Kenny Anthony. Medieval Philosophy: A New History of Western Philosophy. Volume 2
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that Aristotle did not maintain individual immortality, and that such
immortality could not be known by natural reason alone.23
Such was also the view of the cultured and erudite scholar who emerged
as the head of the Paduan Aristotelians, Pietro Pomponazzi. He was the
author of a work, De Immortalitate Animae, which argued that if one took
seriously the Aristotelian doctrine that the human soul was the form of the
human body, it was impossible to believe that it could survive death.24
Pomponazzi considered himself a Christian, and was prepared to accept
personal immortality as an article of faith: but he and his Paduan associates
soon found themselves the object of ecclesiastical hostility.
In 1512 the warrior pope Julius II, battered in conXict and ailing in
health, summoned a general council to meet at the Lateran, with a view
to the emendation of a Church by now universally agreed to be in great
need of reform. Shortly after the summoning of the Council, Julius died
and was replaced by the Medici pope Leo X. Leo showed little enthusiasm
for reformation, and the Council achieved almost nothing in practical
terms apart from a useful decree declaring that those who ran pawnshop s
were not necessarily guilty of the sin of usury. Some ecclesia stical abuses
were prohibited, but the decrees remained a dead letter, until the
issues were brought back by Luther to haunt the papacy. In the meantime,
Pope Leo found it helpful to turn the minds of the Council members to less
embarrassing issues of philosophy, such as the Paduan teaching on immor-
tality.
A bull issued in December 1513 lamented that the devil had recently
sown a pernicious erro r in the Weld of the Lord, namely, the belief that the
rational soul was either mortal or single in all men, and that some rash
philosophers had asserted that this was true ‘at least in philosophy’. It
proclaimed, on the contrary that the soul , by itself and essentially, was the
form of the human body, that it was immortal, and that it was multiplied
in proportion to the multitude of the bodies into which it was infused by
God. Moreover, since truth could not contradict truth, any assertion
contrary to the revealed truth was damned as heretical.
23 Cajetan was called to Rome in 1501, and became successively head of the Dominican order,
cardinal, and papal legate to Germany, in which capacity he held a famous debate with Luther at
Augsburg in 1518.
24 Pomponazzi’s arguments are set out in greater detail in Ch. 7 below.
THE SCHOOLMEN
112
Raphael shows Plato and Aristo tle amicably dividing the empire of philosophy into
separate realms.
THE SCHOOLMEN
113
The immortality of the soul had been Christian teaching for many
centuries, and the religious teaching had already been combined with
Aristotelian hylomorphism at the Council of Vienna in 1311. What is
noteworthy about the Lateran Council’s declaration is its insistence on
the relationship between revealed and philosophical truth, and its claim
that the immortality of the soul is not only true, but provable by reason.
The Church, for the Wrst time, was laying down the law not just on
religious truth, but also on religious epistemology. This decree, like the
reforming decrees, seems to have had little practical eVect. A couple of
years later Pomponazzi published his treatise on the soul: it was topped and
tailed with professions of faith and submission to the Holy See, but the
meat of the work consists of a battery of arguments against personal
immortality.
It was while the Lateran Council was in session that Raphael painted in
the Vatican, Wrst for Pope Julius and then for Pope Leo, the Stanza della
Segnatura, on whose walls and ceilings are represented the disciplines of
theology, law, philosophy, and poetry. The fresco The School of Athens
contains some of the most loving representations of philosophers and
philosophical topics in the history of art. Here the reconciliation of Plato
and Aristotle is given spatial and colourful form. The two philosophers,
side by side, preside over a resplendent court of thinkers, Greek and
Islamic. Plato, wearing the colours of the volatile elements air and Wre,
points heavenwards; Aristotle, clothed in watery blue and earthly green,
has his feet Wrmly on the ground. The two are reconciled, in Raphael’s
vision, by being assigned diVerent spheres of inXuence. Aristotle, standing
under the aegis of Minerva on the side of the fresco next to the law
wall, dominates a group of ethical and natural philosophers. Plato,
under the patronage of Apollo, stands above a throng of mathematicians
and metaphysicians. Surprisingly, perhaps, he, who banished the poets
from his Republic, is given his place next to the wall dedicated to
poetry and dominated by Homer. Facing, across the room, is The Disputation
of the Sacrament, where sit the great Christian philosophers: Augustine,
Bonaventure, and Aquinas. The whole is a masterpiece of recon ciling
genius, bringing together the two truths which, so the Lateran fathers
were proclaiming, no man should put asunder.
