a
thing which is" (*lapis est res que est*), are unclear,
awkward, and absurd ways of saying simply that "a stone is a
thing" (*lapis est res*). Valla also rejects other
scholastic terms such as *entitas* ("entity"),
*hecceitas* ("this-ness") and *quidditas*
("quidity") for grammatical reasons: these terms do not
conform to the rules of word formation in Latin. While he is not
against the introduction of new words for things unknown in antiquity
(e.g., *bombarda* for "cannonball"), the
terminology coined by the scholastics is a different matter
entirely.



Related to this analysis is Valla's repudiation of what he
presents as the scholastic view of the distinction between abstract
and concrete terms, that is, the view that abstract terms
("whiteness," "fatherhood") always refer
solely to quality, while concrete terms ("white,"
"father") refer to both substance and quality
(*Repastinatio*, 1:21-30; *DD* 1:36-54). In a
careful discussion of this distinction, taking into account the
grammatical categories of case, number, and gender, Valla rejects the
ontological commitments which such a view seems to imply, and shows,
on the basis of a host of examples drawn from classical Latin usage,
that abstract terms often have the same meaning as their concrete
counterparts (useful/utility, true/truth, honest/honesty). These terms
refer to the concrete thing itself, that is, to the substance, its
quality or action (or a combination of these three components into
which a thing can be resolved). Again, Valla's main concern is
to study the workings of language and how these relate to the world of
everyday things, the world that we see and experience.



In describing and analyzing this world of things Valla is not only
guided by grammatical considerations. He also uses "common
sense" and the limits of our imagination as yardsticks against
which to measure scholastic notions and definitions. He thus thinks
that it is ridiculous to imagine prime matter without any form or form
without any matter, or to define a line as that which has no width and
a point as an indivisible quantity that occupies no space.
Valla's idea is that notions such as divisibility and quantity
are properly at home only in the world of ordinary things. For him,
there is only the world of bodies with actual shapes and dimensions;
lines and points are parts of these things, but only, as he seems to
suggest, in a derivative sense, in other words, as places or spaces
that are filled by the body or parts of that body. If we want to
measure or sketch a (part of a) body, we can select two spots on it
and measure the length between them by drawing points and lines on
paper or in our mind, a process through which these points and lines
become visible and divisible parts of our world
(*Repastinatio*, 1:142-147; 2:427-431; *DD*
254-64). But it would be wrong to abstract from this diagramming
function and infer a world of points and lines with their own
particular quantity. They are merely aids for measuring or outlining
bodies. In modern parlance, Valla seems to be saying that ontological
questions about these entities--do they exist? how do they
exist?--amount to category mistakes, equivalent to asking the
color of virtue.



The appeal to common sense (or what Valla considers as such) informs
his critique of Aristotelian natural philosophy. He insists on
commonplace observations and experiences as criteria for testing ideas
and hypotheses. On this basis, many of Aristotle's contentions,
so Valla argues, are not true to the facts (*Repastinatio*,
1:98-112; *DD* 1:174-99). He rejects or qualifies a
number of fundamental tenets of Aristotelian physics, for instance
that movement is the cause of heat, that a movement is always caused
by another movement, that elements can be transformed into one
another, that each has its own proper qualities (heat and dryness for
fire, heat and humidity for air, etc.), that there are pure elements,
that the combination of heat and humidity is a sufficient condition
for the generation of life, and so forth. Valla often uses
*reductio ad absurdum* as an argumentative strategy: if
Aristotle's theory is true, one would expect to observe
phenomena quite different from the ones we do, in fact, observe. In
arguing, for instance, for the existence of a fiery sphere below the
moon, Aristotle had claimed that "leaden missiles shot out by
force melt in the air" (*De caelo* II.7,
289a26-28). Valla rejects this claim by appealing to ordinary
experience: we never see balls--whether leaden, iron, or stone,
shot out of a sling or a cannon--heat up in the air; nor do the
feathers of arrows catch fire. If movement is sufficient to produce
heat, the spheres would set the air beneath in motion; but no one has
ever observed this. Arguably, the importance of Valla's polemic
here is not so much the quality of his arguments as the critical
tendency they reveal, the awareness that Aristotle's conclusions
often do not conform to daily experience. While he does not develop
his critique in the direction of an alternative natural philosophy as
later Renaissance philosophers such as Bernardino Telesio
(1509-1588) and Francesco Patrizi of Cherso (1529-1597)
would do, Valla contributed to undermining faith in the exclusive
validity of the Aristotelian paradigm.



