The Grammar Rebel Who Tried to Plow Up All of Philosophy
The Man Who Couldn’t Stop Arguing
In 1431 a young Italian scholar named Lorenzo Valla (1406–1457) made a mistake that would shape his whole life. He wrote a letter ripping apart the Latin of Bartolus of Sassoferrato, a legal authority at the University of Pavia. Law students rioted. Valla had to flee the city in the middle of the night.
He was not a calm, polite thinker. Valla had a “sharp and polemical mind,” wrote the historian later, and a sense of his own importance that verged on “the pathological.” He made enemies wherever he went — with popes, with fellow humanists, even with kings. But that same combative spirit drove him to challenge something huge: the entire way philosophy was taught, written, and argued in his time.
For centuries, universities had built their thinking around Aristotle (384–322 BCE) and a thick layer of commentary by later scholastics — teachers who tried to systematize every concept into tight logical boxes. Valla thought that whole grand palace was built on rotten grammar and words that meant nothing. So he set out not just to fix a few cracks, but to re-plow the field entirely. The Latin word he used was repastinatio — weeding out, cutting back, and preparing the soil for something new.
What gave a quarrelsome grammarian the right to attack all of philosophy? Valla’s answer was simple: words matter. If you use them sloppily, you can’t think clearly. And if you can’t think clearly, your big theories about God, the soul, and the universe are just elegant noise.
An Axe to the Categories: Substance, Quality, Action
Valla began with a deceptively simple idea: the world is made of things. He used the Latin word res. A thing is just a concrete something — a stone, a horse, a person, a cannonball. Things have qualities (adjectives, like tall or hot) and they perform or undergo actions (verbs, like runs or is cut). That’s it. Three basic categories: substance, quality, and action.
Aristotle had given philosophers ten categories — substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action, and passion — and scholastics had built elaborate systems on them. Valla grabbed his grammatical pruning shears. If you ask “what kind of horse should I buy?” and someone answers “a tall one, with a broad chest,” you’ve just used a quantitative word — tall — to answer a question about quality. Quality swallows quantity. In the same way, being a father, being in a classroom, or being six feet tall are all just ways a particular man is qualified, Valla argued. You don’t need separate categories for relation or place or quantity. They reduce to qualities or actions of real things.
He went further, attacking words the scholastics treated as extra-special. They spoke of transcendental terms — words like being, one, true, and good that were supposed to apply to absolutely everything, beyond any single category. Valla boiled them down, too. Being ( ens ) is just “that which is” — which really means “that thing which is.” But “a stone is a thing which is” is a clumsy, pointless mouthful. Just say “a stone is a thing.” The abstract noun entitas (“entity”) he mocked because it didn’t even follow the rules of Latin word formation. If a cannonball needed a new word — bombarda — fine. But these invented philosophical terms, he snarled, were monstrosities.
This isn’t just quibbling. Valla was insisting that language as ordinary people actually use it — not a private technical code — should be the test of whether a philosophical idea makes sense. If a term can’t be cashed out in clear, common Latin, it’s probably empty. And the danger of empty words is that they let you pretend you’re talking about reality when you’re really just shuffling syllables.
Why the Tree of Porphyry Had to Be Chopped Down
One of the most famous tools in the scholastic toolbox was the Tree of Porphyry. It was a branching diagram that started with substance at the top and divided it into corporeal and incorporeal, then into living and non-living, and so on down through animal, rational animal, and finally human being. It was supposed to show how everything in the universe fits into a neat hierarchy.
Valla looked at this tree and saw not order but mischief. First, it put substance at the top, but for Valla pure substance doesn’t exist — every real thing is already a qualified substance. There’s no such thing as a blob of mere “substance” without qualities. Second, where does a human belong? We have both a body and a soul, but the tree splits corporeal and spiritual early on. A human ends up straddling branches in an awkward way. Third — and this mattered deeply to Valla — the tree smeared together God, angels, and animals. God is neither corporeal nor an animal, so applying those labels to the divine order is, he thought, mildly blasphemous.
