The Routledge Companion to Medieval Philosophy

Richard Cross, JT Paasch, Richard Cross, JT Paasch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781317486435
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Like any other group of philosophers, scholastic thinkers from the Middle Ages disagreed about even the most fundamental of concepts. With their characteristic style of rigorous semantic and logical analysis, they produced a wide variety of diverse theories about a huge number of topics. The Routledge Companion to Medieval Philosophy offers readers an outstanding survey of many of these diverse theories, on a wide array of subjects. Its 35 chapters, all written exclusively for this Companion by leading international scholars, are organized into seven parts:

I Language and LogicII MetaphysicsIII Cosmology and Physics

IV Psychology

V Cognition

VI Ethics and Moral Philosophy

VII Political Philosophy

In addition to shedding new light on the most well-known philosophical debates and problems of the medieval era, the Companion brings to the fore topics that may not traditionally be associated with scholastic philosophy, but were in fact a veritable part of the tradition. These include chapters covering scholastic theories about propositions, atomism, consciousness, and democracy and representation.

The Routledge Companion to Medieval Philosophy is a helpful, comprehensive introduction to the field for undergraduate students and other newcomers as well as a unique and valuable resource for researchers in all areas of philosophy.

PART I

Language and Logic

1
Propositions

Nathaniel E. Bulthuis

When philosophers in the twenty-first century speak about propositions, they typically intend to refer to a kind of entity that (ideally, at least) fulfills certain alethic, cognitive, and semantic roles. In particular, by “proposition,” contemporary philosophers mean to talk about a kind of entity which is:

1. the primary bearer of alethic properties,
2. the object of one’s propositional attitudes, such as belief,
3. the meaning, or sense, of (one’s utterances of) declarative sentences, and
4. the referent of that-clauses.¹

For most contemporary philosophers, then, propositions are defined by their functional roles. Contemporary debates about the proposition typically focus on the nature and status of the proposition itself: is it plausible that one entity can fulfill all of these various roles? Assuming that one entity could fulfill all (or even most) of those roles, is that entity mind-independent? abstract? structured? If structured, what is it composed of, and what unifies it? In virtue of what does it play the functional role(s) that it does? And so on.

When medieval philosophers speak of propositions (propositiones; sing., propositio), in contrast, they do not necessarily mean to refer to entities of this sort. Rather, they intend to refer to utterances—typically tokens, but sometimes types—of declarative sentences.² For philosophers in the medieval period, then, the central task with respect to the proposition needn’t be to explain how it can fulfill the alethic, cognitive, and semantic roles mentioned above. Yet this does not mean that the proposition (as they understood it) was not a source of intense philosophical interest throughout the medieval period. Rather, medieval philosophical reflection on the proposition typically focuses on what one does in uttering a declarative sentence, namely, that one says (means) something.³ The medieval interest in propositions is motivated by considerations of the nature of saying (meaning) itself, and in particular by what sort of thing, if any, one says (means) in saying something—a concern typically expressed in the medieval tradition by an interest in what a proposition signifies. Moreover, as many medieval philosophers accepted—to varying degrees—that cognition is linguistic in nature, so that to have a belief, for example, is (at least in part) to form a declarative sentence in mental language, medieval interest in the proposition likewise concerned what sort of thing, if any, one believes in believing something. Consequently, though many medieval philosophers mean something very different by “proposition” than do most contemporary philosophers, the medieval philosophical concern about the proposition anticipates many of the motivations for contemporary theories of the proposition, in the sense that philosophers understand the term today.

The goal of this chapter is to provide an introduction to the main positions that arise within medieval philosophical reflection upon propositions, as they understood them. I will begin (in the section “Language and Cognition”) with some brief remarks on the relationship between propositions in natural language and thought. After that, I will focus on medieval views about the nature of thought itself, and in particular on the development of the claim that thought is propositional in structure—that is, that thinking occurs within a mental language, populated by mental propositions. I will first consider (in the section “Mental Propositions”) the mental proposition itself: the sort of philosophical antecedents we find in the medieval period to the full-fledged accounts of mental propositions and mental language developed in the fourteenth century, and the various accounts of the metaphysics of the thought developed during that century and the one that preceded it. I will then (in the section “The Signification of the Mental Proposition”) focus on a central semantic debate in medieval philosophy about the mental proposition, namely, whether—and what—it signifies. I will conclude (in the section “Conclusion”) with a short discussion of the secondary literature on medieval theories of the proposition.

