Raul Corazzon

"Lesniewski defined ontology, one of his three foundational systems, as 'a certain kind of modernized 'traditional logic' [On the foundations of mathematics (FM), p. 176]. In this respect it is worth bearing in mind that in the 1937-38 academic year Lesniewski taught a course called "Traditional 'formal logic' and traditional 'set theory' on the ground of ontology"; cf. Srzednicki and Stachniak, S. Lesniewski's Systems. Protothetic, 1988, p. 180. On this see Kotarbinski Gnosiology. The scientific approach to the theory of knowledge, 1966, pp. 253-54 [the Polish original was published in 1929], which Lesniewski praised in [FM]: see in particular pp. 373 ff. Kotarbinski noted that Lesniewski "calls his system 'ontology' in harmony with certain terms used earlier (as in..

"Heidegger's way of understanding the originary phenomenon of truth is to "make clear the mode of being of the cognition itself." His starting point is a proposition that is not based on intuition. Someone says with his or her back to the wall: this picture hangs askew. The proposition embodies the claim to have discovered the picture (as a being) in the "how" (the mode) of its being. The proposition displays this "how" of being in language. In the attempt to verify the proposition by sensuous experience, the recognition, according to Heidegger, is directed only to the intended being (the picture) and not to the proposition. It is directed to the being itself (which is to be verified by perception) in its mode of uncoveredness (Entdeckt-heir), i.e., in its showing-itself. Confirmation (Bewährung) means this showing-itself of the being in the same way in which it is intended in the proposition. A true proposition shows the being in its mode of uncoveredness. The phenomenon of "originary truth" does not have the character of correspondence. It is the ground of the concept of truth in the sense of correspondence and propositional truth. By unfolding the meaning of alétheia Heidegger shows us a more originary sense of truth as unconcealment (Unverborgenheit). He wants to show that this concept coincides with the first and originary concept of truth in Greek thinking. In this primary sense only the discovering human Dasein can be "true" while it is Being-discovering (Entdeckend-Sein). On the other hand, beings (Seiendes) that we can find in the world can only "be" in a secondary mode, i.e., as being-discovered (Entdecktsein). They can only make a claim to uncoveredness. Their fundament is the Being-discovering of the human Dasein. The being-true of a discovered being is only possible as being discovered by human Dasein as being-in-the-world. The authentic Being of Dasein, the being-in-the truth, presupposes disclosedness (Erschlossenheit) of the world in states-of-mind (Befindlichkeiten), understanding, and discourse, i.e., the constitution of the being (Seinsverfassung) of human Dasein as thrownness (Geworfenheit) and project (Entwurf)..

"The role of logic in the Middle Ages. Regarding the role of logic within the framework of arts and sciences during the Middle Ages, we have to distinguish two related aspects, one institutional and the other scientific. As to the first aspect, we have to remember that the medieval educational system was based on the seven liberal arts, which were divided into the trivium, i.e., three arts of language, and the quadrivium, i.e., four mathematical arts. The so-called trivial arts were grammar, rhetoric, and logic, and during a period of several centuries virtually every educated person, at least every university graduate, received a training in these matters, especially in logic. Students in the medieval faculty of arts probably spent more time studying logic than any other discipline. This first -- institutional -- aspect concerning the role of logic is explained by the second -- scientific -- aspect. The trivial disciplines provided techniques of analysis and a technical vocabulary that permeate philosophical, scientific and theological writings. Logic, as mentioned before, was referred to and was generally regarded as the art of arts and the science of sciences. The increasing cultural dominance of the universities with their obligatory disputationes and their hierarchy of examinations on the one hand and the outstanding status of logic on the other were corresponding features of the educational world of the 13th century. The core of the logic curriculum from the 12th century onwards was provided by the logical works of Aristotle. These represented the material for the study of types of predication, the analysis of simple propositions or statements (2) and their relations of inference and equivalence, the analysis of modal propositions, of the structure and the types of the syllogism, dialectical topics, fallacies and scientific reasoning as based on the demonstrative syllogism. Medieval logicians, however, realized that there were other, non-Aristotelian, approaches to logical subjects, questions and methods that could be investigated..