Valla also criticizes Aristotle's natural philosophy because,
according to him, it detracts from God's power. In strongly
polemical terms, he attacks Aristotle for his
"polytheistic" ideas and for what Valla sees as his
equation of God with nature (*Repastinatio*, 1:54-59;
*DD* 1:94-103). Valla wants to reinstate God as the sole
creator of heaven and earth. To think of the cosmos in terms of a
living animal or the heavens in terms of celestial orbs moved by
intelligences is anathema to Valla (as it was to many medieval
scholastics as well). The notion of God as First Mover is also
rejected, since movement and rest are terms which should not be
applied (except perhaps metaphorically) to spiritual beings such as
God, angels, and souls.



Religious considerations also led Valla to find fault with another
fundamental tenet of Aristotelian scholastic thought: the Tree of
Porphyry (*Repastinatio*, 1:46-50; 2:389-391;
*DD* 1:82-88). Valla has several problems with the Tree. First
of all, it puts substance, rather than thing, on top. For Valla,
however, pure substance does not exist, since a thing is always
already a qualified substance. He also thinks that there is no place
for a human being in the Tree of Porphyry. Since the Tree divides
substance into the corporeal and the spiritual, it is difficult to
find a place for a human being, consisting of both soul and body.
Moreover, the Tree covers both the divine and the created order, which
leads to inappropriate descriptions of God and angels, to which the
term "animal" should not be applied, since they do not
have a body. Valla, therefore, divides Porphyry's Tree into
three different trees: one for spiritual substance, one for corporeal
substance, and one for what he calls "animal," that is,
those creatures which consist of both body and soul
(*Repastinatio*, 1:49-50; 2:422-424; *DD*
1:88). One might argue that what Valla gains over Porphyry by
disentangling the supernatural from the natural order, he loses by
having to admit that he cannot place Christ in any of his three trees,
since he is not only human but also God.



The soul as an incorporeal substance is treated by Valla in a separate
chapter (*Repastinatio*, 1:59-73; 2:408-410;
418-419; *DD* 1:104-29). Rejecting the Aristotelian
hylomorphic account, he returns to an Augustinian picture of the soul
as a wholly spiritual and immaterial substance made in the image of
God, and consisting of memory, intellect, and will. He rejects without
much discussion the various functions of the soul (vegetative,
sensitive, imaginative, intellectual), which would entail, he thinks,
a plurality of souls. He briefly treats the five exterior senses but
is not inclined to deal with the physiological aspects of sensation.
The term "species" (whether sensible or intelligible) does
not occur at all. The Aristotelian *sensus
communis*--which the medieval commentary tradition on
*De* *anima* had viewed as one of the internal senses,
alongside imagination (sometimes distinguished from
*phantasia*), memory, and the *vis aestimativa*
(foresight and prudence)--is mentioned only to be rejected
without further argument (*Repastinatio*, 1:73; *DD*
1:128). Imagination and the *vis aestimativa* are absent from
Valla's account, while memory, as the soul's principal
capacity, appears to have absorbed all the functions which scholastics
had divided among separate faculties of the sensitive soul. What may
have provoked Valla's anger about the traditional picture is the
seemingly passive role allotted to the soul in perception and
knowledge: it seems to come only at the very end of a long chain of
transmission, which starts with outer objects and concludes with a
merely receptive *tabula rasa*. In his view, the soul is far
more noble than the hylomorphic account of Aristotle implies, at least
as Valla understands that account. He therefore stresses on various
occasions the soul's dignified nature, its immortality, unity,
autonomy, and superiority to both the body and the animal soul,
comparing it to the sun's central place in the cosmos.


## 3. Valla's "Reform" of Aristotelian Logic



After Valla's attack on what he calls the *fundamenta*
(foundations) of Aristotelian-scholastic metaphysics and natural
philosophy, he turns to dialectic in Books II and III of his
*Repastinatio*. For Valla, argumentation should be approached
from an oratorical rather than a logical point of view. What counts is
whether an argument *works*, which means whether it convinces
one's adversary or public. The form of the argument is less
important. Dialectic is a species of confirmation and refutation; and,
as such, it is merely a component of invention, one of the five parts
of rhetoric (*Repastinatio*, 1:175; 2:447; *DD* 2:3).
Compared to rhetoric, dialectic is an easy subject and does not
require much time to master, since it considers and uses only the
syllogism "bare", as Valla puts it, that is, in isolation
from its wider argumentative context; its sole aim is to teach. The
rhetorician, on the other hand, uses not only the syllogism, but also
the enthymeme (incomplete syllogism), epicheireme (a kind of extended
reasoning) and example. The orator has to clothe everything in
persuasive arguments, since his task is not only to teach but also to
please and to move. This leads Valla to downplay the importance of the
Aristotelian syllogism and to consider forms of argumentation that are
not easily forced into its straightjacket. Among these are captious
forms of reasoning such as the dilemma, paradox, and heap argument
(*sorites*), and Valla offers an interesting analysis of these
forms in the last book of the *Repastinatio*.



