Sten Ebbesen

The Chimera’s Diary

My feelings towards philosophers are mixed. For centuries they have used me as an experimental animal, keeping me on a minimum of being. In a way I may owe them my “life”, but their experiments have weakened me so much that the end may be drawing near. If my weakness proves fatal, please inform the Centaur, Goat-Stag and Pegasus, who are my next of kin. If the philosophers kill me, I expect them to keep at least one of my relatives alive in order to continue the experiments. If we are all doomed, I would like to secure us a place in man’s memory. This is why I have put together these extracts from my diary, recording the sufferings to which I and my tribe have been subjected.

Concrete Accidental Terms: Late Thirteenth-Century Debates about Problems Relating to Such Terms as ‘Album’

Bis jetzt haben wir nur vom Terminus concretus gesprochen, d. h. vom Substantiv, das einen Gegenstand direkt bezeichnet. Die Ergebnisse dieser Analyse werden bestatigt, wenn auch andere Redeteile berucksichtigt werden. Zum nomen abstractum etwa ‘albedo’ gehort eine besondere Problematik, die ich hier nicht beruhren kann. Man mus sich aber fragen, inwiefern solche abstrakten Substantive ein Suppositum haben konnen. Vielleicht wurde man mit Ockham auf die „res albae“ hinweisen, vielleicht auf die reine Form. Das Adjektiv bietet besondere Probleme und ist deshalb wichtig, weil es als Prototyp der Pradikate angesehen wird. Es wird allgemein angenommen, das das Adjektiv und damit das Pradikat die Form bezeichnet, das Suppositum aber zu verstehen gibt. Dadurch wird die Theorie vorbereitet, das das Adjektiv als Pradikat auch supponiert, was eine Voraussetzung fur die Identitatstheorie der Pradikation ist.

Early Supposition Theory II

Abstract In 1981 I published an article called Early Supposition Theory. Then as now, the magisterial work on the subject was L.M. de Rijk’s Logica Modernorum and then as now any discussion of the topic would have to rely to a great extent on the texts published there. This means that many of the problems that existed then still remain, but a couple of important new studies and several new texts have been published in the meantime, so it may be time to try to take stock of the situation. I will first look at the origin of the term suppositio and then at the chronology of our source texts.

Context-sensitive Argumentation: Dirty Tricks in the Sophistical Refutations and a Perceptive Medieval Interpretation of the Text

Aristotle in the central chapters of his Sophistical Refutations gives advice on how to counter unfair argumentation by similar means, all the while taking account not only of the adversary’s arguments in themselves, but also of his philosophical commitments and state of mind, as well as the impression produced on the audience. This has offended commentators, and made most of them, medieval and modern alike, pass lightly over the relevant passages. A commentary that received the last touch in the very early 13th century is more perceptive because, it is argued, the commentator had lived in a 12th-century environment of competing Parisian schools that was in important respects similar to the one of Aristotle’s Athens.

Psammetichus’s Experiment and the Scholastics: Is Language Innate?

In question commentaries on Priscian and Aristotle, scholastic authors from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries discuss whether language is innate in humans, so that a person can acquire a language without the normal learning process. Commentaries on De sensu et sensato are a particularly rich source of discussions of the problem, because Aristotle there seems to assume that congenital deafness automatically implies dumbness. Generally, the scholastics conclude that no existing language is more natural than any other, and that a normal learning process is required for anyone to acquire one of the established languages. But they also consider the possibility that a couple of children who were brought up without hearing any human language (King Psammetichus’ experiment) would develop a language of their own, thus satisfying their inborn urge to communicate.

The Prior Analytics in the Latin West: 12th-13th Centuries

This study contains three parts. The first tries to follow the spread of the study of the Prior Analytics in the first two centuries during which it was at all studied in Western Europe, providing in this connection a non-exhaustive list of extant commentaries. Part II points to a certain overlap between commentaries on the Prior Analytics and works from the genre of sophismata. Part III lists the questions discussed in a students’ compendium from about the 1240s and in six commentaries per modum quaestionis from the 1270s through the 1290s.

The Traditions Of Ancient Logic-Cum-Grammar In The Middle Ages—What’s The Problem?

Clashes between bits of non-homogeneous theories inherited from antiquity were an important factor in the formation of medieval theories in logic and grammar, but the traditional categories of Aristotelianism, Stoicism and Neoplatonism are not quite adequate to describe the situation. Neoplatonism is almost irrelevant in logic and grammar, while there might be reasons to introduce a new category, LAS = Late Ancient Standard, with two branches: (1) logical LAS = Aristotle + Boethius, and (2) grammatical LAS = Stoics &c. → Apollonius → Priscian.

Boethius de Dacia et al. The sophismata in MSS Bruges SB 509 and Florence Med.-Laur. S. Croce 12 sin., 3

The manuscripts B (= Brugge, Stedelijke Openbare Bibliotheek, 509), and F (= Firenze, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, S. Croce 12 sin., 3) were executed about the same time (in the early fourteenth century, it would seem), but probably in widely different places, B perhaps in Belgium or Britain, F in Italy (judging by styles of writing). The two manuscripts contain partly identical collections of sophismata from the late thirteenth century. The collections were first described by Grabmann in 1940 (F only)1 then in 1962 by Roos,2 who discovered B, and most recently by Pinborg and myself in 1970.3 A corrected and more detailed catalogue of the sophismata is found in an appendix to the present paper. An edition is being prepared for Corpus Philosophorum Danicorum Medii Aevi IX.4