Port-Royal Logic, or Logique de Port-Royal, is the common name of La logique, ou l'art de penser, an important textbook on logic first published anonymously in 1662 by Antoine Arnauld

Antoine Arnauld

Antoine Arnauld — le Grand as contemporaries called him, to distinguish him from his father — was a French Roman Catholic theologian, philosopher, and mathematician...

 and Pierre Nicole

Pierre Nicole

Pierre Nicole was one of the most distinguished of the French Jansenists.Born in Chartres, he was the son of a provincial barrister, who took in charge his education...

, two prominent members of the Jansenist

Jansenism

Jansenism was a Christian theological movement, primarily in France, that emphasized original sin, human depravity, the necessity of divine grace, and predestination. The movement originated from the posthumously published work of the Dutch theologian Cornelius Otto Jansen, who died in 1638...

 movement, centered around Port-Royal. Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal , was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen...

 likely contributed considerable portions of the text. Its linguistic companion piece is the Port Royal Grammar (1660).

Written in the vernacular, it became quite popular and was in use up to the twentieth century, introducing the reader to logic, and exhibiting strong Cartesian elements in its metaphysics and epistemology (Arnauld having been one of the main philosophers whose objections were published, with replies, in Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy

Meditations on First Philosophy

Meditations on First Philosophy is a philosophical treatise written by René Descartes and first published in 1641 . The French translation was published in 1647 as Méditations Metaphysiques...

). The Port-Royal Logic is sometimes cited as a paradigmatic example of traditional term logic

Term logic

In philosophy, term logic, also known as traditional logic or aristotelian logic, is a loose name for the way of doing logic that began with Aristotle and that was dominant until the advent of modern predicate logic in the late nineteenth century...

.

The philosopher Louis Marin

Louis Marin

Louis Marin was a French philosopher, historian, semiotician and art critic of the 20th century.He was born in La Tronche, He is usually referred to as a French Post-Structuralism thinker. He attended the University of Paris, Sorbonne and graduated with a Licence in Philosophy in 1952...

 particularly studied it in the 20th century (La Critique du discours, Éditions de Minuit, 1975), while Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...

 considered it, in The Order of Things

The Order of Things

The Order of Things is a book by Michel Foucault first published in 1966. The full title is Les Mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines...

, one of the bases of the classical épistémè

Episteme

Episteme, as distinguished from techne, is etymologically derived from the Greek word ἐπιστήμη for knowledge or science, which comes from the verb ἐπίσταμαι, "to know".- The Concept of an "Episteme" in Michel Foucault :...

.

French feminist philosopher and historian from Ecole des Chartes Dominique de Courcelles throws a different light on Port-Royal thinking about language in her ground-breaking Le Sang de Port-Royal, a study of Mother Marie Angelique Arnaud (1994).