THE SCHOOLMEN
114
3
Logic and Language
Augustine on Language
I
n his account of his childhood in his Confessions Augustine describes the
learning of language. One passage of his account has become famous:
When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved towards
something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they
uttered when they meant to point it out. Their intention was shewn by their
bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples: the expression of
the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the
tone of voice which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting or
avoiding something. Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places
in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signiWed,
and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my
own desires. ( Conf. I. 8. 13)
This passage was placed by Wittgenstein at the beginning of his Philosophical
Investigations1 to represent a certain fundamentally mistaken view of lan-
guage: the view that naming is the foundation of language and that the
meaning of a word is the object for which it stands. The passage quoted lays
great stress on the role of ostension in the learning of words, and makes no
distinction between diVerent parts of speech. Despite this Augustine is a
curious choice as a spokesman for the thesis attacked by Wittgenstein, since
in many respects wha t he says resembles Wittgenstein’s own views rather
than the views that are Wittgenstein’s target.
Like Wittgenstein, Augustine believes that the setting-up of linguistic
conventions presupposes a uniformity among human beings in their
1 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953).
natural, pre-conventional reactions to such things as pointing Wngers—
‘the natural language of all peoples’. Ostensive deWnition by itself will not
teach a child the meaning of a word: a child must also ‘hear the words
repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences’. The whole
learning process is started by the child’s own eVorts to express its sensations
and needs pre-linguistically. Just before the quoted passage he says, ‘by cries
and various sounds and movements of my limbs I tried to express my inner
feelings and get my will obeyed’. He thus makes a point, much stressed by
Wittgenstein, that ‘words are connected with the primitive, the natural,
expressions of a sensation and used in their place’.2
The account of language in the Confessions was preceded by a much
ampler account in an early work, On the Teacher. The theme of the work,
which is a dialogue between Augustine and his son Adeodatus, is narrower
than its title suggests: it is not concerned with education in general,
but focuses on the teaching and learning of the meaning of words. It
begins with a lively review of the varied uses for which we employ
language. We use it not solely for the communication of information,
but for many other purposes also, from praying to God to singing in the
bath. We can use speech without sound when we form words in our minds:
in such a case we use them as means to recall to memory the objects that
they signify.
Augustine does not leave unexamined the facile assumption that words
are signs. He quotes a line of Vergil,
If naught of such a city is left by heav’n to stand,
and asks Adeodatus what each of the three Wrst words signiWes. What does
‘if’ stand for? The best Adeodatus can o Ver is that it expresses doubt.
‘Naught’ means nothing, so it cannot be true that every word means
something. What of ‘of ’? Adeodatus proposes that it is a synonym for
‘from’, but Augustine suggests that this is simply replacing one sign with
another—it does not take us from sign to reality (DMg 2. 3–4).
Ostensive deWnition seems to oVer a way out of the impasse, at least for
some words. If I ask what ‘wall’ means, you could point to it with your
Wnger. Not only material objects, but colours, can be ostensively deWned in
this way. But there are two objections to this as a general account. First of
2 Philosophical Investigations, I. 244.
LOGIC AND LANGUAGE
116
all, words like ‘of ’ cannot be ostensively deWned; and, more fundamentally,
the gesture of pointing, no less than the utterance of a word, is only a sign,
not the reality signiWed (DMg 3. 5–6).
Augustine responds to these objections that there are some words, like
‘walk’, ‘eat’, and ‘stand’, which can be explained by producing an instance
of the very thing signiWed: I ostensively deWne ‘walk’ by walking. But
suppose I am already walking when someone asks me what ‘walk’
means: how do I deWne it? I suppose I walk a little faster, says Adeodatus.
But this shows that even in this favoured case ostensive deWnition is
incurably ambiguous: how do I know whether the meaning that is oVered
is that of ‘walk’ or of ‘hurry’?
Eventually Augustine concludes from the failure of ostensive learning
that the meaning of words is not something that is taught by any human
teacher, but by a teacher within us whose home is in heaven (DMg 14. 46).
