  Richard the Sophister (Richardus Sophista) was an English philosopher/logician who studied at Oxford most likely sometime during the second quarter of the thirteenth century. Richard's identity is uncertain, but he is known to be the author of a collection of logically puzzling sentences, sometimes called “sophisms”, entitled Abstractiones. The puzzling aspect of these sophisms is variously caused by semantic or syntactic ambiguities involved in certain logical or “syncategorematic” words such as “all”, “every”, “or”, “if…then”, “and”, “not”, “begins”, “ceases”, “except”, “necessary”, “possible”, etc.