Ars Brevis

History

Ramon Llull of Majorca built his Art as a way of finding and proving truths by combining a few principles, and recast it many times. The Ars brevis, finished at Pisa in January 1308, was written “ut ars magna facilius sciatur”, so that the great Art, the Ars generalis ultima, might be learned more easily. Giordano Bruno called the method a combinatoria, and Leibniz, in his Dissertatio de arte combinatoria of 1666, counted the Table’s 84 columns of 20 complexions.

How it works

Nine letters, B to K, each stand for a principle, a relation, a question, a subject, a virtue and a vice. The first figure joins the nine principles each to each; the second sets the relations in three triangles; the third gives the 36 pairs of letters, and a chamber is “evacuated” by saying each of its four terms of the other three; the fourth turns three circles to make chambers of three letters. The Table takes every three of the nine letters, 84 columns, and writes the 20 ways of dividing them by t: letters before t are read in the first figure, after it in the second.

How it was checked

The three printed Tables were transcribed from the scans and are compared with the rule in the tests. The Lyon Ars magna of 1517 differs in 8 of the 1,680 chambers, six misprints and two letters left uninked; the Strasbourg print of 1617 in 90, most of them c and e confused or a chamber repeated; the seven columns of the Ars brevis of 1617 in three, B printed for H. The two Ars magna prints share their misprints at two chambers. The evacuation of BC gives Llull’s twelve propositions word for word, and his twenty questions on the column BCD follow its chambers in order.

Limits

The Table is checked against two prints, not a manuscript or the critical edition. Llull writes out questions for the column BCD only, so other columns are read as principles and relations without them. Llull gives the predicates in the feminine; the neuter and masculine used for principium, medium and finis are the regular forms. The 1617 woodcut of the fourth figure has only its outer circle, and the second figure’s legends are partly cut; the inner circles and the species follow the chapters’ text.