Ockham's Theory Research Articles

The Philosophy of Piers Plowman: The Ethics and Epistemology of Love in Late Medieval Thought by David Strong

Reviewed by: The Philosophy of Piers Plowman: The Ethics and Epistemology of Love in Late Medieval Thoughtby David Strong Cheryl Taylor Strong, David, The Philosophy of Piers Plowman: The Ethics and Epistemology of Love in Late Medieval Thought( The New Middle Ages), New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017; hardback; pp. vii, 224; R.R.P. US $109.00; ISBN 9783319519814. This book explores correlations between Piers Plowmanand the teachings of Duns Scotus, William Ockham, and other philosophers whose works were prominent in Langland's lifetime. Analysis focuses on the will (allegorically Will, the Dreamer) as possessing freedom and natural dominance within a subordinate matrix of reason and the other cognitive faculties. Following an introduction that announces this thesis and a chapter that surveys relevant aspects of fourteenth-century thought, The Philosophy of Piers Plowmanselectively traces Will's intellectual, moral, and spiritual journey through the B-text. Some of the synergies detected [End Page 224]in passing, for example with contemporary contemplative works like The Cloud of Unknowing(pp. 15–16), suggest directions for future research. Meanwhile this study's obvious though unstated foundation on a present-day Christian faith has inspired an interpretation that may prove as fruitful in the long term as sceptical readings drawing on recent literary and social theories. More accessible and engaging in its later chapters, David Strong's book poses a refreshing challenge to the critical status quo. A compressed version of the argument is as follows: Chapters 3 and 4 consider Piers's earlier Passūs as dedicated to social, political, and legal rights and freedoms, the acquisition of knowledge, and the limits of cognition. Chapter 3 examines Will's encounters with Holy Church, Mede, Conscience, and Reason. Strong understands these as demonstrating, in accordance with Ockham's theory of individual rights, that singular acts of charity 'can supersede socially adjudicated mores' (p. 54). Chapter 4 applies Scotus's and Ockham's distinction between 'intuitive' and 'abstractive' cognition to Will's conversations in the middle Passūs with Piers, the two friars, Study, and Ymagynatyf. By contrast, Chapters 5 to 7 of this book focus on the affective concerns of later Passūs as privileging the need to love rather than know God (p. 7). In arguing for the will's primacy over reason and the sensory appetites, Chapter 5 compares selected contemporary ideas to Langland's distinctive formulations as mediated by Animaand Liberum Arbitrium. Chapter 6 proceeds to elucidate Will's further encounters in Passūs 16 to 17 as showing how, by privileging charity, 'a properly functioning will' furthers the simple goal of loving God rightly and in himself (pp. 135–36). After arguing for analogies between Scotus's affectio commodiand affectio iustitiae, and the choice that Will must make between personal ambition and working diligently with others, Chapter 6 skilfully articulates Scotus's and Ockham's overlapping views on cooperation between human faculties as producing morally upright actions (pp. 150–58). Application of these ideas to negative examples like the drunken Brewer leads to the conclusion that, since the divine transcends the rational, Langland's characters attain wisdom only when society judges them to be foolish (p. 155). This book's analysis of Passus 20 again opposes the scholarly trend by seeing Will's interlocutor Need as an immoral as much as amoral figure. Countering Need and his effects therefore depends ultimately on human choice, that is, on Will. The seventh and most articulate chapter of The Philosophy of Piers Plowmanseeks to justify what most critics regard as the anti-climactic ending to Will's quest. Kynde's simple counsel: 'Lerne to love […] and leef alle othere' (Passus 20, line 208), overflows with the plenitude of Will's discoveries throughout his wanderings and the reader's throughout the poem. Will has rebounded from one personified figure of learning to another, only to find that human beings' rational faculties cannot guarantee fulfilment (p. 171). Accordingly, he abandons his quest in Unity, and Conscience—a faculty that transcends reason—takes his place. With a laugh that marks his realization of the underlying goodness of their vocation, [End Page 225]Conscience grants entrance also to the friars, whose commitment...