Without rejecting the syllogism *tout court*, Valla is scathing
about its usefulness. He regards it as an artificial type of
reasoning, unfit to be employed by orators since it is does not
reflect the natural way of speaking and arguing. What is the use, for
example, of concluding that Socrates is an animal if one has already
stated that every man is an animal and that Socrates is a man? It is a
simple, puerile, and pedantic affair, hardly amounting to a real
*ars* (art). Valla's treatment of the syllogism clearly
shows his oratorical perspective. Following Quintilian, he stresses
that the nature of syllogistic reasoning is to establish proof. One of
the two premises contains what is to be proven (*que
probatur*), and the other offers the proof (*que probat*),
while the conclusion gives the result of the proof--into which
the proof "goes down" (*in quam probatio
descendit*). It is not always necessary, therefore, to have a
fixed order (major, minor, conclusion). If it suits the occasion
better, we can just as well begin with the minor, or even with the
conclusion. The order is merely a matter of convention and custom
(*Repastinatio*, 1:282-286; 2:531-534; *DD*
2:216-39).



These complaints about the artificiality of the syllogism inform
Valla's discussion of the three figures of the syllogism.
Aristotle had proven the validity of the moods of Figure 2 and 3 by
converting them to four moods of Figure 1; and this was taught, for
example, by Peter of Spain (thirteenth century) in his widely read
handbook on logic, the *Summulae logicales*, certainly
consulted by Valla here. Valla regards this whole business of
converting terms and transposing propositions in order to reduce a
particular syllogism to one of these four moods of Figure 1 as useless
and absurd. While he does not question the validity of these four
moods, he believes that there are many deviant syllogisms that are
also valid, for instance: God is in every place; Tartarus is a place;
therefore, God is in Tartarus. Here the "every" or
"all" sign is added to the predicate in the major
proposition. He says, moreover, that an entirely singular syllogism
can be valid: Homer is the greatest of poets; this man is the greatest
of poets; therefore, this man is Homer. And he gives many other
examples of such deviant schemes. Valla thus deliberately ignores the
criteria employed by Aristotle and his commentators--that at
least one premise must be universal, and at least one premise must be
affirmative, and that if the conclusion is to be negative, one premise
must be negative--or, at any rate, he thinks that they
unnecessarily restrict the number of possible valid figures.



In his discussion of the syllogism Valla does not refer to an
important principle employed by Aristotle and his commentators:
*dici de omni et nullo* (to be said/predicated about all and
about none). To quote Peter of Spain's *Summulae
logicales*: "*To be said of every* [*dici de
omni*] is when there is nothing to to be taken under the subject
[*nichil est sumere sub subiecto*] of which the predicate may
not be said, like 'every man runs': here, running is said
of every man, and under man there is nothing to to be taken of which
running is not said. *To be said of none* [*de nullo*]
is when there is nothing to be taken under the subject from which the
predicate may not be eliminated, like 'no man runs': here,
running is eliminated from any man at all [*quolibet
homine*]" (ed. L. M. de Rijk 1972, 43; ed. Copenhaver et
al., 2014, 170). This principle led Aristotle to conclude that only
four moods of the first figure were immediately valid. That Valla does
not make use of this fundamental condition is understandable from his
oratorical point of view, since it would be an uninteresting or even
irrelevant criterion of validity. It is therefore not surprising that
he thinks that we might as well "reduce" the first figure
to the second rather than vice versa. Likewise, from his oratorical
point of view, he can only treat the third figure of the syllogism
with contempt: it is a "completely foolish" form of
reasoning; no one reasons as follows: every man is a substance; every
man is an animal; therefore, some animal is a substance. In a similar
vein, he rejects the use of letters in the study of syllogisms
(*Repastinatio*, 1:297-300; 2:546-548; *DD*
2:264-71).



Valla's insistence on examining and assessing arguments in terms
of persuasion and usefulness leads him to criticize not only the
syllogism but also other less formal modes of argumentation. These
modes usually involve interrogation, resulting in an unexpected or
unwanted conclusion or an aporetic situation. Some scholars have
regarded Valla's interest in these less formal or non-formal
arguments as an expression of a skeptical attitude towards the
possibility of certainty in knowledge in general. Others have raised
serious doubts about this interpretation. What we can say for sure,
however, is that Valla was one of the first to study and analyze the
heap argument, dilemma, and suchlike. The heap argument is supposed to
induce doubts about the possibility of determining precise limits,
especially to quantities. If I subtract one grain from a heap, is it
still a heap? Of course. What if I subtract two grains? And so forth,
until the heap consists of just one grain, which, to be sure, is an
unacceptable conclusion. It seems impossible to determine the exact
moment when the heap ceases to be a heap, and any attempt to determine
this moment seems to involve an ad hoc decision, for a heap does not
cease to be a heap due to the subtraction of just one single grain.
Valla discusses a number of similar cases, and comments on their
fallacious nature.