This is a Christian version, in the special case of language learning, of
Plato’s thesis in the Meno that all learning is really recollection. On the way
to this conclusion, however, Augustine discusses a number of important
issues in philosophy of language.
First, he classiWes signs in a rudimentary semiotic. All words are signs,
but not all signs are words: for instance, there are letters and gestures. All
names are words, but not all words are names: besides words like ‘if’ and
‘of’ there are pronouns, which stand in for nouns, and ver bs, that is to say,
words with tenses (DMg 4. 9, 5. 13).
It is important to keep in mind the distinction between a sign and what
it signiWes (what Augustine calls its ‘signiWcable’). No one is likely to
confuse a stone with a word for a stone: but some words are words for
words, and here there is a real danger of confusion between sign and
signiWcable.
In modern English we minimize the risk of such confusion by
employing quotation marks. Adeodatus is human, and there are two
syllables in ‘human’. In antique Latin, with no quotation marks, there is
no such clear distinction between the normal case when we use the word
as a predicate, and the special case where we use it in order to mention
itself. Adeodatus has to be on his guard to avoid the trap set by his father:
you are not composed of two syllables, therefore, you are not human (DMg
8. 22). Augustine devotes several pages to explaining that while, at one
level, not all words are names, at another level every word is a name since
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117
it can be used to name itself. Even ‘verb’ is a name. The problems he spells
out in this dialogue were discussed at great length by the medieval
scholastics who developed the theory of supposition.3
Augustine himself, however, made no contribution to the discipline of
formal logic. He never made a serious study of Aristotle, whom he
describes rather condescendingly in The City of God as ‘a man of outstanding
intellect, no match for Plato in style, but well above the common herd’. He
was, for a while, very interested in the Stoics, but it was the natural and
ethical, not the logical, branch of their philosophy that principally engaged
him.
In his youth, indeed, Augustine had read Aristotle’s Categories, at the
bidding of his rhetoric teacher in Carthage. In the Confessions he boasts
that he mastered the text very quickly, but complains that it did him
no good. The book, he says, was very clear on the topic of substance
and the items that belong to them, but it is useless from a theological
perspective.
What help was this to me when the book got in my way? Thinking that everything
whatever was included in the ten categories, I tried to conceive you also, my God,
wonderfully simple and immutable as you are, as if you too were a subject of
which magnitude and beauty are attributes. I imagined them as inhering in you as
a subject like a physical body, whereas you yourself are your own magnitude and
your own beauty. (Conf. IV. 16. 28–9)
Among the works traditionally attributed to Augustine, at least from
the time of Alcuin, is a Latin paraphrase of the Categories.4 The work,
however, is not mentioned by Augustine in his Retractationes, an exhaustive
catalogue of his Nachlass, and it is nowadays the universal opinion of
scholars that the work is not authentic. However, the attribution to
Augustine secured the attention of early medieval scholars to this part of
Aristotle’s logic. Another work, De Dialectica, long thought spurious, has
recently been restored to the canon.5 It shows signs of Stoic inXuence
but is concerned more with grammar than with logic or philosophy of
language.
3 See below, p. 130.
4 It was edited by L. Minio-Paluello as the Wrst volume of the Aristoteles Latinus (Bruges: Descle
´
e,
De Brouwer, 1953– ).
5 Edited by Darrell Jackson (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1985).
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The Logic of Boethius
The close connection between logic and language is emphasized by Boeth-
ius, the most signiWcant Latin logician of the Wrst millennium. ‘The whole
art of logic’, he wrote, ‘is concerned with speech.’ Boethius translated most,
perhaps all, of the books of Aristotle’s logical corpus, and he prefaced his
translation of the Categories with a commentary (indeed a pair of commen-
taries) on the Isagoge,orIntroduction, of Porphyry (c.233–309). Porphyry, the
disciple and biographer of Plotinus, had introduced the logic of Aristotle
into the curriculum of the Neoplatonic schools, and his Isagoge became the
standard introductory text. Thanks to the work of Boethius, it retained
that position well into the high Middle Ages.
An important feature of Porphyry’s Isagoge was the theory of predicables,
or the kinds of relation in which a predicate might stand to a subject. He
listed Wve heads of classiWcation: species, genus, diVerentia, property, and
accident. All of these are terms that occur in Aristotle’s Topics, but the
theory of predicables diVers from Aristotle’s theory of categories, though
the two classiWcations are related to each other. ‘Stigger is a Labrador’ tells
us the species to which Stigger belongs; ‘Stigger is a dog’ tells us his genus.
