Laurent Cesalli

Regarding marriage, John Wyclif defends the following position: strictly speaking, no words or any kind of sensory signs would be needed, since the consensus of the spouses together with God's approbation would suffice for the accomplishment of marriage. But if words do have to be pronounced, then the appropriate formula should not be in the present, but in the future. In the following, I shall discuss Wyclif's arguments by comparing them with some other medieval positions, as well as with some elements of contemporary theories of speech acts. It will appear that in his analysis of the only sacrament which is a “social act“ in the literal sense of the expression, Wyclif (i) clearly acknowledges the central role of individual intentions behind (linguistic) conventions, and (ii) carefully distinguishes between the different, chronologically disparate acts involved in marriage and their respective (semantic, psychological and factual) felicity conditions

La Summa logicae de Brinkley est l’un des grands manuels de logique réaliste qui fleurissent en Angleterre, à partir de 1320-1330. Dans le De propositione, le Doctor antiquus, avant d’aborder la question du significatum propositionis, s’interroge sur la nature, les lieux et les divisions des propositions. Sa théorie de la proposition mentale comme résultat d’une composition, non de concepts, mais des choses qu’ils signifient, rappelle celle de Gauthier Burley, mais Brinkley n’étend pas la notion de proposition hors de la sphère des signes linguistiques

Walter Burley (1275-c.1344) and John Wyclif (1328-1384) follow two clearly stated doctrinal options: on the one hand, they are realists and, on the other, they defend a correspondence theory of truth that involves specific correlates for true propositions, in short: truth-makers. Both characteristics are interdependent: such a conception of truth requires a certain kind of ontology. This study shows that a) in their explanation of what it means for a proposition to be true, Burley and Wyclif both develop what we could call a theory of intentionality in order to explain the relation that must obtain between the human mind and the truth-makers, and b) that their explanations reach back to Augustine, more precisely to his theory of ocular vision as exposed in the De trinitate IX as well as to his conception of ideas found in the Quaestio de ideis.

Il De universalibus di Riccardo Brinkley è la seconda delle sette parti che costituiscono la Summa logicae. L'A., prima di fornire l'edizione del testo , conduce un'analisi dottrinale e comparativa. Perciò ne illustra struttura e contenuto, esplicitando il concetto di universale metafisico, la critica della concezione puramente semantica dell'universale, la natura dell'intentio universale, l'universale logico, la sua divisione. Brinkley esprime la sua contrarietà rispetto al concetto dell'universale logico come intentio in anima. La sezione successiva riguarda invece i cinque predicabili di Porfirio, il genere, la specie, la differenza, il proprio e l'accidente. L'ultima parte del saggio è incentrata su alcune osservazioni comparative tra Brinkley e alcuni suoi contemporanei, come Guglielmo d'Ockham , Walter Burley , Giovanni Wyclif . L'A. conclude proponendo di considerare il De universalibus di Brinkley un testimone precoce dell'opposizione tardo medievale tra antiqui e moderni. In Brinkley l'universale metafisico ha il primato rispetto all'universale logico. Il Tractatus de universalibus è edito sulla base dei mss.: P = Praha, Narodní Knihovna, 396 8 , ff. 53rb-58va e L = Leipzig, UB, 1360, ff. 29vb-36va. Si fa riferimento, con la sigla GW all'edizione del primo capitolo del De universalibus

The philosophical problem of the correspondence between what we think, what we say and 'what there is' is a perennial one. At the beginning of the Sophistical Refutations (1, 165a7-9), for example, Aristotle gives a synthetic formulation of it: since 'it is impossible in a discussion to bring in the actual things discussed: we use their names as symbols instead of them; and we suppose that what follows in the names, follows in the things as well' (Aristotle 1984, I, 278). But whereas this diffi culty pertains to language (or thought) in general, it becomes remarkably acute when the linguistic expressions at stake are not simple names, but bearers of truth and falsity, namely, statements or, to use the medieval word for it, propositions. Th is chapter addresses the following question: did medieval authors consider that just as names signify things, propositions, too, are semantically related to special objects-- and if so, what kind of things did they think those special objects are? I shall begin with two short introductory remarks about the notion of state of aff airs (SOA) as well as the identifi cation criteria for the theories describing them before the technical category of SOA was coined (Sections 1 and 2); I shall then give a survey of the fi ve main types of medieval answers given to the question of the nature of SOAs (Section 3); fi nally, I shall briefl y compare the medieval conceptions with (some) later, that is late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, as well as contemporary theories of SOAs (Section 4).

“Austrian” philosophy of language is characterized, among other things, by the following two features: Problems of language are considered within the broader framework of an intentionality-based philosophy of mind—or, to put it more precisely, questions of meaning are considered as involving a quite articulated theory of intentions; several aspects of such an account are explicitly presented as inspired by or somehow already at work in the Medieval Scholastic tradition. In this study we follow the track indicated by these two features and use some “Austrian” reflections on the articulation between meanings and intentions as a “heuristic filter”, as it were, to shed a new and different light on some Medieval debates in philosophy of language on the relationship between significare and intendere. It will be roughly divided into three parts. We begin by singling out some distinctive tenets of the “Austrian” strategy aimed at describing the relationship between meaning and intentions , and then turn to various Medieval texts from the 13th and 14th century dealing with the two related notions of significatio and intentio . The upshot of our investigation is to show how, for both “Austrian” and Medieval philosophers of language , a proper understanding of linguistic meaning—in the twofold sense of words or sentences having a lexical content and utterances having a determinate pragmatic function—presupposes an account of what one could call the “agentive intentionality”, i.e. the complex intentionality proper to practical goal-directed human behaviours. Some final remarks about outcomes, meaning, scope and perspectives opened by the method applied will conclude the study

This paper shows how Wyclif is able at the same time to claim that whatever is is a proposition and to develop a nontrivial theory of propositional truth and falsity. The study has two parts: 1) Starting from Wyclif's fivefold propositional typology – including a propositio realis and asic esse sicut propositio significat – we will analyse the three different kinds of real predication, the distinction between primary and secondary signification of propositions and the status of logical truth as opposed to metaphysical truth. Furthermore, the notion of ens logicum will be compared to Walter Burley's propositio in re of which it appears to be a close analogon. 2) The second part deals with two semantic and metaphysical implications of the "pan-propositionalism": the extended notion of being called upon to explain the truth of so-called non-standard propositions and the relation between contents of the divine mind as "arch-truth-makers" and eternal as well as contingent truths.

Le présent article propose une étude « génétique » de la théorie de la proposition de Walter Burley. La notion de propositio in re y est considérée d’un point de vue interne, en relation avec la théorie augustinienne de la visio et en comparaison avec le Sachverhalt de la philosophie moderne. Il en résulte que l’expression ‘propositio in re’ ne renvoie à aucune entité clairement définissable. Elle est plutôt le symptôme de l’intention fondamentale de Burley : doter toute proposition vraie d’un corrélat objectif