Dilemma, too, receives extensive treatment from him. This type of
argument had been widely studied in antiquity. The basic structure is
a disjunction of propositions, usually in the form of a double
question in an interrogation, which sets a trap for the respondent,
since whichever horn of the dilemma he chooses, he seems to be caught
up in a contradiction and will lose the debate ("If he is
modest, why should you accuse someone who is a good man? If he is bad,
why should you accuse someone who is unconcerned by such a
charge?", Cicero, *De inventione* 1.45.83, cited by Valla
*Repastinatio*, 1:321; *DD* 2:332). It was also
recognized that the respondent could often counter the dilemma by
duplicating the original argument and "turning it back"
(*convertere*) on the interrogator, using it as a kind of
boomerang ("if he is modest, you should accuse him because he
will be concerned by such a charge; if he is bad, you should also
accuse him because he is not a good man"). Alternatively, he
could escape the dilemma by questioning the disjunction and showing
that there is a third possibility. There were many variations of this
simple scheme, and it was studied from a logical as well as a
rhetorical point of view with considerable overlap between these two
perspectives.



In medieval times, dilemma does not seem to have attracted much
theoretical reflection, though there was an extensive literature on
related genres such as *insolubilia* and paradoxes, which were
generally treated in a logical manner. It is, therefore, interesting
to see Valla discussing a whole range of examples of dilemma. The
rhetoric textbook by the Byzantine emigre George of
Trebizond (1396-1486), composed about 1433, was probably an
important source for him. This work might also have led Valla to
explore the relevant places in Quintilian, Cicero, the Greek text of
Aristotle's *Rhetoric* and perhaps other Greek sources.
The example Valla discusses most extensively comes from Aulus Gellius
and concerns a lawsuit between Protagoras and his pupil Euathlus
(*Repastinatio*, 1:312-319; 2:562-568; *DD*
2:312-28. Aulus Gellius, *Noctes Atticae,* 5.10.5-16).
The pupil has promised to pay the second installment of the fees as
soon as he has won his first case. He refuses to undertake any cases,
however, and Protagoras takes him to court, putting the case in the
form of a dilemma. If Euathlus loses the case, he will have to pay the
rest of the fee, on account of the verdict of the judges; but if
Euathlus wins, he will also have to pay, this time on account of his
agreement with Protagoras. Euathlus, however, cleverly converts the
argument: in neither case will he have to pay, on account of the
court's decision (if he wins), or on account of the agreement
with Protagoras (if he loses). Aulus Gellius thinks that the judges
should have refrained from passing judgment because any decision would
be inconsistent with itself. But Valla rejects such a rebuttal
(*antistrephon* or *conversio*) of the dilemma and
thinks that a response may be formulated as long as one concentrates
on the relevant aspects of the case. He carefully considers the
perspectives of all parties, the words employed, the feelings of the
judges, and all the circumstances of the case. In a highly rhetorical
analysis of the case in which Valla makes speeches on behalf of
Protagoras, Valla says in the end that Euathlus cannot have it both
ways and must choose one or the other alternative, not both: he must
comply either with his agreement with Protagoras (and pay the rest of
the fees) or with the verdict passed by the judges. If he loses the
case, a refusal to obey the sentence of the judges shows contempt; if
he wins the case, he has to pay the rest of the fee to Protagoras. At
any rate, there is no reason for the judges to despair; Aulus Gellius
is, therefore, wrong in thinking that they should have refrained
from passing a judgment. In all such cases, Valla argues, the
conversion is not a rebuttal, but at best a correction of the initial
argument (a correction, however, is not a refutation), and at worst a
simple repetition or illegitimate shift of the initial position.



