MEANING AND INFERENCE IN MEDIEY AL PHILOSOPHY

Transcription

1 MEANING AND INFERENCE IN MEDIEY AL PHILOSOPHY

2 SYNTHESE HISTORICAL LIBRARY TEXTS AND STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY Editors: N. KRETZMANN, Cornell University G. NUCHELMANS, University of Leyden Editorial Board: J. BERG, Munich Institute of Technology L. M. DE RIJK, University of Leyden D. P. HENRY, University of Manchester J. HINTIKKA, Florida State University, Tallahassee B. MATES, University of California, Berkeley J. E. MURDOCH, Harvard University G. PA TZIG, University of Gottingen VOLUME 32

3 MEANING AND INFERENCE IN MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY Studies in Memory of Jan Pinborg Edited by NORMAN KRETZMANN Cornell University, Ithaca, Us.A. KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS DORDRECHT / BOSTON / LONDON

4 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data :c:ie Meaning and inference in medieval philosophy: studies in memory of Jan Pinborg I edited by Norman Kretzmann. p. cm. -- (Synthese historical 1 ibrary ; v. 32) Bibl iography: p. Inc 1 udes index. ISBN-l3: e-isbn-13: DOl: / LogIC. Medieval. 2. SemantIcs (PhIlosophy) 3. Language and logic. 4. Pinborg. Jan. I. Pinborg. Jan. II. Kretzmann, Norman. III. Series. BC34.M '.9'02--dc CIP Published by Kluwer Academic Publishers, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands Kluwer Academic Publishers incorporates the publishing programmes of D. Reidel, Martinus Nijhoff, Dr W. Junk and MTP Press. Sold and distributed in the U.S.A. and Canada by Kluwer Academic Publishers, 101 Philip Drive, Norwell, MA 02061, U.S.A. In all other countries, sold and distributed by Kluwer Academic Publishers Group, P.O. Box 322, 3300 AH Dordrecht, The Netherlands All Rights Reserved 1988 by Kluwer Academic Publishers Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1988 No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner

5 JAN PINBORG Photograph Rigmor Mydtskov. All Rights Reserved.

6 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION L. M. DE RIJK / On Boethius's Notion of Being: A Chapter of Boethian Semantics 1 ELEONORE STUMP / Logic in the Early Twelfth Century 31 GABRIEL NUCHELMANS / The Distinction Actus Exercitusl Actus Significatus in Medieval Semantics ROBERT ANDREWS / Denomination in Peter of Auvergne STEN EBBESEN / Concrete Accidental Terms: Late Thirteenth-Century Debates About Problems Relating to Such Terms as 'Album' 107 REINHARD HUELSEN / Concrete Accidental Terms and the Fallacy of Figure of Speech 175 PAUL VINCENT SPADE / The Logic of the Categorical: The Medieval Theory of Descent and Ascent 187 NORMAN KRETZMANN / Tu Scis Hoc Esse Omne Quod Est Hoc: Richard Kilvington and the Logic of Knowledge 225 ALFONSO MAIERU / Logic and Trinitarian Theology: De Modo Predicandi ac Sylogizandi in Divinis 247 LAUGE OLAF NIELSEN / A Seventeenth-Century Physician on God and Atoms: Sebastian Basso 297 BIBLIOGRAPHY 371 INDEX OF PERSONS 395 IX vii

7 INTRODUCTION 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 disappointment. 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 published under the editorship of G. L. Bursill-Hall almost simultaneously 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 in various biographical sketches, 1 one of which is accompanied by a complete bibliography of his publications. 2 I need not attempt here what has already been well done elsewhere on the basis of a long personal and professional association with Jan Pinborg. But perhaps a few fond recollections from a trans-atlantic perspective may be added here. Jan's replies to letters with requests for scholarly help of one sort or another were invariably prompt and magisterial, but at the same time so kind and modest, so marked by collegial and personal good will, that it was hard not to think of him as a close friend even at a great distance. Meeting him only confirmed and enhanced those impressions of erudition, insight, generosity, and consideration. It was Jan's selfless and seemingly tireless scholarly labors that got us through the mountains of work associated with the Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy and the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute Norman Kretzmann (Ed.), Meaning and Inference in Medieval Philosophy. ix-xii by Kluwer Academic Publishers. IX