"Any linguistic study of the Greek verb be is essentially conditioned, and perhaps ultimately motivated, by the philosophic career of this word. We know what an extraordinary career it has been. It seems fair to say, with Benveniste, that the systematic development of a concept of Being in Greek philosophy from Parmenides to Aristotle, and then in a more mechanical way from the Stoics to Plotinus, relies upon the pre-existing disposition of the language to make a very general and diversified use of the verb einai. Furthermore, insofar as the notions expressed by on, einai, and ousia in Greek underlie the doctrines of Being, substance, essence, and existence in Latin, in Arabic, and in modern philosophy from Descartes to Heidegger and perhaps to Quine, we may say that the usage of the Greek verb be studied here forms the historical basis for the ontological tradition of the West, as the very term "ontology" suggests. At the same time it is generally recognized that this wide range of uses for the single verb eimi in Greek reflects a state of affairs which is "peculiar to Indo-European languages, and by no means a universal situation or a necessary condition." (1) The present monograph series on "the verb 'be' and its synonyms" shows just how far the languages of the earth may differ from one another in their expression for existence, for predication with nouns or with adjectives, for locative predication, and so forth. The topic of be can itself scarcely be defined except by reference to Indo-European verbs representing the root *es-. The question naturally arises whether an historical peculiarity of this kind can be of any fundamental importance for general linguistics and, even more pressing, whether a concept reflecting the Indo-European use of *es- can be of any general significance in philosophy.&quot.

"With Abelard, the term 'copula' enters into western thought. In fact, although widely attested, the use of the term 'copula' in reference to Aristotle's work is totally anachronistic. (1) What led to this term? In his Dialectica, Abelard was mainly concerned with the way syllogisms can be construed. The interest of the copula was in fact derivative from this main concern. As Kneale and Kneale (The development of logic, 1962: 206) put it, 'it is clear that for his [Aristotle's] theory of syllogism he assumes in every general proposition two terms of the same kind, that is to say, each capable of being a subject and each capable of being a predicate'. Thus, since the only linguistic entities that can play these two roles are nouns (in modern terms, noun phrases), it is easy to understand why the copula became central. Abelard pursued the Aristotelian theory by emphasizing the role of be as the element that can turn a noun into a predicate in a syllogism rather than as the element that provides the sentence with a time specification (see Dialectica: 161). It is this conceptual shift that underlies the invention of the term 'copula', which is cast on the Latin copulare meaning 'to link'. For example, in sentences like a man is a mammal and Socrates is a man the copula allows the noun phrase a man to play the role of the subject, in the first, and that of the predicate, in the second. Clearly, in such a framework the assumption that the copula can be interpreted as a predicate meaning 'existence'

"On the June 16th, 1996, Richard Sylvan died of a sudden and unexpected heart attack. His death, at the relatively young age of 60, robbed Australasia of one of its greatest philosophers, arguably the most original that it has ever produced. Richard was born Francis Richard Routley at Levin, New Zealand, on 13 December, 1935. He changed his name to Sylvan -- much to the confusion of a number of people -- when he remarried in 1983. After studying at the Victoria University of Wellington, he took a job at the University of Sydney, in Australia, where he lived for the rest of his life. He had several other jobs in Australia, including one at the University of New..

"With the philosophy of Nicolai Hartmann we once again enter a world of sober, objective and impartial inquiry, which presses beyond man's self and seeks to grasp the universe of being so far as it is revealed to our limited capacity to know. The basic mood of Existence philosophy, as might be expected, is altogether missing from this universal way of viewing matters. (...). The true concern of his philosophy is to discover the structural laws of the real world, of the world of being, not of some 'world of mere appearances' set out in front of the real world. Traditional philosophy, according to Hartmann, has sinned a great deal in this connection and in a double manner. First, it has always believed that it faced two basic alternatives - to accept an absolute knowledge of being, or else to assume the total unknowability of the 'things in themselves'. The latter course means rejecting the possibility altogether of objective knowledge of being, the former results in closed..

