Abstract

IN THIS PAPER I WANT TO ADDRESS the metaphysical status of concepts in Thomas Aquinas. The need to do so is raised by contemporary criticism of Aristotelian reflections upon how language “hooks up with the world.” Many contemporary philosophers, following upon the later Wittgenstein think that in the opening passages of the De interpretatione Aristotle provides a very bad “theory” of semantic relations, when he sketches how words are related to things via the mind. It is a bad “theory” inasmuch as it seems to involve “mental representationalism” as a constitutive element. Amidst all their disagreements, it is fair to say that the many authors anthologized in Richard Rorty’s The Linguistic Turn come together in a common disdain for any hint of mental representationalism in philosophical discussions of the semantic of language. This is not the place to rehearse in detail all the difficulties posed for mental representationalism within contemporary philosophy, in particular because they are very familiar. Yet it would be good to characterize briefly what I have in mind. Hilary Putnam, one of the most forceful critics, and with the De interpretatione text explicitly in mind, describes the relationship between meaning and mental representationalism in this way