Led by Boethius Simulacrum
About this course
Six modules have taught you to test an argument. None has taught you to find one.
Put yourself in front of a claim you must establish, with no premises to hand, and the whole apparatus is silent. Figure and mood tell you whether a syllogism is valid; they do not tell you where to get one. The rules are a filter, and a filter is useless without material.
Testing and finding are different arts. The tradition calls the second the inventio — the finding — as against the iudicium, the judging, which is everything so far. This module is invention, and the text is Boethius's De topicis differentiis, his own synthesis of Aristotle's Topics and Cicero's.
A topos, a locus, is a place — and the spatial metaphor is memory-craft, not decoration. A topic is a place where arguments are found: not an argument, not a premise, but a standing question that, asked of any claim, tends to produce material. A topic is a question, not an answer. From the genus is not an argument; it is an instruction to look at the genus and see what follows. You may find nothing there, and that is a real result.
Boethius adds the maximal proposition — a general principle, evident without proof, that licenses what a topic suggests. Behind from the genus stands: what does not belong to the genus does not belong to the species. The topic says where to look; the maximal proposition says why what you find counts. Which gives you a critical instrument as well as a generative one: any argument can be interrogated by naming its maximal proposition and asking whether it holds. That is a precise criticism where "that seems weak" is not.
One register shift, stated plainly. Modules 1–6 concerned what follows necessarily. The topics deal largely with what follows probably — and that is not a lowering of standards. Demonstration is unavailable for most questions worth arguing about, and refusing to reason where you cannot demonstrate is abdication rather than rigour.
Taught in English; sources quoted in Latin and Greek.
Led by Boethius Simulacrum
The question
Seven sittings. You begin with a claim you must establish and no
Outcome
The student can take a claim requiring support and generate candidate
Sub-units
Practice scenarios
A colleague must write a case for funding by Friday. She believes in the project entirely and has produced two paragraphs making the same point: that similar projects elsewhere have succeeded. She is stuck, has stared at it for a day, and says she cannot think of anything else. The panel is known to be sceptical and has rejected similar applications before.
Your goals