Ancient and Philosophy of Medieval Language - Words And Things: Plato And Aristotle, Sentences And Facts: Aristotle And The Stoics, Abelard And The Early Middle Ages
Only in recent times has philosophy of language been considered a distinct branch of philosophy. But ancient and medieval philosophers had different, sophisticated theories about the relation between language—both individual words and whole sentences—and reality, and the thirteenth century saw one of the most thorough attempts ever to give an abstract, analytical account of the grammar of a natural language.
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Spoken sounds are symbols of affections in the soul, and written marks symbols of spoken sounds. But what these are in the first place signs of—affections of the soul—are the same for all; and what these affections are likenesses of—actual things—are also the same. Aristotle's semantic scheme, in which things are signified by words only through the intermediary o…
Aristotle's aim in thinking about language was not merely to look at the relation of naming-words to things, but to explain how words combine to form assertoric sentences, which can be true or false. On Interpretation studies the functions of nouns and verbs and the mechanism of predication in some detail, but Aristotle remains rather vague about how sentences as a whole link up with realit…
By the eleventh century, there was already a strong philosophical interest in questions about language. For example, St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033 or 1034–1109) wrote a dialogue about the problems caused by a word such as grammaticus, which means "grammarian" but also has the adjectival sense of "grammatical": is grammaticus a substance, then, or a quality? In P…
The mainstream Western medieval tradition of thought about language concentrated on a single language, Latin. By doing so, it gained the advantage of allowing philosophers to see more clearly the large, abstract questions that concern the relation of any language to the mind and to reality. It also suffered, because scholars (as appears strikingly in the case of the speculative grammarians) simply…
Aristotle. 'Categories' and 'De interpretatione.' Translated by J. L. Ackrill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974. Long, A. A., and D. N. Sedley. The Hellenistic Philosophers. 2 vols. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Peter of Spain. Language in Dispute: An English Translation of Peter of Spain's Tractatus.… Translated by Francis P. Din…
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