Characteristic Features of the Terminological Apparatus in Makariy Petrovich's “Logic”

Abstract

The authors of the article investigate the history of the formation of Russian logical terminology on the example of Makariy Petrovich’s “Theoretical Logic”. This Serbian author, who worked in Russia in the middle of the XVIII century, had been born in Timisoara (Romanian Banat). At the beginning of the 1850s, he left his homeland to study first at the Kyev-Mohyla Academy, and then at the Slavic Greek Latin Academy, where over time he became a prefect and teacher of philosophical disciplines (including logic). During this period, he wrote a textbook, “Theoretic Logic”; unlike the majority of his predecessors, Petrovich based his course of logic not on the scholastic Aristotelian tradition, but on contemporary European Wolfian and Cartesian logic. His main sources included Institutiones philosophiae rationalis methodo Wolfii conscripta (1735) and Elementa philosophiae recentioris usibus juventutis scholasticae accommodata (1747) by F. Ch. Baumeister and Institutiones philosophicae ad faciliorem veterum ac recentiorum philosophorum lectionem comparatae (1695) by Edmon Pursho.

In the article, we consider the historical circumstances that influenced Petrovich's logical education (the regional specifics of Banat; the German colonization of this area by the Habsburgs and the spread of Catholicism in the region; the peculiarities of the educational traditions in southeastern Europe at that time and, in particular, the widespread use of Baumeister textbooks; adoption of Western educational standards by the administration and teaching staff of Slavic-Greek-Latin Academy), as well as some characteristic features of his work — the first textbook on logic written in Russian.

To illustrate the selection of Russian equivalents for Latin and Greek logical terms and the difficulties associated with this process, we analyze the synonymous series of terms опыт/искус/експериенция/експеримент/эмпейрия. This allows us to demonstrate how, in the process of the adoption of Greek and Latin logical terminology, Makariy Petrovich varies the translations of words that historically formed terminological apparatus of logic, accommodating them to the Russian language.

The article demonstrates that Makariy Petrovich not only models Russian words and constructions after Greek and Latin patterns coming from popular European textbooks of that time but carefully selects Slavic roots and sometimes offers different options of translation.