L'essentialisme de Guillaume d'Ockham by Magali Roques

Reviewed by: L'essentialisme de Guillaume d'Ockham by Magali Roques Jenny Pelletier Magali Roques. L'essentialisme de Guillaume d'Ockham. Études de philosophie médiévalé. Series editor, Marta Cristiani, et al. Paris: Librarie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2016. Pp. 228. Paper, €24.00. In this short but dense monograph, Roques sets out to fill a significant lacuna in the literature on William of Ockham's logic, epistemology, and metaphysics: his theory of real definitions. Remarkably, the subject has received little attention, given that nominal definitions, specifically in connection to complex connotative concepts in mental language and their role in Ockham's ontological reductionism, have been a central focus since the early 1980s. One reason for this oversight may be the historical association between real definitions and the realist view that essences are universal entities. Ockham, a resemblance nominalist, holds that all essences are individual entities; this does not, as Roques's present work attests, entail any anti-essentialism on his part. Substances, since Aristotle, have been understood to have essences and are, therefore, definable by real definitions that express the necessary properties predicable of those substances. Roques's guiding question is: is Ockham's theory of real definitions essentialist? Outlining various ways that medievalists and contemporary analytic philosophers have conceived of essentialism (she quickly discounts medievalists' "equivocal" use of the term), she focuses on Quine's description of Aristotelian essentialism as the thesis that certain necessary properties exist independently of the way we name or conceive them. What follows is a detailed, comprehensive analysis of real definitions in Ockham's thought. Opening the central section of the book, the second chapter considers the semantics of real definitions. Roques gives a close reading of an under-discussed text, distinction 8 of the Ordinatio, that examines various semantic features of genus terms ("animal") and difference terms ("rational"), which, if formed into complex mental concepts or expressions, make up real definitions ("rational animal"). It emerges that a complete real definition explicates all the essential parts of the substance defined, confirming that only substances composed of matter and form(s) are definable. She ends with the suggestive but unelaborated claim that Ockham's criterion of ontological commitment could be fulfilled by the set of propositions in which definitions, real or nominal, are adequately predicated of their definienda. The third chapter is dedicated to an epistemology of real definitions. A primary interest here is to determine how we come to evidently cognize propositions in which real definitions are predicated of their definienda ("every human being is a rational animal"). Because Ockham thinks that these propositions are only discoverable by experience, whether this is in fact possible for human cognizers in this earthly life, she argues that they are analytic and contingent truths that are nonetheless a posteriori. She also discusses the status of real definitions in the production of scientific knowledge of natural substances. The fourth and final chapter explores the metaphysics of essences or quiddities, which, for Roques, ultimately amounts to an analysis of Ockham's reductionist thesis on the mereological structure of composite substances. The essence of a composite substance is identical to its essential parts, its matter and form(s), at least when those parts are naturally unified and in the same place despite the logical or metaphysical possibility that God separate them. In a condensed conclusion, Roques finally returns to Quine, convincingly arguing that Ockham's theory of real definitions is essentialist. Substances, or essences, have necessary properties irrespective of our naming or conceiving. If the existing Socrates is a man, he is necessarily a man, a rational animal. All too rapidly, she admits, she compares Ockham's essentialism to Kripke's (all necessary properties are essential) and Kit Fine's (every essential property is necessary, but not every necessary property is essential) without decisively aligning him with one over the other. The book is well-written in lucid French. Her target audience, however, is specialists. Non-experts will encounter technical but crucial terminology that she does not explain ("supposition" and "adequate object of the intellect") or explains later than one would [End Page 347] expect ("connotation"). While she clearly and readily detects compelling philosophical connections, she often refrains from...

William of Ockham's Early Theory of Property Rights in Context. By JonathanRobinson. Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions, 166. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Pp. xxiv + 396. $146.00.

Religious Studies ReviewVolume 40, Issue 4 p. 224-224 History of Christianity (Early) William of Ockham's Early Theory of Property Rights in Context. By Jonathan Robinson. Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions, 166. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Pp. xxiv + 396. $146.00. Jeffrey C. Witt, Jeffrey C. Witt Loyola University MarylandSearch for more papers by this author Jeffrey C. Witt, Jeffrey C. Witt Loyola University MarylandSearch for more papers by this author First published: 05 December 2014 https://doi.org/10.1111/rsr.12177_10Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Volume40, Issue4December 2014Pages 224-224 RelatedInformation

Ockham on Supposition Theory, Mental Language, and Angelic Communication

In my previous work on Ockham's theory of supposition, I have argued that it is best understood as a theory of sentential meaning, i.e., as an apparatus for the interpretation of sentences. In this paper, I address the challenge posed to this interpretation of Ockham's theory by the (presumed) existence of different kinds of supposition in mental language through the lenses of Ockham's theory of angelic communication. I identify two potentially problematic implications of Ockham's account of mental language as allowing for different kinds of supposition: the existence of non-significative supposition in mental language; and the possibility of ambiguous mental sentences. I then turn to angelic communication and examine these two issues from that point of view, concluding that there cannot be non-significative supposition in mental language, but also that there may still be room for sentential ambiguity in mental language.

