Introduction
At least four assumptions appear to be part of the common ground of inter pretation among scholars of Ockham. The first can be described as a kind of general methodological presupposition, in that it has become standard to explore the Franciscan as a potential contributor to current philosophical debates, such as the issue of externalism in the philosophy of language and in the philosophy of mind.1 The view that medieval philosophers – or at least, Ockham – are of interest only to historians and theologians does not enjoy great popularity, especially not among philosophers working in the tradition of analytic philosophy.2 Second, Ockham is usually labelled a nominalist. While nominalism is not a single unified position,3 Ockham can be called a nominalist insofar as he sub scribes to the view that there are only particular things in this world: he admits only of two kinds of things in his ontology, namely particular substances (Socrates, this apple) and particularized qualities (the wisdom of Socrates, the redness of this apple).4 It would perhaps be more fitting to call Ockham’s posi tion ‘particularistic’. He thereby takes a conceptual stance on the problem of universals.5 According to Ockham, universals are nothing but concepts exist ing in the intellect. There is nothing universal ‘out there’ in the world. That a concept such as whale or wisdom is universal means that whale is semantically
1 See for instance Peter King, ‘Rethinking Representation in the Middle Ages’, in H. Lagerlund (ed.), Representation and Objects of Thought in Medieval Philosophy, Hampshire, 2007; Calvin Normore, ‘Burge, Descartes and Us’, in M. Hahn; B. Ramberg (eds.), Reflections and Replies: Essays on the Philosophy of Tyler Burge, Massachussetts, 2003; Claude Panaccio, ‘Ockham’s Externalism’, in G. Klima (ed.), Intentionality, Cognition and Mental Representation in Medieval Philosophy, New York, (forthcoming). 2 See A. Freddoso and H. Schuurman (transl.; ed.), Ockham’s Theory of Propositions – Part II of the Summa Logicae, Indiana, 1998, viii. 3 See Paul Vincent Spade and Claude Panaccio, ‘William of Ockham’, in E.N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011 Edition), url: http://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/fall2011/entries/ockham, Section 4. Metaphysics. Last access March 7th 2014. 4 On Ockham’s nominalism and the attempt to connect his nominalism with contemporary forms of nominalism, see Claude Panaccio, ‘Nominalisme occamiste et nominalisme con temporain’, Dialogue. Canadian Philosophical Review 26 (1987), 281–287; id., Les mots, les con- cepts et les choses. La sémantique de Guillaume d’Occam et le nominalisme d’aujourd’hui, Paris, 1992; Cyrille Michon, Nominalisme – La théorie de la signification d’Occam, Paris, 1994. 5 For the problem of universals see Wolfgang Künne, Abstrakte Gegenstände, Frankfurt/M., 1983, [2] 2007. And for its specific form in the Middle Ages see Martin M. Tweedale, Abelard on Universals, Amsterdam, 1976.
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6 To make the point differently, Ockham takes terms such as ‘whale’ as concrete, general terms, but not as singular, abstract terms. See Künne, Abstrakte Gegenstände, 37. According to the medieval theory of supposition, ‘whale’ in (1) whale is a species is used differently as in (2) Moby Dick is a whale: in (1) ‘whale’ is used for the species whale, whereas in (2) ‘whale’ is used for the things it signifies. As will become clear later, in Ockham’s view, species are nothing but concepts. 7 That is, there is no other kind of relation involved here, such as the so-called ‘one-over-many’ – relation between a Platonic Form and its instantiations. 8 See for instance the Annotated Bibliography of Medieval theories of mental language www .ontologymirror.com/biblio/supposition-biblio-one.htm and www.ontologymirror.com/ biblio/supposition-biblio-two.htm by Raul Corazzon. 9 See Martin Lenz, Mentale Sätze, Wilhelm von Ockhams Thesen zur Sprachlichkeit des Denkens, Stuttgart, 2003 for an account of the historical development of the mental-speech assumption.