The diVerentia indicates the feature which marks oV the species within the
genus, e.g. ‘Stigger is golden-haired and a retriever’. Humans, it was
commonly explained, formed a species of the genus animal marked oV by
the diVerentia rational.
The predicates ‘human’, ‘animal’, when used of an individual human,
Socrates, are predicated in the category of substance—they indicate,
wholly or partly, the basic kind of entity that Socrat es is. The predicate
‘rational’, the diVerentia, seems to straddle the distinction between
substance and accident: as part of the deWniti on it seems to belong in
the substance category, but on the other hand rationality is surely a
quality, and qualities are accidents. A property (proprium) is an attribute
which is peculiar to a particular species, though not deWnitive of it: the
ability to see jokes was standardly taken in medieval times to be a
property of the human race. An accident is a predicate that may or may
not belong to a given individual, without prejudice to that individual’s
existence.
The theory of predicables permits us to construct hierarchies within
categories. The distinction between genus and species is relative: what is a
LOGIC AND LANGUAGE
119
species relative to a superior genus is a genus relative to an inferior species.
But there are ultimate species that are not genera—such as the human
species. And there are ultimate genera that are not species of any higher
genus: such as the ten categories (which are not species of some superior
genus such as ‘being’). If we take the category of substance as basic, we can
derive two genera from it, body and spirit, by adding the diVerentia ‘material’
or ‘immaterial’ respectively. From the genus body, we can then derive two
further genera, living beings and minerals, by adding the diVerentia ‘animate’
or ‘inanimate’. The genus of living beings will, by a similar Wssion, generate
the genera of vegetable and animal, and the genus animal will, with the
diVerentia ‘rational’, produce the W nal species human, which includes the
In this fourteenth century MS of the Consolation of Philosophy Boethius is represented as a
medieval professor of logic.
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individuals Peter, Paul, and John. A branching hierarchy of this kind, set
out in a diagram, is a ‘Porp hyry’s Tree’.
In the Isagoge Porphyry uses his branching strategy to pose three ques-
tions about species and genera. Species and genera are not individual
entities like Peter and Paul: they are in some sense universal. Do such
things, Porphyry asked, exist outside the mind, or are they merely mental?
If they are outside the mind, are they corporeal or incorporeal? If they are
incorporeal, do they exist in things perceptible by the senses, or are they
separate from them? Porphyry left these question s unanswered; but they
set an agenda for many medieval discussions. They became the canonical
statement of the Problem of Universals.
Boethius himself answered these questions thus: they exist outside the
mind; they are incorporeal; they are not separable except in thought from
individuals. A sp ecies or a genus is a similarity abstracted from particulars,
as we collect the likeness of humanity (similitudo humanitatis) from individual
humans. This, Boethius says, was Aristotle’s view; but for purposes of
formal logic it is not necessary to rule out the Platonic thesis of universals
existing in separation (PL 64. 835a).
Boethius wrote commentaries on Aristotle’s Categories and De Interpreta-
tione. These commentaries show that he had some acquaintance also with
Stoic logic, though he never regards it as trumping Aristotle. For example,
he says that the Stoics were wrong about future contingents: when p is a
future-tensed proposition about a contingent matter, ‘Either p or not-p’is
true, but neither ‘p’ nor ‘not-p’ need be deWnitely true. Thus ‘Either there
will be a sea-battle tomorrow or there will not be a sea-battle tomorrow’ is
true; but neither ‘There will be a sea-battle tomorrow’ nor ‘There will not
be a sea-battle tomorrow’ need be deWnitely true today.
Besides commenting on Porphyry and Aristotle, Boethius wrote text-
books on syllogistic reasoning, one on categorical syllogisms and one on
hypothetical syllogisms. A hypothetical syllogism must contain at least
one hypothetical premiss, that is to say, a molecular proposition con-
structed from atomic categorical propositions by means of the connectives
‘if ’, ‘or’, or ‘since’. Some hypothetical syllogisms contain categorical prem-
isses as well as hypothetical ones: one example is the modus ponens already
familiar in Stoic logic:
If it is day, the sun is shining; but it is day; therefore the sun is shining.
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