History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps HoP 277 - Trivial Pursuits - Fourteenth Century Logic
May 7, 2017
The podcast explores the significance of logic in philosophy and the nominalism-realism debate. It discusses the issue of ambiguity in language and highlights the importance of context in interpretation. The views on the nature of propositions and logical inference are examined. The podcast also explores the game of obligations played by Scholastics in the 14th century.
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Graduate Logic Course Memory
- Peter Adamson recounts arriving at Notre Dame and being asked to take a formal logic course as a grad student.
- He felt logic was foundational yet worried it resembled math with proofs and symbols.
Universals Are A Logical Problem
- Medieval debates about universals were fundamentally questions in logic about how terms stand for things.
- Supposition theory sorted kinds of reference to avoid fallacious inferences from ambiguous terms.
Supposition Explains Equivocation
- Terms can supposit personally or simply, changing what they stand for in context.
- Failing to track supposition leads to fallacies like equivocating 'human' between personal and universal uses.