It is well-known that Chatton is among the earliest and most vehement critics of Ockham’s theory of judgment, but scholars have overlooked the role Chatton’s criticisms play in shaping Ockham’s final account. In this paper, I demonstrate that Ockham’s most mature treatment of judgment not only contains revisions that resolve the problems Chatton identifies in his earlier theories, but also that these revisions ultimately bring his final account of the objects of judgment surprisingly close to Chatton’s own. Even so, I (...) argue that, at the end of the day, there remain significant differences between their respective analyses of the structure and intentionality of judicative states. (shrink)

In this paper I examine William Ockham’s theory of judgment and, in particular, his account of the nature and ontological status of its objects. Commentators, both past and present, habitually interpret Ockham as defending a kind of anti-realism about objects of judgment. My aim in this paper is two-fold. The first is to show that the traditional interpretation rests on a failure to appreciate the ways in which Ockham’s theory of judgment changes over the course of his career. The second, (...) and larger, aim is to show that careful attention to these changes in Ockham’s account (and to the motivations for them) sheds new light on broader developments in his philosophy of mind—specifically, on his views about the nature of concepts and on his account of the nature and structure of intentionality itself. (shrink)

En el siglo XIV se propusieron dos teorías principales para explicar el aumento y la reducción de las cualidades, entendidas éstas como formas accidentales. Quienes defendían alguna de estas dos teorías sostenían que una cualidad aumenta o se reduce debido a que se añaden o se substraen partes de sí misma, o bien, que una cualidad aumenta o se reduce debido a que una nueva forma más o menos perfecta sustituye a la forma ya inherente en una cierta substancia. Ockham (...) defendió la primera teoría con respecto a los estados mentales, entendidos como cualidades. Chatton defendió en sus primeros escritos ambas teorías y después sólo defendió la segunda. Las teorías de Ockham y Chatton están basadas en dos perspectivas distintas sobre la naturaleza del cambio o el movimiento. Ambas teorías, además, implican mecanismos distintos para regular la mayor o menor perfección de un estado mental. (shrink)

Ockham defines intuition as the kind of cognition on the basis of which it is not only possible to evidently judge that a thing exists when it exists, but also that a thing does not exist when it does not exist. He makes a further distinction between natural intuition and supernatural intuition. The aim of this paper is to determine what, according to Ockham, can be judged evidently by means of natural intuition and what can only be judged evidently by (...) means of supernatural intuition. It is commonly assumed that by natural intuition we can make only affirmative judgements, whereas by supernatural intuition we can make both affirmative and negative judgements. The paper shows that this way of contrasting the two is mistaken. The paper argues instead that also natural intuition, according to Ockham, enables us to make both affirmative and negative judgements. (shrink)