Formalizing Medieval Logic: Suppositio, Consequentiae and Obligationes (review)

Reviewed by: Formalizing Medieval Logic: Suppositio, Consequentiae and Obligationes Mary Sirridge Catarina Dutilh-Novaes . Formalizing Medieval Logic: Suppositio, Consequentiae and Obligationes. Logic, Epistemology and the Unity of Science, 7. Dordrecht: Springer, 2007. Pp. xii + 316. Cloth, $169.00. The overarching aim of this excellent book is to demonstrate the common ground between medieval logic and logical theories of the twentieth century by analyzing some important medieval approaches to three important topics in medieval logic (suppositio, consequentiae, and obligationes) and then showing that in each case, once we determine what is really going on in the medieval theory, it can be formalized in such a way as to show how it resembles one or more developments in twentieth-century logical theory. Analysis in terms of modern logical theory has a lot to offer the study of medieval logical theories, the author claims, and twentieth-century theory can learn some interesting lessons from examining its medieval counterparts. Much of the material in these specific discussions has been presented in earlier versions in the author's published articles. "The Philosophy of Formalization" (part 4), however, is new. English translations are used in the text, though the Latin is supplied in the footnotes. Mature supposition theory (Ockham, Burley, and Buridan) is presented, not as a theory of reference or quantification, but as a unified theory of "algorithmic hermeneutics" (77); it allows us to calculate systematically the possible meanings of a proposition as a whole from the meanings of its component parts, with an eye to "distinguishing" the different contents that can be asserted (denotatur) by speaking, writing, or thinking the expression. Such multiple meanings may be due to allowing terms to be self-referential (material supposition) or to stand for species or the like (simple supposition), but also to the sorts of ambiguities of quantifier scope, modal operators, and the like that regularly turn up in discussions of fallacies and sophisms. Some results agree substantially with earlier analyses of Ockham's logic. Ockham's theory ultimately amounts to "an extensional theory of intensions" (31), and the distinction among personal, simple, and material supposition turns out to be more or less functionally independent of the modes of personal supposition. Still, it is a very interesting metatheoretical point that the two parts of the theory are co-ordinate strategies for achieving a single objective: the calculation of propositional meanings. Moreover, the understanding of the distinctive usage of denotatur is not only new and significant; it sounds right. Part 2, "Buridan's notion of consequentia," energetically pursues a search for twentieth-century near-relatives to Buridan's theory of entailment, an "intriguing combination of semantics and pragmatics" (113). Buridan's "token-based semantics" resembles the "two-dimensional semantics of Kaplan and Stalnaker," on which evaluation of the truth of a proposition involves both its content (abstract meaning) and its particular context of [End Page 469] utterance. Buridan's theory of consequence resembles the "hybrid" view of Shapiro (121); there is a broader notion of consequence (material consequence) similar to Etchemendy's "representational" approach to logical consequence that extends to entailments due to specific intensional content and to the inferability of one proposition from another due to pragmatic factors (inferences involving self-referential propositions or indexicals); a subset of these are valid on the basis of their logical form (formal consequence). One interesting side benefit of comparing Buridan's theory to its twentieth-century relatives is that it becomes clear that his token-based ontology, useful as it is for dramatizing self-reference, needs to be abandoned in favor of linguistic types and schemata if sense is be made of his theory of logical consequence, even if we allow him to avail himself of the notion of "equiform propositions." "Obligationes as Formal Games" (part 3) presents the theories of Burley, Swynshed, and Strode, in which the Respondent must accept or deny propositions put forward by the Opponent based on their relation to an initial supposition (positum), in modern game-theoretical terms as variants of a game of logical consistency, not as exercises for school boys, explorations of counterfactuals, or just a means of dealing with sophismata and Liar-like paradoxes. The game-theoretical analysis of Burley's theory...

