This paper primarily aims to provide a coherent interpretation of several, apparently conflicting claims made by Aquinas concerning the semantic function of the copula. The paper also argues that these claims can properly be understood only if they are interpreted as forming a coherent part of Aquinas' larger theory of the analogy of being. The Appendix sketches a model theoretical semantics for the reconstruction of Aquinas' relevant ideas, providing the technical means for setting apart the various senses of the verb (...) 'est' and its cognates distinguished by Aquinas. (shrink)

This is a brief, accessible introduction to the thought of the philosopher John Buridan (ca. 1295-1361). Little is known about Buridan's life, most of which was spent studying and then teaching at the University of Paris. Buridan's works are mostly by-products of his teaching. They consist mainly of commentaries on Aristotle, covering the whole extent of Aristotelian philosophy, ranging from logic to metaphysics, to natural science, to ethics and politics. Gyula Klima argues that many of Buridan's academic concerns are (...) strikingly similar to those of modern philosophy and his work sometimes quite directly addresses modern philosophical questions. (shrink)

This paper argues in the first place that nominalists are right in insisting against ontological realists that semantic universality does not require commitment to universal entities. However, Ockham, in his zeal to get rid of Scotus’s universal entities, swept under the carpet the issue of universal representational content of genuinely universal symbols, conflating it with the mere indifference of the information content of non-distinctive singular representations. Buridan did come up with an abstractionist theory of the formation of genuinely universal representational (...) content to solve the resulting issues, however, the paper argues further, his solution is committed to attributing the sort of “aspectuality” to universal absolute concepts that his Ockhamist semantics denies to them. The conclusion of the paper suggests how Aquinas’s “moderate realism” can provide a consistent solution without the ontological extravaganza of ontological realists, without conflating the mere indifference of singular representation with genuine universality, and without having to deny aspectuality to our quidditative universal concepts formed by abstraction. (shrink)

This paper argues that three characteristic modern positions concerning intentionality – namely, (1) that intentionality is ‘the mark of the mental’; (2) that intentionality concerns a specific type of objects having intentional inexistence; and (3) that intentionality somehow defies logic – are just three ‘modern myths’ that medieval philosophers, from whom the modern notion supposedly originated, would definitely reject.

This paper argues for two principal conclusions about natural language semantics based on John Buridan's considerations concerning the notion of formal consequence, that is, formally valid inference. (1) Natural languages are essentially semantically closed, yet they do not have to be on that account inconsistent. (2) Natural language semantics has to be token based, as a matter of principle. The paper investigates the Buridanian considerations leading to these conclusions, and considers some obviously emerging objections to the Buridanian approach.

After a brief analysis of the specifics of teleological explanations as opposed to causal explanations, the paper seeks to establish the irreducibility of the former to the latter by arguing that teleological explanations are inextricably tied to our notion of intentionality. Since this result undermines the very possibility of “a physicalist reduction” of the explanation of teleological phenomena, especially of human beha- vior, the rest of the paper develops an argument against the perceived need of any such reduction. According to (...) the conclusion of the paper, a more promising program is the development of a “modern, scientific Aristotelianism”, one that can provide a consistent conceptual framework that accommodates both types of explanation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.2 (2003) 272-273 [Access article in PDF] Matthew of Orléans. Sophistaria sive summa communium distinctionum circa sophismata accidentium. Edited by Joke Spruyt. Leiden: Brill, 2001. Pp. ix + 581. Cloth, $151.00. Matthew of Orléans is not a famous author (indeed, even his name is given tentatively by the editor on the basis of the explicit of one manuscript). And the Sophistaria was apparently (...) not one the most influential works of its time, the early thirteenth century (its full text is preserved only in a couple of manuscripts, and it has never been printed before). Yet, the Sophistaria of Matthew of Orléans is a fine example of a characteristic genre in the rich tradition of medieval logical literature. The genre itself is an interesting combination of two other characteristic genres: treatises on syncategoremata and sophismata. The sophismata treatises are discussions of problem-sentences (sophismata) usually grouped together to illustrate some logical doctrinal points, especially concerning the resolution of ambiguities caused by the logical behavior of syncategorematic terms in various contexts. The treatises on syncategoremata provide systematic discussions of the logical behavior of syncategorematic words, i.e., logical connectives, themselves. But these treatises also illustrate their doctrinal points by resolving the ambiguities of sophismata, mostly using some commonly accepted distinctions concerning how the function of the syncategoremata is to be construed in the contexts provided by these problem-sentences. The proper subject matter of the sophistaria treatises is the discussion of these common distinctions, dealing especially with ambiguities caused by (what we would describe as) the different possible scopes of the syncategoremata occurring in the paradigmatic sophismata.For example, take the sentence "Someone seeing nothing is someone seeing something." This sentence can be regarded as ambiguous, if we analyze "nothing" into "not... a thing," yielding (1) "Someone not seeing a thing is someone seeing something," which can be taken to be ambiguous between (a) "Someone not seeing anything is someone seeing something" and (b) "Someone not seeing something is someone seeing something," depending on whether we take "not" in (1) to be operating (a) on "seeing a thing," or (b) only on "seeing." On this analysis, the ambiguous sentence is obviously false in the first sense, but may be true in the second, for it may be true of Socrates who does not see Plato but sees Coriscus.To be sure, this is not the only possible way to account for the (genuine or putative) ambiguity of the original sentence. In fact, this is not the account considered by Matthew of Orléans or in a parallel passage by Peter of Spain in their analyses of the corresponding Latin sentence (Nihil videns est aliquid videns), although one of the arguments for the truth of the sophisma they reject would be a good argument for the second reading provided here (cf. Peter of Spain, Tractatus [Van Gorcum: Assen, 1972], 220, ll. 10-6, and Sophistaria, 88, ll. 16-20). In any case, the point of the sophistaria treatises is precisely the discussion of the merits and demerits of such possible accounts.The Sophistaria of Matthew of Orléans is a well-organized, highly structured treatise, divided into eight chapters, corresponding to the eight groups of syncategorematic terms [End Page 272] it deals with. The first chapter is devoted to the discussion of common distinctions concerning negations (both propositional and term-negations, including privative negation), the second deals with exclusive words (such as "only"), the third with exceptive words ("besides," "except," "unless"), the fourth with the conditional sign "if," the fifth with the modalities "necessarily" and "contingently," the sixth with the verbs "begins" and "ceases," the seventh with the word "whether," and the eighth with the distributive sign "every," that is, the universal sign that causes the terms it is construed with to be distributed for everything that falls under it.The discussion of these topics in the individual chapters is organized around typical scholastic questions raised concerning the validity of some common distinction in connection with typical sophismata, involving ambiguities in the operation... (shrink)

