Non Est Natura Sine Persona. The Issue Of Uninstantiated Universals From Late Antiquity To The Early Middle Ages

Abstract

[ The aim of this chapter is to see what thirteenth-century academics themselves thought about the delimitation of the discipline of logic. It is not possible to delimit thirteenth-century logic from other university disciplines by means of the oral and written genres employed. Knowledge was transmitted by much the same means in all disciplines-handbooks, literal commentaries, questions, and super-questions. In the thirteenth century there were several competing views about how to define the subject-matter of logic. The backbone of logic was the Aristotelian Organon . The border-line between logic and grammar was a little fuzzy. Both operated with the notion of signification, both could dispense with knowing what entities would fall under an actual categorematic term, but they both needed to be able to distinguish between particular and universal terms, alias proper and common names. Keywords:Aristotelian Organon ; genres; thirteenth-century logic , This introductory chapter illustrates some of the challenges that have confronted philosophers of medieval logic in recent years. It first provides a brief sketch of the efforts to interpret William of Ockham's doctrine of supposition as a doctrine of quantification along the lines of modern standard logic. While other medieval philosophers' logical theories have received attention by modern philosophers working in the analytic tradition, attention paid to Ockham's supposition theory has outstripped most else. The author proposes a typology of methodological approaches to the study of medieval logic. The four types are: 1. rational reconstruction, 2. historical reconstruction, 3. history of applied logic, and 4. social history. Each of these types are outlined in the chapter. Keywords:medieval logicians; Ockham; supposition theory ]