SOURCE: Delp, Mark Damien. “Alcuin: Master and Practitioner of Dialectic.” Proceedings of the PMR Conference 16/17 (1992-93): 91-103.

In the following essay, Delp urges a favorable reappraisal of one of Alcuin's short texts on logic, De dialectica.

In surveying the scholarship on Alcuin's educational writings, one cannot help noticing the negative judgements leveled on his little text on logic, De dialectica. Although older scholarship tended to be harsh, using adjectives such as “miserable”¹ and “mediocre,”² more recent scholars have brushed aside De dialectica as a mere “compendium.” The best that scholars seem able to acknowledge is that Alcuin was a great teacher and introduced important new material (such as the Pseudo-Augustinian Categoriae decem) to his contemporaries. On the contrary, however, Alcuin made important interpretations of his sources in De dialectica, and incorporated these interpretations in later anti-adoptionist treatises and letters.³ Thus, far from being an isolated compendium with a...