Logik und Semantik im Mittelalter: Ein Überblick (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 465 mat6rielle m6diocre et les fautes innombrables qui le d6parent. Signalons en terminant que l'ouvrage ne comprend ni index, ni table des passages cit6s, mais cependant une bibliographic, ainsi au'une table des abr6viations des oeuvres de Philon malheureusement inutile, car ce ne sont pas celles que I'auteur a utilis6es dans sa th6se. RICHARD GOULET C.N.R.S. (Paris) Jan Pinborg. Logik und Semantik im Mittelalter: Ein Uberblick. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1974. Pp. 216. DM22. Jan Pinborg, the author of this work, is Director of the Medieval Institute at the University of Copenhagen, a center that specializes in the study of medieval grammar and logic. He likewise is editor of Cahiers de l'lnstitut du moyen-age grec et latin, a journal of medieval logic, grammar, and rhetoric text and commentary, which emanates from the same university. The present work, a collection of systematically unified lectures he gave at Copenhagen and at the Christian Albrechts University at Kiei, serves well to update the history of medieval logic we have obtained from Boehner's Medieval Logic and the various histories of Prantl, Bochenski, and the Kneales. In the field of medieval grammar it supplies content for a great vacuum left by the lack of any general introduction to developments there. Pinborg's book is not, however, an independent history of each discipline, but it provides a lengthy survey of their conflicts with and impacts upon one another. The main theme, nonetheless , is the continuous "purification" of Aristotelian logic as it goes through its various stages of Iogica vetus, logica nova, and logica moderna, and draws further and further away from the predominant neo-Platonic influence of Porphyry and some other authors who people Boethius's commentaries on the Categoriae and De interpretatione. As Pinborg highlights the contributions of Anselm, Abelard, Peter of Spain, Boethius of Dacia, Ockham, Burley, and Buridan he studies the diverse developments within the issues of the signification, consignification , and supposition of terms, the analyses of past and future propositions, and the theories of consequences. What is most striking in the work is not the incidental treatment of these authors and these issues; it is the presence of certain dominant themes that tie in with the "de-Platonization" of Aristotelian logic. The debate between the different theories of predication-the inherence theory, where the predicate expresses a form present or not present in the subject, and the identity theory, where the subject and predicate name or do not name the same individualalready is a debate Abelard carried on with himself (and others) in the Logica Ingredientibus (Inherence theory) and the Dialectica (identity theory). Pinborg traces this debate through the post-Abelardian period up to the fourteenth century when Ockham, in his de-Platonizing efforts, stood by the identity theory. If I can find any flaw in this whole portrait, it is with the claim that Ockham's contemporary Walter Burley offered an "ingenious combination" of the identity and inherence theories of the copula (p. 156). I rather find Burley's frequent and lengthy treatments of universals and predication during his long career dealing with logic issues (1301-37) quite confusing. At times he uses the language of excessive realism; at other moments he seems close to Ockham himself. His contemporaries must have seen him this way also, for he argues in the 1337 In Artem Veterem (ed. Venice, 1541, f. 76ra) that he really is not saying anything that St. Thomas Aquinas did not hold. Pinborg also ties in the theme of natural supposition with the de-Platonizing motif. Natural supposition is the kind of supposition a term has outside any use in a proposition (it transcends its context). This theory of natural supposition appears in thirteenth-century authors, but it was attacked strongly by writers at the end of that period and is found neither in Ockham nor (note well) in Burley. Following M. De Rijk's lead, Pinborg has noted its continuance through 466 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY the fourteenth century. I will agree that the term "natural supposition" does survive in the fourteenth century, but I believe we should be cautious in regard to its meaning and note the...