An Intensional Interpretation of Ockham's Theory of Supposition

According to a widespread view in medieval scholarship, theories of supposition are the medieval counterparts of theories of reference, and are thus essentially extensional theories. I propose an alternative interpretation: theories of supposition are theories of properties of terms, but whose aim is to allow for the interpretation of sentences. This holds especially of Ockham’s supposition theory, which is the main object of analysis in this paper. In particular, I argue for my intensional interpretation of his theory on the basis of two key-phrases in his Summa Logicae: ‘denotatur’ and ‘propositio est distinguenda’. Finally, I offer a reconstruction of his theory as a set of instructions to be carried out in order to generate the possible readings of (certain) sentences.

Ockham on Judgment, Concepts, and The Problem of Intentionality

Introduction In this paper I examine William Ockham's theory of judgment — in particular, his account of the nature and ontological Status of its objects. ‘Judgment’ (Latin iudicio) is the expression Ockham and other medieval thinkers use to refer to a certain subset of what philosophers nowadays call ‘propositional attitudes’. Judgments include all and only those mental states in which a subject not only entertains a given propositional content, but also takes some positive stance with respect to its truth. For Ockham, therefore, as for other medievals, a judgment is a type of mental State that includes attitudes such as belief, knowledge, opinion, doubt, faith, and so on.

Francis of Marchia and William of Ockham: Fragments from a Dialogue

AbstractIt is well known that Francis of Marchia and William of Ockham joined Michael of Cesena's rebellion against the pope, together escaping from Avignon and signing documents supporting Cesena's defence of Franciscan poverty. The relationship between the works of the two thinkers, on the other hand, is the subject of ongoing investigation. After discussing Francis' rejection in his Commentary on the Sentences of Ockham's theory of quantity, this paper shows how Francis' Improbatio became a source for Ockham's Opus Nonaginta Dierum. Building on Offler's ground-breaking critical edition of the latter work, it is argued that Ockham made extensive use of Francis' Improbatio, even though on several points he felt it necessary to reformulate the arguments of his confrère or even to substantially modify his positions. The two Franciscan theologians differed deeply both in their basic philosophical commitments and in their methodological attitude. These differences emerged even when they were—so to speak—fighting on the same front.

Ockham as a divine-command theorist

Although this thesis is denied by much recent scholarship, Ockham holds that the ultimate ground of a moral judgement's truth is a divine command, rather than natural or non-natural properties. God could assign a different moral value not only to every exterior act, but also to loving God. Ockham does allow that someone who has not had access to revelation can make correct moral judgements. Although her right reason dictates what God in fact commands, she need not know that God so commands. Ockham's divine-command theory plays an important role in the shift away from a nature-based ethics, and it anticipates contemporary problems concerning truth in meta-ethics.

The Medieval Roots of Reliabilist Epistemology: Albert of Saxony's View of Immediate Apprehension

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.

El intelecto en Guillero de Ockham

The ontological theory about the two aristotelical intellects, created in the 13th century, finishes finally its itinerary with Ockham's epistemological theory. The realistic-propositionalist Ockham's epistemological theory reduces the intellect to a connotation: intellect denotes the soul, or better, the thinking subject whole and one; but connotes the man's cognitival function. The man is essentially free and directs his knowledge to its object, it is life and activity; but the denoted acognitival function is passive.