An important way of seeing through deceptive arguments is to consider
the weight of words carefully, and Valla gives some further examples
of fallacies which can easily be refuted by examining the meaning and
usage of words and the contexts in which they occur
(*Repastinatio*, 1:320-334; 2:568-578; *DD*
2:328-69). He considers the fallacies "collected by Aristotle in
his *Sophistical Refutations* as for the most part a puerile
art," quoting the *Rhetorica ad Herennium* (2.11.16) to
the effect that "knowledge of ambiguities as taught by
dialecticians is of no help at all but rather a most serious
hindrance." Valla is not interested in providing a comprehensive
list of deceptive arguments and errors or in studying rules for
resolving them. He does not mention, for example, the basic division
between linguistic (*in dictione*) and extra-linguistic
(*extra dictionem*) fallacies. In a letter to a friend, Valla
lists some "dialecticians"--Albert of Saxony (c.
1316-1390), Albert the Great (c. 1220-1280), Ralph Strode
(fl. 1350-1400), William of Ockham, and Paul of Venice (c.
1369-1429) --but there is no sign that he had done more
than leaf through their works on *sophismata* and
*insolubilia* (Valla 1984, 201). The few examples he gives seem
to come from Peter of Spain's *Summulae logicales*. Nor
was it necessary to have more than a superficial acquaintance with the
works of these dialecticians in order to realize that their approach
differed vastly from his. As he repeatedly states, what is required in
order to disambiguate fallacies is not a deeper knowledge of the rules
of logic but a recognition that arguments need to be evaluated within
their wider linguistic and argumentative context. Such an examination
of how words and arguments function will easily lay bare the
artificial and sophistical nature of these forms of argumentation.



This approach is also evident in Valla's analysis of the
proposition of which a syllogism or argument consists. Propositions
are traditionally divided according to quantity (universal of
particular) and to quality (affirmative and negative). Quantity and
quality are indicated by words that are called *signa*
(markers, signs): "all," "any,"
"not," "no one," and so forth. In Book II of
the *Repastinatio*, Valla considers a much wider range of words
than the medieval logicians, who had mainly worked with
"all," "some," "none," and
"no one". To some extent, his aim is not unlike that of
the dialecticians whom he so frequently attacks, that is, to study
signs of quality and negation and how they determine the scope of a
proposition. But for him there is only one proper method of carrying
out such a study: examining carefully the multifarious ways in which
these words are used in refined and grammatically correct Latin. Not
surprisingly, Valla criticizes the square of contraries--the
fourfold classification of statements in which the distinction between
universal and particular and that between affirmative and negative are
combined. A similar critique of the rather arbitrary restriction to a
limited set of words is applied to the scholastic notion of modality
(Valla *Repastinatio*, 1:237-244; 2:491-497;
*DD* 2:126-43). Scholastics usually treat only the following
six terms as modals: "possible," "impossible,"
"true," "false," "necessary," and
"contingent." Latin, however, is much more resourceful in
expressing modality. Using criteria such as refinement and utility,
Valla considers terms such as "likely/unlikely,"
"difficult/easy," "certain/uncertain,"
"useful/useless," "becoming/unbecoming," and
"honorable/dishonorable." This amounts to introducing a
wholly new concept of modality, which comes close to an adverbial
qualification of a given action.



Valla's principal *betes noires* are Aristotle,
Boethius, Porphyry, and Peter of Spain, but he also speaks in general
terms of the entire *natio peripatetica* (nation of
Peripatetics). He frequently refers to *isti* (those), a
suitably vague label for the scholastic followers of
Aristotle--including both dialecticians and theologians. It has
often been claimed that Valla is attacking late medieval
scholasticism; but it must be said that he does not quote any late
medieval scholastic philosophers or theologians. He generally steers
clear of their questions, arguments, and terminology. If we compare
Valla's *Repastinatio* with, for example, Paul of
Venice's *Logica* *parva* (*The Small
Logic*), we quickly perceive the immense difference in attitude,
argument, and approach. Moreover, as noted above, Valla's
grammatical and oratorical approach is fundamentally different from
Ockham's terminism. He probably thought that he did not need to
engage with the technical details of scholastic works. It was
sufficient for him to establish that there was a huge distance between
his own approach and that of the scholastics. Once he had shown that
the scholastic-Aristotelian edifice was built on shaky foundations, he
did not care to attack the superstructure, so to speak. And Valla
proved to his own satisfaction that these foundations were shaky by
showing that the terminology and vocabulary of the scholastics rested
on a misunderstanding of Latin and of the workings of language in
general. But even though his criticisms are mainly addressed to
Aristotle, Boethius, and Porphyry, his more general opinion of
Aristotelianism was, of course, formed by what he saw in his own time.
He loathed the philosophical establishment at the universities, their
methods, genres, and, above all, their style and terminology. He
thought that they were slavishly following Aristotle. In his view,
however, a true philosopher does not hesitate to re-assess any opinion
from whatever source; refusing to align himself with a sect or school,
he presents himself as a critical, independent thinker
(*Repastinatio*, 1:1-8; 2:359-363; *DD*
1:2-12). Whether scholasticism had, indeed, ossified by the time Valla
came on the scene is a matter of debate; but there is no question that
this is how he and the other humanists saw it.


