Calvin G. Normore

Ockham on Mental Language

Thanks largely to the work of Noam Chomsky, we have witnessed over the last thirty years a revival of interest in two closely related ideas: that there is a universal grammar, a set of structural features common to every human language, and that the exploration of this grammar is, in part, an exploration of the structure of thought.

Divine Omniscience, Omnipotence and Future Contingents: An Overview

We can generate a family of problems of future contingents by working variations on a single simple theme. Suppose that some claims about the future are, in some sense, contingent. Suppose that some claims about the past are in that same sense necessary. We now propose various principles which purport to show that every claim of the first kind is entailed by a claim of the second kind. If entailment preserves necessity then every claim of the first kind is necessary after all.

Buridan’s Ontology

Here is a recipe for ontology. First divide the expressions of one’s language into those which purport to pick things out and those which don’t. Then see whether some of those which purport to pick things out can be defined in terms of others. Finally admit into your ontology whatever an undefinable term purports to pick out. This scheme expresses (though vaguely and incompletely) one of the central intuitions behind many ontological programmes. What is admitted by an ontologist operating within this framework will depend, of course, upon how he or she divides expressions, on what resources of definition are available, and, perhaps, on pressures from other theories. What I hope to do in this paper is to show the influence of the intuition behind this sketch on the work of the fourteenth century Parisian master Jean Buridan.

Primitive Intentionality and Reduced Intentionality: Ockham’s Legacy

Three philosophical questions that are often confused should instead be keep distinct: First, what is a thought? Second, what is that in virtue of which a thought is a thought? Third, what is it that determines of what a thought is a thought? These questions raise very different issues within Ockham’s philosophy. Although Ockham’s views about the first question evolve, he seems to answer the second and the third questions in the same way, maintaining throughout his career that the intentionality of thoughts, which he expresses in terms of signification, is a primitive feature of them. Ockham’s view contrasts sharply with the view that can be found in Aquinas and others that a thought is a form of being present in an immaterial way. This alternative view explains intentionality by reducing it to the co-presence of a number of non-cognitive factors. This latter view offers hope of unifying epistemology and such sciences as optics but at the price of a very peculiar ontology. Ockham avoids this peculiarity, ...

Goodness and Rational Choice in the Early Middle Ages

Twentieth-century discussion of the history of the notions of will was domi-nated by debates about whether free choice is compatible with efficient causal determinism. One consequence of this was that a related but distinct issue — whether free choice is compatible with determination by final causes and, in particular, compatible with thegivennessof ends of action — was largely ignored. It was not always so. In late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages debates about the nature of choice centered as much (if not more) on the issue ofrational determinismthan on its efficient causal cousin. The aim of this paper is to trace part of the story of the evolution of discussion of this issue and of the evolution of conceptions of choice and of freedom which paralleled it.

Buridan on the Metaphysics of the Soul

Normores chapter focuses on the metaphysical issues stemming from Buridans conception of the union of body and soul, also considered in the broader context of the union of substantial form and matter in general. Normores argument traces in particular the rather strange metaphysical and mereological ramifications of Buridans “homogeneity-thesis” of material substances (the thesis that all material substances by themselves, without their accidental dispositions, must be homogeneous: every quantitative part of a material substance is of the same kind as is the whole), as presented in Buridans difficult discussion in Book II, q. 7.

Causa sui : Awareness and Choice in the Constitution of the Self

This paper argues that the conception of the self as constituted by its act of awareness of itself emerges from the confluence of three medieval ideas: Augustine’s concept of endogenous attention, Avicenna’s concept of primitive self-awareness, and Olivi’s concept of reflexivity as a necessary feature of personhood. It is Descartes who by his rejection of a distinction between a substance and its principal attribute and his weaving together of these three strands of thought who creates a conception of the self which still plays a central role in contemporary discussions.

Ex impossibili quodlibet sequitur (Angel d'Ors)

While agreeing with Professor D’Ors’ thesis that the notion of logical consequence cannot be exhaustively characterized (though not with his grounds for it), I depart from Professor d’Ors’ conclusion that the very notion of good consequence is primitive and can only be identified with the (incompletable) set of acceptable rules of inference, and from his conviction that modal notions such as necessity and impossibility are equivocal and gain such clarity as they have by their interaction with rules of inference. Inspired by this picture, Professor d’Ors undertook an examination of a number of medieval attempts to analyze the notion of consequence and tried to show how certain developments in the medieval history of logic made sense in the light of debate over such analyses. This paper examines a small fragment of Professor d’Ors programme and its relation to some aspects of Jean Buridan’s account of the consequence relation.

Validity Now and Then

It is often said that an argument is valid if and only if it is impossible for its premises to be jointly true and its conclusion false. Usually there is little harm in saying this but it places the concept of truth at the very heart of logic and, given how complex and obscure that concept is, one might wonder if trouble arises from this. It does in at least two contexts. One of these was explored in the first half of the fourteenth century by Jean Buridan and by the mysterious figure known as the Pseudo-Scotus of the Questions on the Prior Analytics printed in the edition of Scotuss works edited by Luke Wadding. Buridan thought that the bearers of truth were particular sentence-tokens; he thought of ttuth as a property of those tokens and he thought that nothing had properties unless it existed. There were, he pointed out, cases in which things could be as a sentence claimed them to be but in which the sentence could not be true. Such were cases in which the existence of the sentence was incompatible with the claim made by the sentence. For example, the sentence