Now we should have to answer the question: when were the questions on Perihermeneias written? Little is known about the chronology of Buridan's works. Even a relative date is difficult to establish. However, some remarks can be made. First, there is the fact that the questions on Perihermeneias are quoted several times in Tractatus I of the Summule (4), in a way that makes it highly probable that the Summule were written after the Questiones on Perihermeneias (5). Now, according to professor Pinborg the first lectura of the Summule may be dated as early as the late 1320es (6), that is at the very beginning of Buridan's career as a teacher of philosophy at the university of Paris. This may be an indication for an early date of the Questiones on Perihermeneias, possibly as early as 1325. There are two other reasons for assuming that the commentary on Perihermeneias is one of Buridan's first works. The first clue is given by the places where Buridan refers to one of his own works: once he refers to his commentary on Porphyry's Isagoge (7), twice to his commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics (8), and six times to his commentary on the Physics (9). The way in which he refers to these tracts seems also to be significant: the reference to his commentary on Porphyry's Isagoge shows that this work is of an earlier date than the present work. As to the other two works, he only refers to the number of the book in which he is going to treat a particular subject, not to the number of the question. A (cross)reference to the Summule is not given, although, as Pinborg remarks, there is a general doctrinal concordance between the two works. The questions on Metaphysics do not contain a (cross)-reference to the questions on Perihermeneias, at least not on the places where one would expect them. I am not certain about possible references occurring in the commentary on Physics. However, we should be very careful to draw conclusions from the occurrence of references, since it is always possible that we are dealing with a second or third lectura of the text..

"The difficulty of piercing the screen, sometimes very opaque, which is the Aristotelianism of so many centuries, based substantially on the thinking of a thousand and one more or less faithful "disciples," is doubled by a difficulty probably unique in its kind: the impossibility of always being able to determine exactly the sort of things the writings of the authentic Aristotelian Corpus are. For we suspect that scholars often have to deal with texts whose definitive form owes something to the work of Aristotle's disciples. We remain, on the other hand, powerless to determine always with precision the extent to which the products of their work continue to conform to the master's thinking or proceed, on the contrary, from a new idea. At least I can state very generally that the organization of the Corpus Aristotelicum, such as scholars after Andronicus of Rhodes have understood it, depends for them on the firmer and firmer conviction that Aristotle elaborated a philosophical system whose constituent parts are reflected in the arrangement of the different preserved treatises, as if their author had effectively "programmed" them from the perspective of systematic expression. Now, this is the one intention that we may hardly attribute to our philosopher. The project of expounding a genuine system is in fact, as I. During has written,(4) "typically Hellenistic but very un- Aristotelian." Such a claim will perhaps seem today the unavoidable result of Jaeger's explicit attempt to combat "scholastic idolatry,"(5) which regarded the work of the "master of those who know" as a genuine "summa," firmly articulated. But, independently of Jaeger, K. Praechter, for example, assures us that "a secure division of the philosophical disciplines according to a determinate principle does not occur in Aristotle"! (6) And it is obvious that Aristotle was not as concerned as his disciples were to propose a rigid system of sciences and to organize his writings systematically according to it. This indeterminateness is obviously quite irksome for the interpreter who asks about the occasion for the project of Aristotle to which the texts catalogued under the titles Ethics and Politics correspond, and who finds himself dealing with a Corpus established by people who indeed thought that they could abolish such indeterminateness by recourse to the hypothesis that the philosopher conceived his project as formally expounding a genuine system. Moreover -- and this is a prime consideration whose significance I shall examine at great length -- the originality of Aristotle's project risks being masked by the interpretation or the importance given since antiquity to certain interpretive categories (human philosophy, practical science, ethics, etc.) in accounting for the approach of a series of texts integrated in the Corpus, itself conceived as a philosophical summa..