John Buridan

by Klima, Gyula

• ISBN13: 9780195176223
• ISBN10: 0195176227
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-12-23
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

John Buridan (ca. 1300-1362) has worked out perhaps the most comprehensive account of nominalism in the history of Western thought, the philosophical doctrine according to which the only universals in reality are "names": the common terms of our language and the common concepts of our minds. But these items are universal only in their signification; they are singular entities like any other in reality. This book examines what is most intriguing to contemporary readers in Buridan's medieval philosophical system: his nominalist account of the relationship between language, thought and reality. The main focus of the discussion is Buridan's deployment of the Ockhamist conception of a "mental language" for mapping the complex structures of written and spoken human languages onto a parsimoniously construed reality. Concerning these linguistic structures, this book carefully analyzes Buridan's conception of the radical conventionality of written and spoken languages, in contrast to the natural semantic features of concepts. The discussion pays special attention to Buridan's token-based semantics of terms and propositions, his conception of existential import, ontological commitment, truth, and logical validity. Finally, the book presents a detailed discussion of how these logical devices allow Buridan to maintain his nominalist position without giving up Aristotelian essentialism or yielding to skepticism, and pays special attention to contemporary concerns with these issues.

Author Biography

Gyula Klima, having taught previously at Yale and the University of Notre Dame, is Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University. He is the author of Readings in Medieval Philosophy, John Buridan: Summulae de Dialectica, an annotated translation with a philosophical introduction, and ARS ARTIUM: Essays in Philosophical Semantics, Medieval and Modern.

Table of Contents

Preface

Buridan's Life, Works, and Influence

Buridan's logic and the medieval logical tradition

The Primacy of Mental Language

The various kinds of concepts and the idea of a mental language

Natural language and the idea of a "formal syntax" in Buridan

Existential import and the Square of Opposition

Ontological commitment

The properties of terms (proprietates terminorum)

The semantics of propositions

Logical validity in a token-based, semantically closed logic

The possibility of scientific knowledge

Buridan's anti-skepticism

Buridan's essentialist nominalism

Bibliography

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