## 4. Moral Philosophy



The same critical spirit also infuses Valla's work on moral
philosophy. In his dialogue, published as *De voluptate* in
1431, when he was still in his mid-twenties, and revised two years
later under the title *De vero bono* (*On the True
Good*), Valla presents a discussion between an
"Epicurean," a "Stoic," and a
"Christian" on an age-old question: what is the highest
ethical good? The result of this confrontation between pagan and
Christian moral thought is a combination of Pauline fideism and
Epicurean hedonism, in which the Christian concepts of charity and
beatitude are identified with hedonist pleasure, and the
"Stoic" concept of virtue is rejected (Valla, *De vero
falsoque bono*). Valla thus treats Epicureanism as a
stepping-stone to the development of a Christian morality based on the
concept of pleasure, and repudiates the traditional synthesis of
Stoicism and Christianity, popular among scholastics and humanists
alike. The substance of the dialogue is repeated in a long chapter in
his *Repastinatio* (*Repastinatio*, 1:73-98;
2:411-418; *DD* 1:130-75).



Valla's strategy is to reduce the traditional four
virtues-- prudence, justice, fortitude, and propriety (or
temperance)--to fortitude, and then to equate fortitude with
charity and love. For Valla, fortitude is the essential virtue, since
it shows that we do not allow ourselves to be conquered by the wrong
emotions, but instead to act for the good. As a true virtue of action,
it is closely connected to justice and is defined as "a certain
resistance against both the harsh and the pleasant things which
prudence has declared to be evils." It is the power to tolerate
and suffer adversity and bad luck, but also to resist the
blandishments of a fortune which can be all too good, thus weakening
the spirit. Fortitude is the only true virtue, because virtue resides
in the will, since our actions, to which we assign moral
qualifications, proceed from the will.



Valla's reductive strategy has a clear aim: to equate this
essential virtue of action, fortitude, with the biblical concept of
love and charity. This step requires some hermeneutic manipulation,
but the Stoic overtones of Cicero's account in *De
officiis* have prepared the way for it--ironically, perhaps,
in view of Valla's professed hostility towards
Stoicism--since enduring hardship with Stoic patience is easily
linked to the Pauline message that we become strong by being tested
(II Cor. 12:10, quoted by Valla). The labor, sweat, and trouble we
must bear, though bad in themselves, "are called good because
they lead to that victory," Valla writes, echoing St Paul
(*Repastinatio*, 1:88-89; 2:415; *DD* 1:156). We
do not, then, strive to attain virtue for its own sake, since it is
full of toil and hardship, but rather because it leads us to our goal.
This is one of Valla's major claims against the Stoics and the
Peripatetics, who--at least in Valla's
interpretation-- regarded virtue as the end of life, that is, the
goal which is sought for its own sake. Because virtuous behavior is
difficult, requiring us to put up with harsh and bitter afflictions,
no one naturally and voluntarily seeks virtue as an end in itself.
What we seek is pleasure or delectation, both in this life
and--far more importantly --in the life to come.



By equating pleasure with love, Valla can argue that it is love or
pleasure that is our ultimate end. This entails the striking notion
that God is not loved for his own sake, but for the sake of love:
"For nothing is loved for its own sake or for the sake of
something else as another end, but the love itself is the end"
(*Repastinatio*, 2:417). This is a daring move. Traditionally,
God was said to be loved for his own sake, not for his usefulness in
gaining something else. Many thinkers agreed with Augustine that
concupiscent love was to be distinguished from friendship, and, with
respect to heavenly beatitude, use from fruition. We can love
something as a means to an end (use), and we can love something for
its own sake (fruition). But because Valla has maintained that
pleasure is our highest good, God can only be loved as a means to that
end.



It is therefore a moot point whether Valla successfully integrated
Epicurean hedonism with Christian morality. He seems to argue that the
Epicurean position is valid only for the period before the coming of
Christ. In our unredeemed state, we are rightly regarded as
pleasure-seeking animals, governed by self-interest and utilitarian
motives. After Christ's coming, however, we have a different
picture: repudiating Epicurean pleasure, we should choose the harsh
and difficult life of Christian *honestas* (virtue) as a step
towards heavenly beatitude. Yet, the two views of human beings are not
so readily combined. On the one hand, there is the positive evaluation
of pleasure as the fundamental principle in human
psychology--which is confirmed and underscored by the
terminological equation of *voluptas* (pleasure),
*beatitudo* (beatitude), *fruitio* (fruition),
*delectatio* (delectation), and *amor* (love). On the
other hand, Valla states apodictically that there are two pleasures:
an earthly one, which is the mother of vice, and a heavenly one, which
is the mother of virtue; that we should abstain from the former if we
want to enjoy the latter; and that the natural, pre-Christian life is
"empty and worthy of punishment" if not put in the wider
perspective of human destiny. In other words, we are commanded to live
the arduous and difficult life of Christian *honestas*, ruled
by restraint, self-denial, and propriety (temperance), and, at the
same time, to live a hedonist life, which consists of the joyful,
free, and natural gratification of the senses.



