 “Topic” is the standard translation for the Latin term locus. (Note that the translators of Peter of Spain (2014) have chosen to render it as “place”, which is the basic meaning of the Latin term.) As Stump (1978, Part 2, and 1982) and Green-Pedersen (1984) have pointed out, the notion of the Topic evolves over the course of its use in ancient and medieval logic, but roughly put, medieval logicians think that the study of the Topics helps one to discover a number of self-evidently true propositions, or “maximal propositions”, that can serve as warrants for arguments. (See Peter of Spain, Tractatus V.3–4 (2014, 198–205).) For example, suppose that someone makes this inference: 