As a historian of logic, I am frequently puzzled by the things which people have to say about the relationship between mathematical logic and some other kind of logic which is variously described as ‘intentional’ and ‘traditional.’ Part of my puzzlement arises from my failure to understand precisely what kind of system is being offered under the guise of intentional logic. I have always taken it that logic is concerned with valid inferences, with showing us how we may legitimately derive (...) a conclusion from a set of premisses; yet the validation of inferences seems to be the least of the concerns of the intentional logician. He says that it can be done, but he does not bother to show us how. My purpose in this paper is to list some of the sources of my puzzlement in the hope that an exponent of intentional logic will show me how they can be resolved, and how their resolution will contribute to the building of a system (however informal) in which different types of argument can be validated. (shrink)

Josse Clichtove represents a turning point in the history of disputation, for he combines one of the earliest accounts of the doctrinal disputation with one of the latest accounts of the obligational disputation. This paper describes the nature and significance of the theories that he offered. Particular attention is paid to the doctrines of truth, necessity and possibility which lie behind his doctrines; and also to the light which his work throws on the aims and nature of an obligational disputation.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Metaphysics of Creation. Aquinas's Natural Theology in Summa contra gentiles IIE.J. AshworthNorman Kretzmann. The Metaphysics of Creation. Aquinas's Natural Theology in Summa contra gentiles II. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. Pp. xiii + 483. Cloth, $65.00.Thomas Aquinas is astounding not just for the richness, complexity and timeless interest of his thought, but for the sheer bulk of his works. The challenge this bulk presents to commentators has been (...) taken up in various ways. Some people focus on Aquinas's architectonic, giving a global overview of individual works in such terms as the neo-Platonic exitus-reditus schema; others focus on the interplay of faith and reason in his works by classifying Aquinas as a theologian, or a Christian philosopher, or a philosopher-theologian; still others try to organize his thought by bringing together thematically-linked discussions from a variety of places. All three approaches tend to overlook perhaps the most striking feature of Aquinas's writings: the continuous progression of carefully-formulated, detailed arguments and sub-arguments.In the second book of his uncompleted trilogy on Summa contra gentiles, Norman Kretzmann combines the best of the first two approaches to Aquinas with an impressive and largely successful attempt to come to terms with Aquinas as an arguer. He takes an ample selection of Aquinas's own arguments in their order of appearance in SCG II; he analyzes their premisses; he shows how they function in relation to earlier and later arguments; and he criticizes their weaknesses. He does all this in an elegant, lucid prose that ensures the attentive reader an enhanced understanding of the specific topics discussed by Aquinas. [End Page 434]To understand the full import of the arguments examined, however, we need to consider what Aquinas hopes to achieve by his sequences of arguments. While granting that Aquinas is a theologian, and that he intends his Summa contra gentiles to give a full account of what Christians believe, Kretzmann argues that the first three books of SCG present a fully-developed natural theology which can serve as guide and inspiration to thinkers today. The key to understanding Aquinas here is the recognition that the philosopher, particularly the metaphysician, is, or should be, concerned with the first principles and most ultimate aspects of reality. If it turns out, as most philosophers before the twentieth century have believed, that these first principles are divine, then truths taught by revelation can be integrated with truths arrived at by reason. Moreover, once the existence and nature of God have been established, or at least rendered plausible, one can take God as a starting point for the explanation of this-worldly phenomena, from the nature of the physical world to the nature of the human person. This explanation, while buttressed by references to Biblical revelation, will nonetheless be fully natural, insofar as it relies on arguments whose premisses are those available to any rational being independently of revelation.In his earlier book, The Metaphysics of Theism (Oxford, 1997) Kretzmann examined the start of Aquinas's natural theology, the movement from things around us to God. In The Metaphysics of Creation, finished just before his death, Kretzmann takes up the emergence of things from God. The book is divided into three unequal parts. First, there is a long discussion of Aquinas's view of creation, and the precise way in which the world is dependent upon God, its first cause. Particularly notable in this section is the discussion of Aquinas's view that creation is compatible with the notion of a beginningless world. The second, very brief, section takes up Aquinas's treatment of the emergence of different species, and his willingness to reject the kind of literal reading of Genesis espoused by contemporary creationists. The third and longest section takes up the nature of the human mind or soul. What makes this section particularly interesting is its emphasis on the implications of the top-down approach. If we start with the ideas that God is a pure intellect, and that immaterial substance is possible, then the mind-body problem becomes that of explaining how intellect can ever be closely related to matter, rather that... (shrink)

Locke's main semantic thesis is that words stand for, or signify, ideas. He says this over and over again, though the phraseology he employs varies. In Book III chapter 2 alone we find the following statements of the thesis: ‘ … Words … come to be made use of by Men, as the Signs of their Ideas’ [III.2.1; 405:10-11); The use then of Words, is to be sensible Marks of Ideas; and the Ideas they stand for, are their proper and (...) immediate Signification’ [III.2.1; 405:15-17]; ‘Words in their primary or immediate Signification, stand for nothing, but the Ideas in the Mind of him that uses them’ [III.2.2; 405:21-2]; That then which Words are the Marks of, are the Ideas of the Speaker’ [III.2.2; 405:27-8]; ‘ …. (shrink)

This is the first full-length translation of a work by the influential medieval logician Walter Burley. As such, it is an important addition to our knowledge of medieval logic, and will undoubtedly spur further research.