Ockham on Difference in Category

OCKHAM ON DIFFERENCE IN CATEGORY It is easy enough to show why Ockham's discussion of the categories is important simply by listing the many significant topics that come up in the context of his writings about them: e.g., the account of first and second substance, relations, individual inhérents, mathematics and infinitesimal, place and many more.1 In the present paper, however, I want to concentrate on Ockham's idea of what categories are: that is, his theory of the categories as such rather than what, however interesting in its own right, he might have to say about individual topics under the various category headings. His category theory (in this sense) is, it seems to me, surprisingly less fully articulated than one might expect. In Sections 1 and 2, I try to sort out some of the problems associated with that. In Sections 3 through 5, I take up the issue of the basic character of the categories as a classification, and its implications for dealing with certain recent controversies about Ockham's semantics. Section 6 provides a brief summary of my conclusions. While I end up raising more questions than I answer, the idea that there is still more to be learned even about well-known medieval philosophers is not at all out of line with the spirit ofJerry Etzkorn's life-long inquiry into the sources. 'There are extensive discussions of these topics throughout Ockham's works. I mean to concentrate on texts primarily directed to the categories: Expositio in Librum Praedtcamentorum Aristotelis (OPh. II), Summa Logicae (OPh. I) and Quodlibeta (OTh. IX). I more often cite the latter two because they are not explicit commentaries. They are also more accessible to the non-specialist because of reliable translations: M. J. Loux (trans.), Ockhams 's Theory of Terms (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974) and A. J. Freddoso and Henry Schuurman (trans.), Ockham's Theory of Propositions (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980); Freddoso and William Kelley (trans.), William of Ockham: Cuodlibetal Questions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991) 2 vols. 97 Franciscan Studies, Vol. 56 (1998) 98John Boler There are two general questions to be asked of any Aristotelian theory of the categories:2 (1) How are the categories derived (and/or distinguished)? and (2) What are the ontological consequences of that? My primary concern in this paper will be with the anomalies in Ockham's answer to the first question; but a brief sketch of his answer to the second may be helpful as background. On this issue, fortunately, Ockham is reasonably clear and consistent. The categories, for Ockham are a classification of concepts and he insists that no distinction of entities (other than concepts) follows upon that classification. That is, there are no categorial things (res) in his system.3 But while Ockham vigorously denies that there are categorially distinct things, he is equally insistent on the relevance of categories to ontology. The main value of studying Aristotle's book On The Categories, he says, is in avoiding the fallacy of Figura* That is to say, one should learn from that book that (surface) similarities and differences in the structure of affirmative predications are not matched by or mapped on differences among or within things outside the mind. "Brunellus is a donkey" and "Brunellus is a parent" are both (on the surface) in quid predications; and "Brunellus is brown" and "Brunellus is similar (to Eyore)" are both predications quale. But they all have, for Ockham, quite different (deep) semantic structures; and the appropriate analysis of these structures, he thinks, allows one to protect both a nominalistic ontology and an Aristotelian scheme of essential and accidental predication.5 2I shall be dealing throughout with Aristotelian rather than Kantian categories. Roughly put, the former have to do with the simple or basic explicit elements in language or thought as expressible; the latter with the presuppositions of our conceptual scheme. ^Expos. praed., ch. 10, #6; Quodl. V, q. 23. Ockham recognizes only two basic kinds of extramental thing (res): individual substances and certain equally individual qualitative inhérents. His commitment to the latter derives not from the categories but his analysis of...

Supposition and Truth in Ockham's Mental Language

In this paper, Ockham's theory of an ideal language of thought is used to illuminate problems of interpretation of his theory of truth. The twentieth century idea of logical form is used for finding out what kinds of atomic sentences there are in OckhamOs mental language. It turns out that not only the theory of modes of supposition, but also the theory of supposition in general is insufficient as a full theory of truth. Rather, the theory of supposition is a theory of reference, which can help in the determination of truth values within the scope of simple predications. Outside this area, there are interesting types of sentences, whose truth does not depend on whether the terms supposit for the same things or not for the same things.

Ockham, Adams and Connotation: A Critical Notice of Marilyn Adams, William Ockham

If I had written this book, I could die a happy man. I did not write it, but still I can join mediaevalists everywhere in celebrating its publication. In what follows, I will first discuss the contents of Adams's book (Section I), its intended audience (Section II), and some defects in the actual production of the volumes (Section III). Then I will turn to theoretical matters, and discuss certain difficulties and suggestions I find in Ockham's theory of connotation (Sections IV-VI).