Buridan's life, works, and influence -- Buridan's logic and the medieval logical tradition -- The primacy of mental language -- The various kinds of concepts and the idea of a mental language -- Natural language and the idea of a formal syntax in Buridan -- Existential import and the square of opposition -- Ontological commitment -- The properties of terms (proprietates terminorum) -- The semantics of propositions -- Logical validity in a token-based, semantically closed logic -- The possibility of scientific (...) knowledge -- Buridan's anti-skepticism -- Buridan's essentialist nominalism. (shrink)

In this paper, I will primarily argue for the consistency of Aquinas’ conception, according to which the human soul, uniquely in God’s creation, is both the inherent, material, substantial form of the human body, and the subsistent immaterial substance underlying the immaterial operations of its immaterial, rational powers, namely, intellect and will. In this discussion, I will point out that typical challenges to Aquinas’ conception usually rely on semantic or ontological assumptions that can plausibly be denied in Aquinas’ own conceptual (...) framework. Since the issue of consistency merely assumes the less than self-evident claim of the immateriality of the human intellect, I will also provide a brief sketch of what I take to be Aquinas’ most promising proof of this claim. (shrink)

We study the process of observation (measurement), within the framework of a “perspectival” (“relational,” “relative state”) version of the modal interpretation of quantum mechanics. We show that if we assume certain features of discreteness and determinism in the operation of the measuring device (which could be a part of the observer's nerve system), this gives rise to classical characteristics of the observed properties, in the first place to spatial localization. We investigate to what extent semi-classical behavior of the object system (...) itself (as opposed to the observational system) is needed for the emergence of classicality. Decoherence is an essential element in the mechanism of observation that we assume, but it turns out that in our approach no environment-induced decoherence on the level of the object system is required for the emergence of classical properties. (shrink)

This paper argues that Aquinas's conception of the human soul and intellect offers a consistent alternative to the dilemma of materialism and post-Cartesian dualism. It also argues that in their own theoretical context, Aquinas' arguments for the materiality of the human soul and immateriality of the intellect provide a strong justification of his position. However, that theoretical context is rather "alien" to ours in contemporary philosophy. The conclusion of the paper will point in the direction of what can be done (...) to render Aquinas's position more palatable to contemporary philosophers. (shrink)

Common representational content allows the Buridanian classification of human concepts discussed in the fourth chapter, which provides the first thoroughgoing, systematic survey of Buridan’s conception of a mental language. The chapter discusses the divisions of concepts into syncategorematic and categorematic, simple and complex, absolute and connotative, and singular and common concepts. Besides presenting these classifications, the chapter provides a detailed discussion of the idea of conceptual complexity as semantic compositionality, its role in Buridan’s nominalist program of “ontological reduction,” and his (...) precarious positioning of his account of the distinction between the representational contents of universal and singular concepts “somewhere between” those of Ockham and Aquinas. The discussion relates the emerging issues to contemporary concerns in the philosophy of mind and language, such as the possibility of forming genuinely singular concepts and simple substantial concepts that would allow some terms of our language to function as rigid designators; the differences between consciousness and mental content; and the problem of universal representation without real universals. (shrink)