Language and Cognition

The term “propositio,” in the broad sense that medieval philosophers typically used it, appears to first enter Latin philosophical discourse in a second-century treatise on logic called the Peri Hermeneias.⁴ The author of that treatise, Apuleius (d. 170), argues that a proposition is a certain kind of oratio (speech). An oratio is an utterance of some sort: for example, a command or an inquiry.⁵ Of the various kinds of orationes, however, Apuleius identifies the proposition as particularly important, for only a proposition expresses a “complete thought” (i.e., a judgment of some sort, such as a belief), such that it is the only kind of oratio capable of bearing truth or falsity.⁶ In other words, the proposition is the only sort of oratio that is a statement-making utterance.

Through Apuleius’s treatise, “propositio” and “oratio” come to constitute part of the standard Latin logical terminology in the late antique period. Especially important for our purposes are the uses to which Boethius (d. 524) puts that terminology. Following Aristotle’s division of logos in the first chapter of the De Interpretatione, Boethius argues that orationes can be divided into those which are incomplete and those which are complete. Incomplete orationes are those utterances that are composite (that is, they are constituted by uttered expressions, voces, which are themselves meaningful, such as in “pale Socrates”) but which do not constitute the utterance of a sentence. Complete orationes, in contrast, are utterances of sentences: questions and commands, for example.⁷ Complete orationes also include propositions, the kind of oratio of chief interest to the logician.⁸ Propositions garner that interest because they are the only sorts of orationes—complete or incomplete—that are bearers of alethic value, and so can figure in a demonstration.

For Boethius, then, a proposition is a kind of utterance in natural language that has alethic properties. But why, exactly, do propositions have alethic properties? Boethius argues that a proposition is truth-apt—indeed, that it has the truth value that it does—because it is related to one’s thought that something is or is not the case, “in which truth and falsity are primarily engendered” (1877: 49.27–32). On the view of Boethius—a view informed by Aristotle and one which becomes standard during the medieval period—a proposition expresses the thought of the speaker that something is or is not the case.⁹ It is the thought that something is or is not the case that Boethius (following Aristotle) claims is primarily true or false; propositions are true or false in a secondary, or derivative, sense.¹⁰

How do propositions express the thoughts of the speaker? Boethius argues that “a proposition is an oratio signifying something true or something false.”¹¹ According to Boethius, then, a proposition expresses a thought via signification. And to signify (significare), according to Boethius’s translation of Aristotle’s De Interpretatione, is to “establish an understanding,” that is, to bring about a thought in the mind of one’s audience.¹² Nouns and verbs, by themselves, bring about a thought of something in the world; “Socrates” brings about a thought of Socrates, for example, and “runs” a thought of running. When nouns and verbs are joined together to form a statement-making utterance, then, we might expect that utterance itself to itself bring about a certain thought, namely, the thought that something is or is not the case.¹³ Consequently, a speaker expresses her thoughts to her audience by using a proposition to signify—that is, to bring about—her thought that something is or is not the case within the minds of her audience members.

Whatever its origins and motivations, Boethius’s position—that a proposition signifies a thought that something is or is not the case—becomes the received view in the medieval period. In the twelfth century, for example, Peter Abelard (d. 1142) argues that propositions signify thoughts in that they generate those thoughts. Likewise, the fourteenth-century philosopher John Buridan (d. 1358) argues that propositions in natural language signify propositions in mental language. And one finds similar views defended in the generations between those two philosophers: for example, by Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) and John Duns Scotus (d. 1308) in the thirteenth century.

One notable exception to this position is Wil...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Language and Logic
• Part II Metaphysics
• Part III Cosmology and Physics
• Part IV Psychology
• Part V Cognition
• Part VI Ethics and Moral Psychology
• Part VII Political Philosophy
• Index