In this essay I argue that Albert would reject the need for a separate fourth mode of common personal supposition, and that his view of merely confused supposition has not been fully explicated by modern scholars. I first examine the various examples of conjunct descent given by modern scholars from his Perutilis logica , and show that Albert clearly adopts it in resolving the sophistic examples involved. Second, I explicate the view of merely confused supposition that Albert defends in his (...) Sophismata , and then attempt to answer the question: which view of merely confused supposition was his final view, the view articulated in the Perutilis logica or the view in the Sophismata ? I conclude that based upon his Sophismata view of merely confused supposition, Albert came to realize the logical strength his revised theory of personal supposition afforded, and consequently, that he is one of the earliest 14th-century logicians to adopt conjunct terminal descent to resolve various sophisms, a move which gave his theory of personal supposition a logical symmetry having two sorts of propositional descents to singulars, and two sorts of terminal descents to singulars. (shrink)

Albert of Saxony was one of the great logicians of the Middle Ages, on a par with William Ockham and John Buridan. The Twenty-Five Disputed Questions on Logic treat of central issues in logic, both then and now, such as the nature of meaning, of universals, of truth, and of tense and modality; and the quality and quantity of propositions, the role of negation, and the relations of contradiction and equivalence between them. Dr. Fitzgerald has studied Albert's work extensively, and (...) previously edited the Twenty-Five Disputed Questions from the original manuscripts. This translation makes available for the first time in English this careful and exemplary examination of logical notions by an outstanding medieval thinker.-Stephen Read, University of St. Andrews. (shrink)

The essay first makes some observations on the general interrelationship between the logical writings of Albert and Buridan. Second, it gives an account of a ‘semantic logical model’ for analyzing complex subject terms in some basic categorical propositions which is defended by Albert of Saxony, and briefly recounts Buridan's criticisms of that model. Finally, the essay maintains that the Albertian model is typically compatible with, and a further development of, what is called by a late-fourteenth century anonymous scholar ‘the English-Rule’ (...) but the ‘determinable/determinate’ grammatical model defended by Buridan is not. (shrink)

In the essay I first argue that Albert ofSaxony's defense of perceptual ``directrealism'' is in fact a forerunner of contemporaryforms of ``process reliabilist''epistemologies. Second, I argue that Albert's defenseof perceptual direct realism has aninteresting consequence for his philosophy oflanguage. His semantic notion of `naturalsignification' does not require any semanticintermediary entity called a `concept' or`description', to function as the directsignificatum of written or spoken termsfor them to designate perceptual objects. AlthoughAlbert is inspired by Ockham's mentalact theory, I conclude that Albert seemsto (...) be striking out in a very new direction. (shrink)

The essay casts doubt upon the view that Albert was criticizing or was dependent upon Thomas Manlevelt's logico-philosophical views, and counter argues that it is in fact Manlevelt who knows and cites Albert's views in his recently edited Porphyrian Questions, rather than vice versa. The argument for this conclusion proceeds in two stages. First, it is argued that the brief comment Albert makes about ‘conjunct descent’ in treating the definition of merely confused supposition his Perutilis Logica does not conclusively show (...) that Albert is criticizing the logico-philosophical view of Thomas Manlevelt, as the notion of ‘conjunct descent’ is already present in the work of Heytesbury. Hence, Albert may have been referring to him, since the unique contribution of Thomas Manlevelt to the definition of merely confused personal supposition appears completely unknown to Albert. Second, it is argued that the views in the Porphyrian Questions on the nature of the continuum, quantity, and disposi.. (shrink)

This book will be of interest to advanced students in philosophy, historians of logic and medieval philosophy, as well as logicians who wish to understand the significant contribution that Robert Kilwardby's thirteenth-century commentary on Aristotle's Prior Analytics made to those fields. Paul Thom's analysis treats Kilwardby's views on propositions, syllogisms, reduction, necessity, and contingency with depth and finesse, revealing what he takes to be the Aristotelian ontology underlying them. Helpful summaries remind the reader of the important formal and ontological results (...) of each chapter. The book is a genuine logical treat, despite a misleading typo of '' for '' at page 108, l.26, and the fact that most readers will need a good, strong magnifying glass for some of Brill's printed type and superscripts. I found only a couple of drawbacks. (shrink)