William of Sherwood's Treatise on Syncategorematic Words (review)

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 403 William of Sherwood's Treatise on Syncategorematic Words trans, with intro, and notes by Norman Kretzmann. (Minneapolis. University Press, 1968. Pp. xm+ 173) Already known by his William of Sherwood's Introduction to Logic (Minneapolis: University Press, 1966), the translator offers us an advanced treatise on Medieval logic, the Syncategoremata of William of Sherwood, published in Medieval Studies, III (1941). Once more we are acquainted with scholastic logic of which we knew already the Tractatus Syncategorematum of Peter of Spain translated by Joseph Mullally and Roland Houde and published by the Marquette University Press in 1964. Thanks to the diligent work of ,the translator, the notes and the index, the reading of this difficult treatise becomes relatively easy. The translator did well by keeoing the latin equivalent of the expressions, prepositions, adverbs, conjunctions analysed by the treatise. What is the object of this logical work? William of Sherwood, in a short introduction, answers this question: the objects are these secondary parts of a statement (enuntiatio) which "are determinations of principal parts (the substantival name and the verb) insofar as they are subjects or predicates." In other words, the syncategorematic words (syncategoremeta ) with which W. of Sherwood is dealing do not mean something which belongs to things but results from the "mind of the speaker" (p. 118). For a contemporary logician, the syncategorematic words signify the structure of language, the syntactical elements of it; for a medieval thinker, they express all the entia ration&, the logical entities of thought. As a matter of fact, both speak of the same thing in a different mentality: on the one hand nominalism, on the other hand conceptualism. Anyway, the specifically logical doctrines are almost the same. Consequently, it is still very fruitful to go back to these treatises of the Middle Ages. The following topics are dealts with: words which determine the distributivity of the predicate, "Every" or "All" (omnis), "Whole" (totum), "Both" (uterque), "of Every sort" (quaelibet), "No" (nullus), "Nothing" (nihil), "Neither" (neutrum)---these sync~tegorematic words correspond to quantifiers; "But" (praeter), "Alone" (solus), "Only" (tantum)---these syneategorematie words introduce the implicitly compound propositions of the Scholastic logicians; "Is" (est)---it is syncategorematie insofar as it signifies a composition; otherwise, it is not; "Necessarily" (necessario), "Contingently" (contingenter)----these words introduce modal propositions; "Not" (non), "If" (si), "unless" (nisi), "and" (et)---these words correspond to the connectives of the propositional logic. One word "but that" (quin) is rather a grammatical expression than a logical one. The same has to be said of "he.... an", which correspond to "Whether" or "Or." Many subtile analyses distinguish the several uses of the syncategorematic words. Many sophisms are proposed and solved thanks to the distinctions. It is evident that these analyses are made in an epistemological context which implies Metaphysics. E. WINANCE Claremont Graduate School Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto. Isaac Cardoso, ,4 Study in Seventeenth Century Marranism and Jewish ,4pologetics. (Columbia University Press, New York. xx+524 pp.) This excellent scholarly study of the amazing career of Isaac Cardoso, 1603/4-1683, brings to life a much neglected current in 17th century intellectual history, that of ...