The paper focuses on some aspects of the early modern aftermath of supposition theory within the framework of the protestant logical tradition. Due to the growing influence of Humanism, supposition theory from the third decade of the sixteenth century was the object of general neglect and contempt. While in the late sixteenth-century a number of standard textbooks of post-Tridentine scholastic logic reintegrated this doctrine, although in a bowdlerized version, it remained for a century out of the scope of Protestant logic. (...) The situation changed when the Strasburg Lutheran theologian J.C. Dannhauer, who in 1630 developed and propagated the program of a new discipline which he called ‘general hermeneutics’, accentuating the importance of supposition theory as an indispensable device for the purpose of textual interpretation. Due to Dannhauer’s influence on later developments of hermeneutics, which in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was regarded as a logical discipline, supposition theory is still present in several logical treatises of the eighteenth century. The explication of the underlying views on the notion of supposition and its logico-semantic function may give at least some clues as to how to answer the question of what supposition theory was all about. (shrink)

Logic is usually thought to concern itself only with features that sentences and arguments possess in virtue of their logical structures or forms. The logical form of a sentence or argument is determined by its syntactic or semantic structure and by the placement of certain expressions called “logical constants.”[1] Thus, for example, the sentences Every boy loves some girl. and Some boy loves every girl. are thought to differ in logical form, even though they share a common syntactic and semantic (...) structure, because they differ in the placement of the logical constants “every” and “some”. By contrast, the sentences Every girl loves some boy. and Every boy loves some girl. are thought to have the same logical form, because “girl” and “boy” are not logical constants. Thus, in order to settle questions about logical form, and ultimately about which arguments are logically valid and which sentences logically true, we must distinguish the “logical constants” of a language from its nonlogical expressions. (shrink)

The studies that make up this book were written and brought together to honor the memory of Jan Pinborg. His unexpected death in 1982 at the age of forty-five shocked and saddened students of medieval philosophy everywhere and left them with a keen sense of disappoint ment. In his fifteen-year career Jan Pinborg had done so much for our field with his more than ninety books, editions, articles, and reviews and had done it all so well that we recognized him (...) as a leader and counted on many more years of his scholarship, his help, and his friendship. To be missed so sorely by his international colleagues in an academic field is a mark of Jan's achievement, but only of one aspect of it, for historians of philosophy are not the only scholars who have reacted in this way to Jan's death. In his decade and a half of intense productivity he also acquired the same sort of special status among historians of linguistics, whose volume of essays in his memory is being G. L. Bursill-Hall almost simultane published under the editorship of ously with this one. Sten Ebbesen, Jan's student, colleague, and successor as Director of the Institute of Medieval Greek and Latin Philology at the University of Copenhagen, has earned the gratitude of all of us by memorializing Jan 1 in various biographical sketches, one of which is accompanied by a 2 complete bibliography of his publications. (shrink)

Lecture notes from Husserl's logic lectures published during the last 20 years offer a much better insight into his doctrine of the forms of meaning than does the fourth Logical Investigation or any other work published during Husserl's lifetime. This paper provides a detailed reconstruction, based on all the sources now available, of Husserl's system of logical grammar. After having explained the notion of meaning that Husserl assumes in his later logic lectures as well as the notion of form of (...) meaning as it features in ‘doctrine of the forms of meaning’, I present a system of rules that describes all the various forms of meaning that Husserl singles out in his lectures. (shrink)

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)