On Ockham's Supposition Theory and Karger's Rule of Inference

ON OCKHAM'S SUPPOSITION THEORY AND KARGER'S RULE OF INFERENCE I. INTRODUCTION Since 1952, there has been a considerable amount of discussion of William of Ockham's theory of the modes of common personal supposition (hereafter, following Elizabeth Karger, "TM"). The main interpretative question regarding TM has been the question, What is Ockham up to in presenting TM? Until fairly recently, an expanding body of literature on the subject has been closing in on one particular way of answering this question.1 The answer that has been gaining acceptance is this: Ockham's purpose in presenting TM is to provide a theory of quantification. The main claims of this (until recently) widely accepted interpretation of Ockham (which interpretation I will call "The Quantification Theory Interpretation of TM," or "QTI") are the following. 1 See, for example, Marilyn McCord Adams, "What Does Ockham Mean by 'Supposition'?" Notre Dame Journal of Symbolic Logic 17 (1976): 375-91; Philotheus Boehner, Medieval Logic (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1952); Michael J. Fitzgerald, "Ockham's Implicit Priority of Analysis Rule?" Franciscan Studies 38 (1973): 213-19; Alfred J. Freddoso, "Ockham's Theory of Truth Conditions," essay contained in William Ockham, Summa logicae, Part II, trans. Alfred Freddoso and Henry Schuurman (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980) (hereafter, "Ockham, SL II"); Michael J. Loux, "Ockham on Generality," essay contained in William Ockham, Summa logicae, Part I, trans. Michael J. Loux (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974) (hereafter , "Ockham, SL I"); Gareth B. Matthews, "Ockham's Supposition Theory and Modern Logic," Philosophical Review 73 (1964): 91-9; Ernest A. Moody, Truth and Consequence in Medieval Logic (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Co., 1980); Graham Priest and Stephen Read, "The Formalization of Ockham's Theory of Supposition," Mind 86 (1977): 109-13; Graham Priest and Stephen Read, "Merely Confused Supposition," Franciscan Studies 40 (1980) : 265-97; Paul Vincent Spade, "Priority of Analysis and the Predicates of ?'-form Sentences ," Franciscan Studies 36 (1976): 263-70; and Robert G. Turnbull, "Ockham's Nominalistic Logic: Some Twentieth Century Reflections," The New Scholasticism 36 (1962): 313-29. Ockham's Supposition Theory and Karger's Rule41 QTI: TM is meant to be a general analysis of quantified statements that provides, for each quantified statement, q, a "descent to particulars," i.e., a materially equivalent expansion to a statement , p, about individual things such that (i) ? contains no general terms, and (ii) ? has the same truth—conditions as q. Thus, for example, Ockham tells us that we can descend from the quantified statement 'Some man is an animal' to the following statement about individual things: 'This man is an animal, or that man is an animal, or...'. Similarly, he suggests that we can descend from the quantified statement 'Every man is an animal' to the conjunctive statement 'This man is an animal and that man is an animal and...'. There are, however, some problems facing QTI. These have been recognized and developed in the last fifteen years by several commentators.2 The difficulties are summarized by Gareth Matthews in roughly the following way:3 (1)When he discusses various descents to particulars from statements with general terms, Ockham never explicity claims that the statements about individual things to which he descends are equivalent to the statements from which they are derived.4 (2)Not all of the descents Ockham offers are in fact to equivalent statements; his descents under classic O-form statements are to particular statements that are clearly weaker than the general statements from which they are derived.5 (3)In Part II of his Summa logicae Ockham explicitly does provide truth-conditions for general statements—i.e., he gives a theory of quantification—and he does so without reference to TM; but he never there mentions that he is repeating a job that the has already taken care of, in a different manner, in an earlier work.6 2 Marilyn McCord Adams, William Ockham, vol. I (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987); Elizabeth Karger, "Modes of Personal Supposition: The Purpose and Usefulness of the Doctrine Within Ockham's Logic," Franciscan Studies 44 (1984): 87-106; Gareth B. Matthews, "Supposttio and Quantification in Ockham," Nous 7...