The work of joachim jungius on the logic of relations was not as original as some authors have thought, But he did make it clear that relational inferences should be distinguished from categorical inferences; and he was the first to recognize the argument 'a rectis ad obliqua', An example of which is 'all circles are figures, Therefore whoever draws a circle draws a figure'.

This chapter focuses on John Locke's relation to scholasticism. It explores who the schoolmen referred to by Locke were, and what he might have learned from them, particularly with respect to topics in metaphysics, logic, and language. The chapter considers the Oxford curriculum which provided the framework for Locke's years of study and teaching there, as there is little reason to believe that he enriched his acquaintance with the schoolmen in his later career. The topic of substance was raised both (...) in metaphysics textbooks and in logic textbooks, but the material in both was largely similar. The chapter considers some of Locke's remarks and focuses on what the scholastics had to say. Locke goes on to claim that the very use of syllogistic depends on the prior ability to see the connections between ideas. The area in which Locke showed the most obvious influence of scholasticism is that of language. (shrink)

In 1498 Cajetan published a short book, On the Analogy of Names, which is often regarded as a masterly summary of Aquinas's doctrine of analogy. It opens in the very first paragraph with an attack on three views of the concept of being (ens): first, that it is a disjunction of concepts; second, that it is an ordered group of concepts; and third, that it is a single, separate concept which is unequally participated by substances and accidents. A number of (...) questions immediately spring to mind. Why are concepts being discussed when analogy is said by Cajetan to be a theory of language? What is meant by ‘concept’? Who held the views under attack and why? So far as I can tell, the extensive literature on both Aquinas and Cajetan offers no satisfactory answers to these questions. (shrink)

This book examines John Locke’s claims about the nature and work- ings of language.WalterOtt proposes a new interpretation of Locke’s thesis that words signify ideas in the mind of the speaker, and argues that rather than employing such notions as sense or reference, Locke relies on an ancient tradition that understands signification as reliable indication.He then uses this interpretation to explain crucial areas of Locke’s metaphysics and epistemology, including essence, abstraction, knowledge, and mental representation. His discussion, which is the first (...) book-length treatment of its topic, challenges many of the current orthodox readings of Locke, and will be of interest to historians of philosophy and philosophers of language alike. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Knowledge and Faıth in Thomas Aquinas by John I. JenkinsE.J. AshworthJohn I. Jenkins. Knowledge and Faıth in Thomas Aquinas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xv + 267. Cloth, $59.95.There is a strong tension in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. On the one hand, he is strongly naturalist. He insists that our cognition is rooted in sense-perception and that [End Page 673] it is normally reliable. He insists (...) that our moral life is grounded in our nature both as physical beings, able to feel pain and pleasure, and as social beings, depending on each other for our welfare. But he is also strongly supernaturalist. Human nature by virtue of its cognitive orientation toward the physical is not able through its own powers to know God. Still less is human nature able to achieve moral virtue by its own powers. This is not just because we are cut off from God by original sin; rather, there is a primal lack that was there even before the Fall. To achieve our true end, both cognitive and moral, we depend on God’s free gift of grace which elevates our nature and renders it able both to know God through the beatific vision in Heaven and to respond to God through loving, virtuous action. The gift of faith becomes central to human nature and destiny in a way that was to worry later thinkers such as Duns Scotus, who pertinently asked how our intellect can have the ultimate end of knowing God if it has to be made a different intellect before it achieves that end.Jenkins does not worry about the point raised by Scotus. Instead, he sets out to give an interpretation of the Summa theologiae which will help us understand more deeply the interplay between the natural and the supernatural in Aquinas. He begins by taking advantage of new readings of Aristode’s Posterior Analytics which present Aristode’s account of the demonstration which moves from cause to effect, not just as a pedagogic device for presenting material obtained by moving from effect to cause, but as a recipe for cognitive restructuring. Certainly we have to begin with mere observation, and with the piecemeal discovery of causes, but to achieve true scıentia (to use the medieval Latin term for organized, necessary knowledge) we need to acquire a new vision of how reality is structured and to see how effects flow necessarily from their causes. True demonstration is an expression of this new vision. Jenkins applies this reading of Aristotle to Aquinas. He takes with absolute seriousness Aquinas’s claim at the beginning of the Summa theologıae that theology too is an Aristotelian scientıa, and he sees the work as presenting a recipe for the cognitive restructuring of apprentice theologians (those to whom the work is addressed).The scientıa of the Summa theologiae differs from the scientia of the Posterior Analytics in two ways. First, Aquinas allows the term scientia to have an extended sense, so that God too can have scientia, even though he does not move from principles to conclusions by a process of syllogistic demonstration, but instead grasps all that is knowable in one simple act. Second, the basic principles which are the foundation of theological demonstration are the articles of faith, especially those of the creeds, which cannot be known by us in any naturalistic way. It is through God’s infused light that we assent to these articles as divinely revealed. After a lengthy examination of the role of faith in Aquinas’s account, Jenkins describes the epistemology involved as supernatural externalism.Although Jenkins’s presentation of the relationship between scientıa and faith in the Summa is carefully and lucidly argued, there are two aspects of the book that I would question.First, while it is true that Aquinas does present theology as an Aristotelian scientia, I doubt that this single fact “determines the purpose and structure of the Summa theologiae” (15) in any very detailed way. Jenkins further claims that the structure of the Summa is determined by the structure of God’s knowledge (220), but if God is truly [End... (shrink)