-
45One often hears extravagant claims made for the Aristotelian doctrine that "what understands and what is understood are the same" De anima iii.4; 430a4). This identity between knower and what is known, or between percipient and what is perceived, is often said to offer a way out of the familiar skeptical arguments against the possibility of our having knowledge of the external world. Typically such claims are made by students of Thomas Aquinas, who in this way seek to render Aquinas's theory of …Read more
-
377Indifference vs. Universality of Mental Representation in Ockham, Buridan, and AquinasQuestio. Yearbook of the History of Metaphysics 10 (1): 99-110. 2010.This paper argues in the first place that nominalists are right in insisting against ontological realists that semantic universality does not require commitment to universal entities. However, Ockham, in his zeal to get rid of Scotus’s universal entities, swept under the carpet the issue of universal representational content of genuinely universal symbols, conflating it with the mere indifference of the information content of non-distinctive singular representations. Buridan did come up with an …Read more
-
43Consequences of a closed, token-based semantics: the case of John BuridanHistory and Philosophy of Logic 25 (2): 95-110. 2004.This paper argues for two principal conclusions about natural language semantics based on John Buridan's considerations concerning the notion of formal consequence, that is, formally valid inference. (1) Natural languages are essentially semantically closed, yet they do not have to be on that account inconsistent. (2) Natural language semantics has to be token based, as a matter of principle. The paper investigates the Buridanian considerations leading to these conclusions, and considers some ob…Read more
-
24Ockham's semantics and ontology of the categoriesIn P. V. Spade (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ockham, Cambridge University Press. pp. 118--42. 1999.
-
20"What can a scholastic do in the 20 th century?" - asks Katalin Vidrányi in the title of her article written in 1970. [1] If her characteristically systematic and pithy analysis can be summarized in a single sentence, the author's answer is this: many things, but not too much.
New York City, New York, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Intentionality |
Semantic Theories |