With the publication of this inaugural issue of the internationally peer-reviewed journal Biosemiotics, our still-developing young interdiscipline marks yet another milestone in its journey towards adulthood. For this occasion, the editors of Biosemiotics have asked me to provide for those readers who may be newcomers to our field a very brief overview of the history of biosemiotics, contextualizing it within and against the larger currents of philosophical and scientific thinking from which it has emerged. To explain the origins of this (...) most twenty-first century endeavour effectively, however, will require tracing—at least to the level of a thumbnail sketch—how the ‘sign’ concept appeared, was lost, and now must be painstakingly rediscovered and refined in science. To relate this long history, this article will appear in Biosemiotics in three instalments, examining, respectively: (1) The History of the Sign Concept in Pre-Modernist Science, (2) The History of the Sign Concept in Modernist Science, and (3) The Biosemiotic Attempt to Develop a More Useful Sign Concept for Contemporary Science. In this instalment, we begin our introductory ‘stroll through the woods of sciences and signs’ by following the development of the sign concept within the context of scientific inquiry, in necessarily broad outline, from the beginnings of such inquiry in sixth century BCE, through its long development in the Middle Ages, and up unto the onset of modernity. For only within this larger historical context can our contemporary attempt to develop a naturalistic understanding of sign relations be understood. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 53, Issue 2-4, pp 269 - 293 This article presents some results of the study of seventeen medieval treatises containing a logical analysis of the syncategorem ‘_an_’. On the one hand, a new classification is proposed of the literary genres of the _Logica Modernorum_, based on the four elements involved in the logical analysis of syncategorematic terms: the meaning of the syncategorem, logical rules, related sophisms, and proposed solutions. On the other, three texts are studied in detail, (...) showing the origins and development of the logical analysis of the syncategorem ‘_an_’ between the 12th and the 13th centuries. Finally, a comparative study is offered of different analyses of the sophism ‘_Tu scis an de mentiente sit falsum Sortem esse illum_’, a sophism that does not raise any problem as to the particle ‘_an_’, but introduces the issue of the truth conditions of the _dicta_. (shrink)

Bernard Bolzano offers a criterion of individuation for ideas, according to which ideas are distinct if and only if they represent different objects or are composed differently. It fails to individuate ideas that are both simple and fail to represent, in particular syncategorematic ideas and logical constants. However, Bolzano also provides the means to close this gap. He suggests that we can distinguish ideas if they are not substitutable for each other in propositions, which we can, in turn, distinguish in (...) terms of their truth-values. This paper explicates this suggestion and develops it into an improved individuation criterion for ideas: ideas also are distinct if we cannot replace them for one another in propositions salva veritate. (shrink)

La lógica de la Edad Media se presenta a los lógicos contemporáneos, filósofos medievalistas, historiadores y filósofos de la lógica, como un campo tan fascinante como de difícil acceso. Parece demasiado intrincado para casi cualquier investigador de estas áreas encontrar la punta del ovillo que lo conduzca a transitar una presentación ordenada e inteligible de la lógica medieval. Este libro pretende solucionar este problema. Para ello, presenta de manera ordenada y autocontenida los desarrollos lógicos de la parte técnicamente más evolucionada (...) de la lógica de la Edad Media: el siglo XIV. A diferencia de otras presentaciones no evade los hechos históricos y culturales que conforman el panorama de la época ni las cuestiones filosóficas detrás de los desarrollos lógicos, a fin de entender cabalmente las cuestiones técnicas y no desnaturalizar la propuesta medieval. Los primeros tres capítulos se abocan a cuestiones introductorias, históricas y a la genealogía de los tópicos más importantes. El cuarto capítulo está dedicado a la presentación sintáctica del lenguaje de la lógica medieval. El quinto y el sexto a la metateoría de esta lógica. El séptimo explora y presenta la semántica. Los dos últimos nos brindan una reconstrucción racional, en términos del lenguaje simbólico contemporáneo, de la lógica de finales del siglo XIV. (shrink)

Analysis has always been at the heart of philosophical method, but it has been understood and practised in many different ways. Perhaps, in its broadest sense, it might be defined as a process of isolating or working back to what is more fundamental by means of which something, initially taken as given, can be explained or reconstructed. The explanation or reconstruction is often then exhibited in a corresponding process of synthesis. This allows great variation in specific method, however. The aim (...) may be to get back to basics, but there may be all sorts of ways of doing this, each of which might be called ‘analysis’. The dominance of ‘analytic’ philosophy in the Englishspeaking world, and increasingly now in the rest of the world, might suggest that a consensus has formed concerning the role and importance of analysis. This assumes, though, that there is agreement on what ‘analysis’ means, and this is far from clear. On the other hand, Wittgenstein's later critique of analysis in the early (logical atomist) period of analytic philosophy, and Quine's attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction, for example, have led some to claim that we are now in a ‘post-analytic’ age. Such criticisms, however, are only directed at particular conceptions of analysis. If we look at the history of philosophy, and even if we just look at the history of analytic philosophy, we find a rich and extensive repertoire of conceptions of analysis which philosophers have continually drawn upon and reconfigured in different ways. Analytic philosophy is alive and well precisely because of the range of conceptions of analysis that it involves. It may have fragmented into various interlocking subtraditions, but those subtraditions are held together by both their shared history and their methodological interconnections. It is the aim of this article to indicate something of.. (shrink)

