Abstract
John Buridan developed further the nominalism and via moderna of William of Ockham. He became one of the most influential thinkers in the later Middle Ages. The selection included here is from his monumental work Summulae de dialectica, which itself is a commentary on Peter of Spain’s Tractatus. The selection includes his theory of appellation and some of his discussion of sophisms, more specifically his analysis and solution to the Liar paradox. Appellation is a semantic notion that, for example, gives an account of the supposition of terms in intentional contexts. Buridan’s solution to the Liar paradox is famous and had an impact even on contemporary philosophy of language. Buridan was perhaps the foremost logician of the Middle Ages.
Text excerpted from: Klima, G. ed. 2001. John Buridan: Summulae de dialectica. New Haven: Yale University Press.
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Notes
- 1.
“Oblique cases” are all the cases other than the nominative case of the declension of a Latin noun or nounlike, declinable word (adjective, participle, pronoun, etc.). Accordingly, an “oblique name” or “term” in Buridan’s usage is any noun or nounlike word or phrase in an oblique, i.e., non-nominative case.
- 2.
Status, clearly intended to be a technical term, refers to the state in which a term is, i.e., the range of reference that a term has when it is neither ampliated nor restricted. Buridan assigns this status as the range of reference a term has when it supposits for (or appellates) all its significata (or connotata) in a present-tense proposition. Hence, in other tenses, and in modal and intentional contexts as well as in natural supposition, the term’s range of reference will be extended, ampliated, beyond its status, whereas in adjectival or other restrictive constructions (as with restrictive relative clauses) it will be restricted to a scope within its status.
- 3.
An indistant combination (complexio indistans) is a nonpropositional combination of categorematic terms (such as the combination of a substantive and an adjective, as in “a wise man”), as opposed to a “distant combination” (complexio distans), which is a combination of categorematic terms in a proposition (as in “A man is wise”).
- 4.
Of course, Buridan analyzes ego dico falsum (“I say something false”) as ego sum dicens falsum (“I am someone saying something false”).
- 5.
That is to say, nouns do not have the temporal connotation verbs have.
- 6.
Aristoteles vidit Alexandrum equitare. The point Buridan wants to make, which does not quite come across in English, is that in the context of a past-tense verb even a present-tense infinitive construction can supposit for past things. I have tried to translate such constructions consistently by that-clauses throughout the text. In this case, however, English syntax would demand that the that-clause itself should be in the past tense (namely, in “Aristotle saw that Alexander was riding”), which would ruin Buridan’s logical point.
- 7.
Aristoteles fuit disputans. Buridan’s theory of “substantivated adjectives” (which applies to participles as well) certainly justifies the insertion of “someone” in the translation . In any case, it must be the interpretation conveyed by this insertion that Buridan has in mind when he claims that his analysis has the status of a first principle.
- 8.
Let us not forget that propositions for Buridan are individual utterances or inscriptions with a determinate “life span” in time.
- 9.
Here and henceforth the term “context” is going to be used in a broad sense, in which it covers all sorts of perhaps nonlinguistic circumstances that may determine the truth or falsity of a proposition.
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Sainsbury, M. (2017). John Buridan. In: Cameron, M., Hill, B., Stainton, R. (eds) Sourcebook in the History of Philosophy of Language. Springer Graduate Texts in Philosophy, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26908-5_17
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