His solution was to saw the single tree into three separate ones: a tree for purely spiritual substances (God, angels), a tree for corporeal substances (rocks, plants, non-human animals), and a tree for living beings with both body and soul — that’s us. Looking back, modern thinkers might say he was disentangling the supernatural from the natural, a move that would later become central to science. But Valla admitted one awkward result: he could not place Christ in any of his three trees, since Christ is claimed to be both fully human and fully God. A clean taxonomy broke at the edges of mystery. Valla was willing to live with that — he preferred an honest limit to a fake solution dressed in fancy terminology.
Stop Playing Syllogism Solitaire
If his attack on categories shook the foundations, Valla’s next move rattled the whole house. He turned to dialectic — the art of logical argument — and declared that the scholastics’ beloved tool, the syllogism, was mostly a sterile parlor game.
A syllogism runs like this: Every man is an animal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is an animal. For generations, students memorized the valid “moods” and “figures” of such three-step arguments, reducing everything to tidy forms with letters instead of words. Valla asked a blunt question: Who actually talks like that? No orator, no lawyer, no human being in a real dispute lays out their reasoning in a perfect syllogistic straitjacket. Real persuasion uses enthymemes (shortened reasoning), examples, dilemmas, and the whole range of rhetoric.
Valla was trained in the tradition of Quintilian (c. 35–c. 100 CE), the great Roman teacher of oratory. From that perspective, the point of an argument isn’t to satisfy a formal rule — it’s to convince a listener. So he treated the syllogism as just one tiny species of invention (the part of rhetoric that finds your arguments), not the master key to all reasoning. What’s the use, he complained, of concluding that Socrates is an animal if you’ve already said aloud that every man is an animal and Socrates is a man? You’re not discovering anything; you’re just rearranging what you already stated. It’s “simple, puerile, and pedantic,” he wrote — “hardly amounting to a real art.”
He gleefully showed that many valid arguments don’t fit the four officially approved moods of the first figure. A perfectly good singular syllogism: Homer is the greatest of poets. This man is the greatest of poets. Therefore, this man is Homer. Logic textbooks said at least one premise must be universal — oops, here both are singular. Valla wanted to open the cage and let arguments walk around in natural language. That meant paying attention to the weight of words, not the skeleton of symbols. He analyzed fallacies by examining what a word means in context — not by applying a fixed list of error types from Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations.
His most creative work here was on tricky argument forms like the dilemma and heap argument (sorites). Take the famous case of Protagoras and his student Euathlus. The student agreed to pay the second half of his fees as soon as he won his first court case — then avoided taking any cases. Protagoras sued him and set a dilemma: if the judges rule for me, Euathlus must pay by the court’s order; if they rule for him, he must pay because he’s finally won a case! The student cleverly “converted” the argument: if I win, I don’t pay by the court’s ruling; if I lose, I don’t pay because I still haven’t won a case. Valla dove into this puzzle not with formal logic but with a rich rhetorical analysis — considering intentions, word meanings, and the whole situation. He concluded that the student can’t have it both ways; he must choose one horn, not both, and the judges shouldn’t just throw up their hands in despair. The point was that you handle such tangles by thinking like a speaker addressing real people, not like a machine processing symbols.
Pleasure Is the Point — Even for a Christian
Valla’s most startling move wasn’t about grammar or logic — it was about ethics. As a young man he wrote a dialogue, On Pleasure, that scandalized readers. In it, an “Epicurean,” a “Stoic,” and a “Christian” debate the highest good. The winner, in Valla’s telling, was a strange hybrid: a Christian who argues that the ultimate goal of life is pleasure.