The Structure of Ockham's Moral Theory

THE STRUCTURE OF OCKHAM'S MORAL THEORY ?. Introduction Ockham's moral theory, like his nominalism, finds its place among the most notorious, and yet widely misunderstood, doctrines ofmedieval philosophy, (a) Many take Ockham's as the paradigm of"Divine Command Morality," according to which moral norms are entirely a function of the arbitrary choices of the free will of an omnipotent God. Paul Helm's recent comment is merely representative when he writes, What can be labelled an Ockhamist Divine Command Theory holds that morality is founded upon a free divine choice. If God commands fornication, then fornication is obligatory, and it is within God's power to do so. He could establish another moral order than the one he has in fact established and he could at any time order what he has actually forbidden.1 Maurice De Wulf had characterized Ockham's moral theory the same way at the beginning of the century: Applied to the Deity, this absolute autonomy of volition makes the Free Will of God the sovereign arbiter of moral good and evil. But if nothing is of itselfmorally good or evil, the study of nature can teach us nothing about morality.2 Likewise, Armand Maurer sees Ockham's doctrines ofdivine omnipo1 Paul Helm, "Introduction," in Divine Commands and Morality, Oxford University Press, 1981, 3. 2 Maurice De Wulf, History of Medieval Philosophy, translated by P. Coffey, Longmans, Green, and Co. 1909, 425. 2 MARILYN MCCORD ADAMS tence and free will so converging as to rob morality of its footing in nature. For he observes, Because God is omnipotent and absolutely free, he is not bound to impose a given set of laws upon men. We should not imagine him as ruled by an eternal or divine law from which human laws flow as necessary conclusions from premisses. The laws he imposes on men are completely arbitrary, so that he can change or annul them at will.3 and concludes that the moral code which binds humans is "not rooted in human nature."4 Again, Dom David Knowles contends, The methodological use of the absolute power of God is corollary of the emphasis on the absolute freedom of God first emphasized in a tendentious manner by Scotus. Ockham followed Duns here, stressing the primacy of the will and the concept of freedom both in God and man.... Acts are not good or bad of themselves, but solely because they are commanded or prohibited by God. Not only murder and adultery, but even hatred of God could become ethically good actions at God's commands.5 (b) Some felt the epistemological corollary of such Divine-Command Ethics to be scepticism about our natural knowledge of moral truths. Thus, De Wulf complains that for Ockham, "intelligence is powerless to instruct us on the requirements of the Divine Law...."6 Lamenting "Ockham's view of God's absolute power" and his use of it "with devastating effect to show the impossibility of discussing matters of faith," Leff protests that given "the sheer unrestricted limits ofHis omnipotence " and radical freedom, "anything was possible, and so there could be no means of knowing what He might will."7 Knowles, also, joins this chorus: 3 Armand Maurer, A History of Philosophy: Medieval Philosophy, Random House, 1962. 4 Maurer 287. 5 David Knowles, The Evolution of Medieval Thought, Random House, 1962, 324. 6 De Wulf 425. 7 Gordon Leff, Medieval Thought: St. Augustine to Ockham, Penguin Books, 1958, chap. 9, 289. The Structure of Ockham's Moral Theory3 as we know nothing by pure reason of God's attributes or way of acting , and as the first article of the creed is an assertion of the omnipotence of God, ethics becomes entirely dependent upon revelation, which is the only channel by which God's will becomes known to us.8 So, too, Helm: From this position Ockham could consistently only regard ethics as a matter of special divine revelation in Scripture or elsewhere, and not a matter of natural law discerned through reason or conscience.9 (c) The principal difficulty with this interpretation is that it overlooks Ockham's repeated reference to right reason in his most concentrated discussions ofmoral philosophy. Gilson...

Plenty of Nothing: Ockham's Commitment to Real Possibles

����� As Marilyn Adams discovers in the course ofher valuable article on Nominalism and Unreal Entities, Ockham's mature theory of concepts carries with it an ontological commitment to unreduced unactualized possibles.1 What we are thinking about when we think about horses in general cannot be real universal horse outside the mind or fictive horse posited by the mind itselfin 'objective' being, but neither is our concept horse restricted to past or present actual horses. It applies as well to merely possible horses, and for Ockham, eventually, as Adams shows, this means that there must be possible horses for the concept to apply to, fully determinate individual merely possible horses which cannot be reduced to aspects of actual horses or aspects ofthe mind itself. I think I am only spelling out what is implicit here when I say that, on this view, the act of intellection in which we exercise our universal concept horse is sort of mental viewing of each and every one of an infinite number of wholly distinct, fully individuated possible horses, and that when we say that all horses are animals we are somehow identifying each ofthese possible horses with one ofan even larger infinite number ofpossible animals. With some reason, given our usual sense of Ockham's philosophical temperament and given his ridicule of theories of concepts positing a little world ofoccult objectively existent things, Adams concludes that Ockham should have found this commitment to real possibles embarrassing: he should have found such unreduced, unactualized possibles even stranger than the occult entities posited by an objective

Alfred J. Freddoso. Ockham's theory of truth conditions. Ockham's theory of propositions, Part II of the Summa logicae, by William of Ockham, translated by Alfred J. Freddoso and Henry Schuurman with an introduction by Alfred J. Freddoso, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame and London1980, pp. 1–76.

Alfred J. Freddoso. Ockham's theory of truth conditions. Ockham's theory of propositions, Part II of the Summa logicae, by William of Ockham, translated by Alfred J. Freddoso and Henry Schuurman with an introduction by Alfred J. Freddoso, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame and London1980, pp. 1–76.

