 As is well known, Aristotle developed dialectical encounters in a strictly theoretical manner in his Topics. One question that is still open in the modern scholarship on obligations is to account for the role of Aristotle’s Topics in the development of the obligations genre in the middle ages. Medieval commentaries on Topics do not regularly take up to discuss obligations systematically (see Green-Pedersen 1984). One interesting exception is Boethius of Dacia’s commentary (written in the 1270s; Breen-Pedersen &amp; Pinborg 1976), but the rules that he proposes for obligational disputations appear quite different from what we find from the mainstream authors of the genre itself (e.g., Burley, Swyneshed, and Eland). In any case, even judging on the basis of Boethius’ treatment of the technique in the commentary, the technique does not seem a direct descendant of the so called ‘topical’ tradition in logic.