Another of his targets is the Aristotelian account of virtue as a mean
between two extremes. According to Valla, each individual vice is
instead the opposite of an individual virtue. He makes this point by
distinguishing between two different senses of the same virtue,
showing that they have different opposites. So, while Aristotle
regards fortitude as the mean between the vices of rashness and
cowardice, Valla argues that there are two aspects to fortitude:
fighting bravely and being cautious (for instance, in yielding to the
victorious enemy), with cowardice and rashness as their respective
opposites. Likewise, generosity is not the mean between avarice and
prodigality, but has two aspects: giving and not giving. Prodigality
is the opposite of the first aspect, avarice of the second, for which
we should use the term frugality or thrift rather than generosity.
More generally, the terminology of vices as defects and excesses and
virtue as a mean is misleading; virtues and vices should not be ranked
"according to whether they are at the bottom, or halfway up, or
at the top." Interestingly, a similar critique of
Aristotle's notion of virtue as a mean between two extremes has
been raised in modern scholarship (for example, by W. D. Ross).



Valla regards the Aristotelian notion of virtue as too static and
inflexible, so that it does not do justice to the impulsive nature of
our moral behavior. For him, virtue is not a habit, as Aristotle
believed, but rather an affect, an emotion or feeling that can be
acquired and lost in a moment's time. Virtue is the domain
solely of the will. The greatest virtue or the worse vice may arise
out of one single act. And because virtue is painful and vice
tempting, one may easily slide from the one into the other, unlike
knowledge, which does not turn into ignorance all of a sudden. Valla
therefore frequently removes the notions of knowledge, truth, and
prudence from the sphere of moral action. Virtues as affects are
located in the rear part of the soul, the will, while the domains of
knowledge, truth, and opinion reside in the other two faculties,
memory and reason (*Repastinatio*, 1:73-74; *DD*
1:130). This is not to say that the will is independent from the
intellectual capacities. The affects need reason as their guide, and
the lack of such guidance can result in vice. But Valla is not
entirely clear as to what element we should assign the moral
qualification "good" or "bad." He identifies
virtues with affects, and says that only these merit praise and blame
(*Repastinatio*, 1:74; *DD* 1:130-32); however, he also
writes that the virtues, as affects, cannot be called good or bad in
themselves, but that these judgments apply only to the will, that is,
to the will's choice. This is underlined by his remark that
virtue resides in the will rather than in an action
(*Repastinatio*, 1:77; *DD* 1:136). In his discussion of
the soul, however, he frequently calls reason the will's guide
(e.g., Valla *Repastinatio*, 1:75; *DD* 1:132), and also
says that the affects should follow reason, so that it, too, may be
held responsible, in the final analysis, for moral behavior (even
though he also explicitly denies that the will is determined by
reason). Finally, pleasure, delectation, or beatitude are also called
virtue by the equation of virtue with love and with charity
(*Repastinatio*, 1:85; *DD* 1:150-52).



Moreover, Valla's insistence on the will as the locus of moral
behavior seems compromised by the predestinarianism advocated by the
interlocutor "Lorenzo" in his dialogue *De libero
arbitrio* (*On Free Will*). In this highly rhetorical work,
Valla--if we can assume that Lorenzo represents Valla's own
position--stresses that in his inscrutable wisdom God hardens the
hearts of some, while saving those of others. We do not know why, and
it is presumptuous and vain to inquire into the matter. Yet, somehow
we do have free will, "Now, indeed, He brings no necessity, and
His hardening one and showing another mercy does not deprive us of
free will, since He does this most wisely and in full holiness"
(Valla 1948, 177). So, we are free, after all, and God's
foreknowledge does not necessitate the future; but how exactly Valla
thinks his views settle these issues is not clear. His fideistic point
is that we humans cannot settle the issue; 'the cause of the
divine will which hardens one and shows mercy to another is known
neither to man nor to angels'. Yet, in spite of his fideism and
anti-intellectualism, his own discussion of God and free will, as well
as his account of the Trinity in the *Repastinatio*, makes
substantive claims about what God is.