A Note on Ockham's Theory of the Modes of Common Personal Supposition

The last half of this century has seen an amazingly energetic and resourceful effort to understand Ockham's supposition theory. The result is that we are much more sophisticated in our approach to the subject today than anybody could have been before. Yet, despite the fact that we now have, not only critical editions and translations of Ockham's logic texts, but also elaborately formal reconstructions of the theory of supposition itself,1 there is no clear consensus about what Ockham was up to in presenting his theory of the Modes of Common Personal Supposition (hereafter, following Alfred Freddoso,2 MCPS). Beginning with the account Philotheus Boehner offers in his Medieval Logic,3 the clearest and most intriguing suggestion has been that Ockham's theory of MCPS is a theory of quantification. According to that theory both the subject term and the predicate term of each of the standard categorical propositions, A, E, I and O, are quantified, either explicitly, as is the case with the subject term of this A proposition,

Force of Words and Figures of Speech: The Crisis over Virtus Sermonis in the Fourteenth Century

FORCE OF WORDS AND FIGURES OF SPEECH: THE CRISIS OVER VIRTUS SERMONlS IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY On the Friday after Christmas in 1340 the Arts Faculty at the University ofParis, during the rectorship of Alain de Villa Colis, enacted a statute listing propositions and types of argumentation that should not be used in the schools by any master, bachelor, or scholar under pain of expulsion from the faculty forever.1 Most of the articles in that statute concerned arguments employing the phrase de virtute sermonis , to the effect that propositions taken from authoritative sources should not simply be called false, de virtute sermonis. This statute was identified in the fifteenth-century manuscript of the Chartularium as being directed against Ockhamist errors—a rubric repeated in Denifle's edition of the Chartulary and expanded upon by Michalski, who attempted to link the expression de virtute sermonis to Ockham's theory of language and personal supposition.2 That interpretation was subsequently rejected as highly unlikely by Boehner and Moody, but has been resurrected and defended by Ruprecht Paqué in his book-length study of this statute, and by T. K. Scott.3 1 Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis, ed. H. Denifle and E. Châtelain, Vol. II (Paris, 1891), 505-07, n. 1042, henceforth cited as CUP. 2 The relevant section of the manuscript of the Chartularium, whose somewhat topical structure was rearranged and added to in Denifle's edition, is Arch. Univ. Paris., Reg. 100 (formerly 94), p. 67, n. 59. C. Michalski, "Le problème de la volonté à Oxford et à Paris au XIVe siècle," in Studia Philosophica 2 (1937), 255-61. 3 Ph. Boehner, "Ockham's Theory of Supposition and the Notion of Truth," Franciscan Studies, 6 (1946), 261-92, reprinted in Collected Articles (St. Bonaventure, N.Y., 1958), 232-67; E. A. Moody, "Ockham, Buridan, and Nicholas of Autrecourt: The Parisian Statutes of 1339 and 1340," Franciscan Studies, 7 (1947), 113-46, reprinted in Studies in Medieval Philosophy, Science, ??8WILLIAM COURTENAY As has been established elsewhere,4 this statute was mislabeled and was not one of the two anti-Ockhamist statutes promulgated in the same period at Paris-one in September of 1339 that is still extant , and one early in 1341 that no longer exists, but which can be partially reconstructed from references to it in the 1341 oaths of the arts faculty and in the Nominalist defense of 1474. Even so, the 1340 statute with which we are here concerned did appear in the midst of a crisis over the degree to which Ockham's writings and views should be used in the schools, and a study of the meaning and function of the phrase de virtute sermonis, particularly in the fourteenth century, may hold some answers for its original context and purpose. As far back as 1946 Boehner attempted to erase many ofthe misunderstandings about the meaning of the expression de virtute sermonis and shed light on Ockham's use of it.5 The persuasiveness of his analysis was handicapped by his need for brevity (it was given as an aside in the context of another article), by a few unfortunate mistakes, and probably by the ad hominem assumption by many that Boehner had a vested interest in freeing Ockham from the taint of heresy. Yet when Boehner's analysis is considered on its own merits, it is essentially correct. It is only insufficient in the degree of attention given to the pre- and post-Ockhamist history of the phrase de virtute sermonis and the limitation of discussing it only in the context of supposition theory, leading to the mistaken inference that the expression de virtute sermonis was equivalent to and interchangeable with proper supposition , as opposed to improper supposition, or ex usu loquendi. I. Meaning and Verbal Sense: the Origins of Virtus Sermonis Although the specific phrase de virtute sermonis is not found, so far as I am aware, before the thirteenth century, the distinction ofwhich and Logic (Berkeley, 1975), 127-60; Ruprecht Paqué, Das Pariser Nominalistenstatut (Berlin, 1970); T. K. Scott, "Nicholas ofAutrecourt, Buridan, and Ockhamism ," Journal of the History of Philosophy, 9 (1971), 15-41. 4 W. J. Courtenay and K. H. Tachau, Ockham...