Walter Burley on The Kinds of Simple Supposition 1

PAUL VINCENT SPADE

1. Background By the early-fourteenth century at the latest, the mediaeval theory of supposition could be divided in most authors into two main branches, which in recent literature have come to be called the theory of “suppo- sition proper” and the theory of “modes of personal supposition,” respec- tively.2 While the relation between these two branches remains obscure, we can say to a Ž rst approximation that the theory of supposition proper was atheory of “reference,” designed to answer the question what entity or enti- ties a term refers to or “supposits” for in a given occurrence in a given proposition, whereas the theory of modes of personal supposition, whatever its ultimate purpose, was the part of the theory that included the much- discussed accounts of “descent to singulars” and “ascent from singulars.”3 Walter Burley and his somewhat younger contemporary, William of Ockham, for the most part agreed about the modes of personal supposition, 4

1 I am grateful to Rega Wood and Elizabeth Karger for their comments and sugges- tions on an earlier draft of this paper. 2 See Paul Vincent Spade, The Semantics of Terms , in: Norman Kretzmann et al. (ed.), The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy , New York 1982, Ch. 9 (188-96). This ter- minology was Ž rst used by T.K. Scott in the “Introduction” to his translation of John Buridan’s Sophismata, and is not mediaeval. See T.K. Scott (trans.), John Buridan: Sophisms on Meaning and Truth , New York 1966, 29-42. 3 For an account of this second part of the theory, and a discussion of some of the diYculties surrounding it, see Paul Vincent Spade, The Logic of the Categorical: The Medieval Theory of Descent and Ascent , in: Norman Kretzmann (ed.), Meaning and Inference in Medieval Philosophy: Studies in Memory of Jan Pinborg , Dordrecht 1988, 187-224. For a critique of my interpretation of the theory there (although not of my account of its mechanics), see Gareth B. Matthews, Two Theories of Supposition , in: Topoi, 16 (1997), 35-40. See also Terence Parsons, Supposition as Quanti Žcation versus Supposition as Global Quanti Žcational EVect, in: Topoi, 16 (1997), 41-63, especially p. 61, n. 2. 4 That is, although their deŽnitions of the modes of personal supposition di Ver, those deŽ nitions appear to agree in assigning the various modes to particular cases—at least in the contexts the theory seems to have been primarily designed to handle. (John Buridan’s deŽ nitions behave the same way.) On this odd fact and its signi Ž cance, see Spade 1988 (op.cit., above n. 3).

©Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 1999 Vivarium 37,1 42 paul vincent spade but they disagreed fundamentally about supposition proper, particularly about the kinds of supposition known as “personal” and “simple.”5 Even there, however, they agreed on the main paradigm cases. In “Every man is mortal” , for example, they both held that “man” is in personal sup- position and supposits for individual human beings; in “Man is a species”, they both held that “man” is in simple supposition and supposits for the universal man.6 Their disagreement was over what is going on in these and other cases, both metaphysically and semantically. Metaphysically, Ockham was a nominalist. For him, talk about uni- versals—which had been an important part of logical discourse ever since Aristotle’s Categories and Porphyry’s Isagoge came to be included in the log- ical corpus—only makes sense as talk about universal concepts in the mind. 7 Of course, like everything else in Ockham’s ontology, concepts are meta- physically individual. Some of them, nevertheless, can be regarded as uni- versal “by representation,” so to speak; they are general concepts (mental representations) of many individuals at once. Burley, by contrast, was a metaphysical realist of some kind or other. 8 For him, talk about species and genera is talk about the world. Semantically, the main basis for the disagreement between Burley and Ockham was over signi Ž cation, and hence over the proper way to de Ž ne personal and simple supposition. For Ockham, a term in personal sup- position always supposits for what it signi Ž es (that is, for everything it signiŽ es), which is always one or more individuals (there are nothing but individuals in Ockham’s ontology), whereas in simple supposition it sup- posits non-personally for a mental concept. For Burley, on the other hand, a term in personal supposition does not always supposit for what it sig- niŽ es, and indeed only rarely does so; 9 it is typically only in simple sup-

5 For a general overview of the theory of “supposition proper,” see Spade 1982 ( op.cit., above n. 2), 192-3. For a discussion of some aspects of this disagreement between Burley and Ockham, see Paul Vincent Spade, Some Epistemological Implications of the Burley-Ockham Dispute, in: Franciscan Studies, 35 (1975), 212-22. For corrections to both papers, see Paul Vincent Spade, Walter Burley on the Simple Supposition of Singular Terms , in: Topoi, 16 (1997), 7-13. 6 For Ockham, of course, thatuniversal is theconcept “man.”See the following paragraph. 7 And, derivatively, about universal spoken or written words subordinated to such con- cepts in conventional languages. 8 The exact form Burley’s realism took is a matter still under discussion. For some recent treatments of the question, see Alessandro D. Conti, Ontology in Walter Burley’s Last Commentary on the Ars Vetus, in: Franciscan Studies, 50 (1990), 121-76; and Elizabeth Karger, Mental Sentences according to Burley and to the Early Ockham , in: Vivarium, 34 (1996), 192-230. 9 In fact, this occurs only in cases of what Burley calls “simple discrete terms,” for exam-