In conclusion, Valla's moral thought can be described--with
some justice--as hedonistic, voluntarist, and perhaps also
empirical (in the sense of taking account of how people actually
behave). On closer inspection, however, his account seems to contain
the seeds of several ideas that are not so easily reconciled with one
another. This is doubtless due, in no small measure, to his
eclecticism, his attempt to bring into one picture Aristotelian
ethics, the Stoic virtues of Cicero, the biblical concepts of charity
and beatitude, and the Epicurean notion of hedonist pleasure--
each with its own distinctive terminology, definitions, and
philosophical context.


## 5. Evaluation



Valla's contributions to historical, classical, and biblical
scholarship are beyond doubt, and helped to pave the way for the
critical textual philology of Poliziano, Erasmus, and later
generations of humanists. Valla grasped the important
insight--which was not unknown to medieval philosophers and
theologians--that the meaning of a text can be understood only
when it is seen as the product of its original historical and cultural
context. Yet his attempt to reform or transform the scholastic study
of language and argumentation--and, indeed, their entire mode of
doing philosophy--is likely to be met with skepticism or even
hostility by the historian of medieval philosophy who is dedicated to
the argumentative rigor and conceptual analysis which are the
hallmarks of scholastic thought. Nevertheless, while it may be true
that Valla's individual arguments are sometimes weak,
superficial, and unfair, his critique as a whole does have an
important philosophical and historical significance. The following two
points, in particular, should be mentioned.



First, the humanist study of Stoicism, Epicureanism, skepticism, and
Neoplatonism widened the philosophical horizon and eroded faith in the
universal truth of Aristotelian philosophy--an essential
preparatory stage for the rise of early modern thought. In
Valla's day, Aristotle was still "the Philosopher,"
and scholastics put considerable effort into explaining his words.
Valla attacks what he sees as the *ipse dixit* attitude of the
scholastics. For him, a true philosopher does not follow a single
master but instead says whatever he thinks. Referring to
Pythagoras' modest claim that he was a not a wise man but a
lover of wisdom (*Repastinatio*, 1:1; *DD* 1:2), Valla
maintains that he does not belong to any sect (including that of the
skeptics) and wants to retain his independence as critical thinker.
What the scholastics forget, he thinks, is that there were many
alternatives in antiquity to the supposedly great master, many sects,
and many other types of philosopher. In criticizing Aristotle's
natural philosophy, for instance, he gave vent to a sentiment which
ultimately eroded faith in the Aristotelian system. This does not,
however, mean that he was developing a non-Aristotelian natural
philosophy; his rejection of Aristotle's account of nature was
primarily motivated by religious and linguistic considerations.
Indeed, Valla's insistence on common linguistic usage, combined
with his appeal to common sense and his religious fervor, seems at
times to foster a fideism that is at odds with an exploratory attitude
towards the natural world. But with hindsight we can say that
*any* undermining of the faith in the exclusiveness of the
scholastic-Aristotelian worldview contributed to its demise and,
ultimately, to its replacement by a different, mechanistic one. And
although the humanist polemic was only one factor among many others,
its role in this process was by no means negligible. Likewise, in
attacking Peripatetic moral philosophy, Valla showed that there were
alternatives to the Aristotelian paradigm, even though his use of
Epicureanism and Stoicism was rhetorical rather than historical.



The second point relates to the previous one. In placing himself in
opposition to what he regarded as the Aristotelian paradigm, Valla
often interprets certain doctrines--the syllogism, hypothetical
syllogism, modal propositions, and the square of contraries--in
ways they were not designed for. In such cases, we can see Valla
starting, as it were, from the inside of the Aristotelian paradigm,
from some basic assumptions and ideas of his opponents, in order to
refute them by using a kind of *reductio ad absurdum* or
submitting them to his own criteria, which are external to the
paradigm. This moving inside and outside of the Aristotelian paradigm
can explain (and perhaps excuse) Valla's inconsistency, for it
is an inconsistency which is closely tied to his tactics and his
agenda. He does not want to be consistent if this means merely obeying
the rules of the scholastics, which in his view amounted to rigorously
defining one's terms and pressing these into the straightjacket
of a syllogistic argument, no matter what common sense and linguistic
custom teach us. Behind this inconsistency, therefore, lies a
consistent program of replacing philosophical speculation and
theorizing with an approach based on common linguistic practice and
common sense. But arguably it has also philosophical relevance; for
throughout the history of philosophy a warning can be heard against
abstraction, speculation, and formalization. One need not endorse this
cautionary note in order to see that philosophy thrives on the
creative tension between, on the one hand, a tendency to abstract,
speculate, and formalize, and, on the other, a concern that the object
of philosophical analysis should not be lost from sight, that
philosophy should not become a game of its own--an abstract and
theoretical affair that leaves the world it purports to analyze and
explain far behind, using a language that can be understood only by
its own practitioners.