Predication and Universals in Vincent Ferrer's Logic

PREDICATION AND UNIVERSALS IN VINCENT FERRER'S LOGIC The facility of scholars for finding historical antecedents for almost any philosophical position is surely a testimony to the perennial nature of philosophic problems. Although some may regard Frege's doctrine of predication as the last word on the subject, Professor P. T. Geach has recently maintained that Aquinas held a strikingly similar doctrine.1 He also suggests that Frege may have been aware of some of the similarities between his views and those of some medieval philosophers.2 Some of the characteristics of Aquinas' doctrine, as Geach sees it, which seem very Fregean are the foUowing. First, Aquinas held that a general term used as a subject has a mode of reference radically different to that which it has when used as a predicate. In the former case it refers to a concrete thing (supposition) ; in the latterit signifies a formornature.3 Second, there is an essential incompleteness about the predicate expression (e. g., ". . . is wise" in "Socrates is wise") which can be completed by the sign of some object whose form is signified by it.4 Third, although the analogy was, of course, unavailable to Aquinas, these relations between subject and predicate can be explicated by Frege's language of mathematical functions.8 I leave it to Thomistic scholars to decide whether Geach is right about Aquinas or not. In this essay I shall discuss the doctrine of predication of a fourteenth-century follower of Aquinas, St. Vincent Ferrer (c. 1350—1419), who claimed that he wrote in the spirit of St. Thomas (secundum sententiam veridicam sancti Thome is the way he put it) but who was, unlike his master, at least for a time a logician ex professe.6 1 See "Form and Existence", Aristotelian Society, Proceedings, LV (1954—55)- 2S1—2D2; Reference and Generality (Ithaca, 1962), pp. 179—180; G. E. M. Anscombe and P. T. Geach, Three Philosophers (Ithaca, 1961), pp. 76 ff. 2 Three Philosophers, p. 136.8 Ibid., p. 76. 4 Ibid., p. 78.6 Ibid., pp. 77 f., 80. • On St Vincent's life see Matthieu-Maxime Gorce, Saint Vincent Ferrier (Paris, 1924). On the texts see Matthieu-Maxime Gorce, Les Bases de l'étude historique de Saint Vincent Ferrier (Paris, 1924), pp. 1—3, and M. Garcia Miralies, "Escritos Filosóficos de San Vicente Ferrer", Estudios Filosóficos, IV (1955), 279—-284. For studies of St. Vincent's logic see Ivo Thomas, "Saint Vincent Ferrer's De Suppositionibus", Dominican Studies, V (1952), 48IOHN TRENTMAN The Fregean characteristics of Aquinas' doctrine noted by Geach can be found in Ferrer, however, and even the function analogy may not be as far-fetched as it seems. Not only does it help in describing the incomplete nature of predicate expressions; it also provides a kind of parallel to Ferrer's ascription of syncategorematic or formal functions to predicates. Yet although these ideas can be usefully employed in understanding Ferrer's doctrine, Vincent of course knew nothing of the modern mathematical notion of functions, and there is no reason to suppose Frege had heard of him; so a detailed comparison of their writings would be more likely misleading than enlightening. Nevertheless these Fregean characteristics of Ferrer's doctrine of predication also reflect his teaching about universals, which is found in De Suppositionibus and is more explicit in De unitate universalis, and comparing the doctrine of predication with its ontological implications will be a primary task of this essay. The argument of the essay will proceed in this way. First, I shall review Ferrer's views about the relation of logic to ontology, of words to things. Then I shall show that Aquinas' comparison of predicate and subject to form and matter, which is crucial to Vincent's doctrine, is taken by him to mean that subjects and predicates perform radically different semantic roles, that predicates have an essentially incomplete nature and that this incompleteness can best be understood by seeing that his predicates really function as syncategoremata. Finally, I shall compare the ontological suggestions that emerge from this discussion with Ferrer's explicit claims about the status of universals. First, then, what is logic about ? Or, more to...