He wasn’t saying “go have a wild party.” He was redefining terms. The Latin word voluptas (pleasure) he linked to beatitudo (blessedness), fruitio (enjoyment), delectatio (delight), and amor (love). For Valla, all of them named the same deep reality. When you love someone or something, you take pleasure in it. When you aim for heavenly beatitude, you’re aiming for the ultimate pleasure. So God is not loved “for his own sake,” Valla dared to claim; God is loved for the sake of love itself, which is pleasure. That flipped a centuries-old Christian formula on its head, and many readers were horrified.
Why would he do this? Because he thought the scholastics’ praise of virtue for its own sake was dishonest. Virtuous acts — being brave in battle, patient under suffering, generous with your money — are hard. They hurt. No one, Valla said, naturally seeks pain as an end in itself. Prudence tells us which things are truly good or evil, but it’s the will that moves us, driven by an affect — a feeling, an emotion. The central virtue, he argued, is fortitude, the power to endure hard things and resist soft temptations. And fortitude itself is just a form of love in action. He pointed to St. Paul’s words about becoming strong through testing. The labor and sweat are real evils, but they are “called good because they lead to that victory.”
Valla also took a swipe at Aristotle’s doctrine that virtue is a mean between extremes. Courage, Aristotle said, is the midpoint between cowardice and recklessness. Valla objected that courage has two aspects — fighting bravely and knowing when to retreat — each with its own opposite vice. Generosity has two aspects — giving and not giving — each with its opposite (prodigality and avarice). Treating virtue as a static midpoint, he thought, misses the impulsive, moment-by-moment nature of real moral life. A virtue isn’t a fixed habit, as Aristotle had it. It’s an affect that can flare up in a single act and be lost in a heartbeat.
This whole vision was voluntarist (centered on the will, not the intellect) and hedonist (centered on pleasure). But Valla never fully resolved the tension between his call to a harsh, self-denying Christian life and his insistence that pleasure is what we all ultimately seek. He left that knot for later thinkers to untangle — or wrestle with.
Why a Grouchy Grammarian Still Matters
Lorenzo Valla died in 1457, still revising his work, still feuding with his enemies. His Elegantiae, a handbook on good Latin, became a European bestseller. His proof that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery helped remake historical scholarship. His notes on the New Testament, comparing the Latin translation to the Greek original, were found and published by Erasmus (c. 1467–1534) — who went on to revolutionize biblical studies using exactly Valla’s philological method. The critical textual scholarship we take for granted today owes a debt to this irascible Italian.
But the deeper reason Valla matters is something you can feel in your own classroom or at your own dinner table. When you’re in an argument, do you trust your gut sense of what words mean in ordinary conversation, or do you reach for formal definitions? When someone uses a jargon-heavy term — “disruptor,” “synergy,” “problematic” — do you demand they say it in plain words? Valla’s whole career was a one-man war against the idea that being abstract and obscure makes you deep. He insisted that common linguistic practice and common sense are the real tests of whether a thought holds water.
He was often unfair, inconsistent, and blisteringly rude. The scholastics he attacked were not fools; they were exploring real logical problems with care. But Valla’s skeptical eye also spotted something genuine: philosophy can drift so far into its own special language that it loses contact with the world it’s supposed to explain. The tension between formal precision and ordinary language, between tidy systems and the mess of experience — that tension is still alive. Every time you stop a discussion and say, “Wait — what do you actually mean by that word?” you’re stepping into Valla’s plowed field.
Think about it
- If a philosophical idea can only be expressed in technical jargon that no one outside a university understands, does that make the idea more likely to be profound, or more likely to be empty? Why?
- Valla believed that no one naturally seeks hard, painful things just for their own sake — we do them to reach a good feeling or goal. Do you agree? Can you think of a courageous act that isn’t aimed at some kind of reward or relief?
- Imagine you’re in a debate and someone presents a perfectly shaped, three-line syllogism that “logically proves” their point. You’re sure the conclusion is wrong, but you can’t spot a formal mistake in their steps. How would you argue back?