8 x INTRODUCTION on Medieval Philosophy. But it was Jan's gentle humor and his easy inclusion of the rest of us in his happy family life during the long, hardworking, hot days of those two American summers that make the memory of them so pleasant. Anyone lucky enough to have known Jan well will always remember him with gratitude and joy. The ten contributors to this volume hope to honor Jan Pinborg's memory by presenting studies and texts relevant to his own scholarly interests in medieval philosophy, particularly in logic and semantic theory. Though not everyone of the ten studied or worked with Jan Pinborg, all of us learned a great deal from his writings. One or two of the contributors, having studied with a student of Jan's, can lay claim to being his academic grandchildren; but those of us who were born before Jan are also deeply in his debt. The ten contributions are arranged approximately in the chronological order of their subject matter. L. M. de Rijk, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Leiden, ranging over Boethius's Aristotelian commentaries and theological treatises with his well-respected authority, finds new material for Boethius's semantic theory in his metaphysics and theology and, in the process, sheds light on Boethius's difficult and historically important conception of being. Eleonore Stump, Professor of Philosophy at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, well-known for her own work on Boethius, here describes a critical development in the history of the dialectical Topics and shows how it can be used to help explain the new direction taken by the terminist logicians of the first half of the thirteenth century. Gabriel Nuchelmans, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Leiden and author of an important series of volumes on the development of theories regarding propositions, analyzes the medieval distinction between doing something linguistically and merely talking about it, bringing out the remarkable power and range of medieval logicians' applications of the distinction. The fourth, fifth, and sixth contributions form a connected series, all focusing on semantic issues associated with the treatment of concrete accidental terms (such as 'white') by medieval logicians, and all stemming from a seminar conducted at the University of Copenhagen. The first of these three pieces is by Robert Andrews, a PhD candidate at Cornell

9 INTRODUCTION Xl University who studied for a year at the Copenhagen Institute; he focuses on problems of denomination - the sort of relationship that obtains between 'literacy' and 'literate' - and presents an edition of a relevant text by Peter of Auvergne. The centerpiece of this set of three contributions is the one contributed by the professor who conducted the seminar, Sten Ebbesen, whose three-volume study of Greek and Latin commentaries on Aristotle's Sophistici elenchi is truly monumental. Here he considers the elaborate medieval analysis of the way in which a concrete accidental term manages to have a conceptually unitary meaning despite both signifying a quality and indicating that the quality has a bearer. He concludes his contribution with an edition of Peter of Auvergne's sophisma Album potest esse nigrum. Reinhard Hiilsen, a PhD candidate of the Philosophisches Institut of the University of Hamburg, who also studied at Copenhagen with Ebbesen, is the third of this trio of contributors. He uses the medieval treatment of concrete accidental terms to illuminate the notoriously perplexing Aristotelian fallacy of "figure of speech". Paul Vincent Spade, Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University, editor or translator of several medieval logical treatises and author of many valuable articles, focuses on a peculiar logical doctrine attached to the medieval semantic theory of suppositio in order to explain certain philosophical and historical developments in the latter half of the thirteenth century. Norman Kretzmann, Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University and principal editor of The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, presents a critical analysis of one of Richard Kilvington's sophismata in order to illustrate the achievements of later medieval epistemic logic. He provides an edition and translation of Kilvington's Sophisma 45. Alfonso Maieru, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Rome, to whom all students of medieval logic are grateful for his Terminologia /ogica, here carries on his study of medieval attempts to develop a logical account of the intricacies of the divine Trinity, primarily by presenting an edition and study of an anonymous treatise of this sort from the late fourteenth century. Lauge Olaf Nielsen, a Danish theologian and church historian who studied at the Copenhagen Institute with Jan Pinborg and who is doing important work on the connections between philosophy and theology in

10 Xll INTRODUCTION the later Middle Ages, here extends his study chronologically into the seventeenth century with a remarkably rich paper on the hitherto neglected atomist Sebastian Basso. The subjects of the ten papers are obviously diverse, and yet there are common themes that will not appear in a brief survey of the contents and that are more specific than the overarching concern with medieval logic and semantic theory. The General Index supplied at the end of the book can serve as a guide to these unifying topics. Bibliographical references within the notes to the various contributions are keyed to the General Bibliography, for which I am happy to acknowledge my gratitude to Robert Andrews. NORMAN KRETZMANN REFERENCES I K@benhavns Universitet, Arbog 1982, pp ; Universite de Copenhaque, Cahiers de {'lnstitut du Moyen-Age Grec et Latin (CIMAGL), 41 (1982), pp. III-VII; Bursill Hall volume, forthcoming. 2 CIMAGL 41 (1982), pp. VIII-XII; compiled by N. J. Green-Pedersen.