“The expression ‘free logic’ is an abbreviation for the phrase ‘free of existence assumptions with respect to its terms, general and singular’.”1 Classical quantification theory is not a free logic in this sense, as its standard formulations commonly assume that every singular term in every model is assigned a referent, an element of the universe of discourse. Indeed, since singular terms include not only singular constants, but also variables2, standard quantification theory may be regarded as involving even the assumption of (...) the existence of the values of its variables, in accordance with Quine’s famous dictum: “to be is to be the value of a variable”. (shrink)

The third chapter discusses how Buridan’s conception of mental language provides the grounding for the objectivity and universality of logic despite the radical conventionality of written and spoken languages. Buridan’s conception, since it is based on the Aristotelian idea of the uniformity of natural human capacities in all individual humans, is nothing like modern psychologism, the kind heavily criticized by Frege. Indeed, Buridan’s mental language is not a “private language” criticized by Wittgenstein. On Buridan’s conception, the naturally representative units of (...) human mental language, namely, human concepts, are not inter-subjectively inaccessible private mental states; on the contrary, they are common to us all in our thinking. Of course, our concepts, being individual acts of individual minds are singular token-symbols, but they are common in their representational content: in what and how they represent for all humans. This is precisely the ground for their intersubjective accessibility as well as for the objectivity and universality of logic. (shrink)

Having seen the limitations of a reconstruction of Buridan’s semantics in terms of a modified quantification theory, this chapter begins engaging Buridan’s theory in its own terms, starting with a detailed discussion of the semantic properties of terms. The discussion moves from a brief discussion of Buridan’s distinction between immediate and ultimate signification, to Buridan’s theory of reference, namely, supposition, and oblique reference, namely, appellation. The chapter discusses suppositional descents as distinguishing quantifier-scopes, numerical quantification, and appellation in temporal and modal (...) contexts, as well as Buridan’s peculiar theory of appellatio rationis, the theory of oblique reference to concepts in intentional contexts. (shrink)

This chapter provides a brief survey of Buridan’s reliabilist epistemology, contrasting it with skeptical challenges of his time, and comparing it with modern responses to similar skeptical challenges in modern philosophy, arguably stemming from the controversies of Buridan’s time. In particular, the chapter argues that the sort of “Demon-skepticism” modern readers are familiar with from Descartes was made conceptually possible precisely by the emergence of late-medieval nominalist semantics, and that the modern strategies responding to the skeptical challenge, exemplified by the (...) works of Thomas Reid and most recently John Greco, originate in the epistemic principles of Buridan. (shrink)

This chapter provides a systematic discussion of Buridan’s nominalist semantics of propositions and sentential nominalizations. The chapter argues that despite its incompleteness, Buridan’s theory is still “nominalism’s best shot” at a semantics of propositions without buying into a philosophically and theologically dubious ontology of dicta, enuntiabilia, complexe significabilia, real propositions, or states of affairs.

Contemporary "essentialism", if we want to provide a succinct, yet sufficiently rigorous characterization, may be summarized in the thesis that some common terms are rigid designators. [1] By the quotation marks I intend to indicate that I regard this as a somewhat improper (though, of course, permitted) usage of the term (after all, nomina significant ad placitum [2]). In contrast to this, essentialism, properly so-called, is the Aristotelian doctrine summarizable in the thesis--as we shall see, no less rigorous in its (...) own theoretical context--that things have essences. (shrink)

Saint Anselm’s proof for God’s existence in his Proslogion, as the label “ontological” retrospectively hung on it indicates, is usually treated as involving some sophisticated problem of, or a much less sophisticated tampering with, the concept of existence. In this paper I intend to approach Saint Anselm’s reasoning from a somewhat different angle.

Thomas of Sutton was one of the earliest, and by all measures one of the most astute defenders of St. Thomas Aquinas’ characteristic theological and philosophical doctrines. As usual with medieval thinkers, we have little information regarding Sutton’s life..

Lo studio intende mettere in evidenza l'ambiguità della nozione di unità, intesa come entità numerica, con la nozione di unità quale sinonimo di essere. Sul primo concetto verte la parte iniziale dello studio, alla quale segue l'esame del significato ontologico di «uno». Le considerazioni fatte guidano l'A. a valutare i rapporti di relazione fra le nozioni di essere e uno, e quelle di sostanzialità, identità e semplicità in Tommaso. La gerarchia ontologica che ha al vertice l'essere assoluto e l'assoluta unità (...) implica la paradossale impossibilità di «significare» e definire la divinità. (shrink)

“The problem of universals” in general is a historically variable bundle of several closely related, yet in different conceptual frameworks rather differently articulated metaphysical, logical, and epistemological questions, ultimately all connected to the issue of how universal cognition of singular things is possible. How do we know, for example, that the Pythagorean theorem holds universally, for all possible right triangles? Indeed, how can we have any awareness of a potential infinity of all possible right triangles, given that we could only (...) see a finite number of actual ones? How can we universally indicate all possible right triangles with the phrase ‘right triangle’? Is there something common to them all signified by this phrase? If so, what is it, and how is it related to the particular right triangles? The medieval problem of universals is a logical, and historical, continuation of the ancient problem generated by Plato's (428-348 B.C.) theory answering such a bundle of questions, namely, his theory of Ideas or Forms. (shrink)