Aquinas’ famous comments in his early Scriptum on the Sentences (In I Sent., d. 38, q. 1, a. 3) regarding the intellect’s apprehension of essence and esse have traditionally been interpreted as grounding Aquinas’ doctrine on the judgment of esse. For Aquinas, it appears, what the intellect apprehends in a simple concept is essence. Since esse, for him, is not an essence, it cannot, on the received view, be the object of conceptualization. Therefore, esse is grasped by the intellect only (...) in judgment. The claim that no genuine concept of esse is possible, however, is inconsistent with Aquinas’ theory of signification. A term’s signification is constituted, at least in part, in its “signing relation” with some “concept” in the mind. If, as on the traditional reading, there is no concept of esse, the term ‘esse’ is left without signification. To respond that the term ‘esse’ signs, not a concept, but the judgment in which esse is apprehended is in direct conflict with Aquinas’ claim elsewhere that no term, including ‘ens’ and ‘esse’, signifies a judgment. I propose an alternative interpretation to In I Sent., d. 38, q. 1, a. 3, one that allows for the possibility of a conceptual apprehension of esse. The alternative reading explains Aquinas’ remarks there in light of the theoretical context of the discussion, in particular the theory of propositions and their objects. I show how and why Aquinas develops a distinctive theory of the object of the proposition, that it is concerned with “the esse of a thing” as a complex. Although this complex includes the simple act of being, as for the traditional position (contrary to its major critics), it cannot be reduced to anything simple. Despite the Sentences’ affirmation of a real distinction between a thing’s esse and essence, to which correspond two different operations of the intellect, it does not follow that the human intellect cannot conceive esse, just as it conceives essences, in a simple conception. (shrink)

This dissertation investigates the ways in which natural language restricts the domains of quantifiers. Adverbs of quantification are analyzed as quantifying over situations. The domain of quantifiers is pragmatically constrained: apparent processes of "semantic partition" are treated as pragmatic epiphenomena. The introductory Chapter 1 sketches some of the background of work on natural language quantification and begins the analysis of adverbial quantification over situations. Chapter 2 develops the central picture of "semantic partition" as a side-effect of pragmatic processes of anaphora (...) resolution. I argue that the apparent effects of topic/focus articulation and presuppositional information on the interpretation of quantifiers are not the result of a direct and local mechanism of sentence grammar. Instead, I develop an analysis where the link is established via the anaphoric dependence of quantifier domains on the discourse context. Chapter 3 discusses the analysis of conditional clauses as quantifier restrictors, concentrating on the question whether conditional clauses restrict quantifiers directly or indirectly. A treatment is explored which has if-clauses constrain the value of the hidden domain variable of the restricted quantifier. Chapter 4, on unless-clauses, and Chapter 5, on only if- and even if-clauses, present some issues in the compositional analysis of complex conditional clauses. These chapters significantly expand the data coverage of the theory of A-quantification. Building on previous work of mine on exceptives, I analyze unless-clauses as exceptive operators on A-quantifiers. The analysis of only if-clauses, treated as conditional clauses that combine if with the focus adverb only, unearthes some interesting new properties. Chapter 6, finally, examines the phenomenon of donkey-anaphora in the light of the results of the previous chapters. I show that a solution to the proportion problem may become possible once we combine the situation-semantic approach to adverbial quantification with the pragmatic theory developed in Chapter 2 and further elaborated in the analysis of donkey anaphora in complex conditionals. (shrink)

This thesis deals with one of the essential problems in epistemology, that is, the foundation and variety of universal concepts. The classical controversy on universals is baseless if we do not consider different kinds of universal concepts. In this thesis, universal concepts are examined as classified into three groups: first intentions, logical second intentions and philosophical second intentions.