De suppositionibus

Abstract

For the medievals, whether Christian, Islamic or Jewish, thinking involved above all reading, namely, understanding a text, something which obliged them to explain how to go about grasping the meaning thereof. Like philosophers of more recent times related in one way or the analytic tradition, namely, philosophers such as Dummet, Putnam, and de Libera, they believed that language provided the key to resolving the great philosophical questions or, at any rate, to enabling one to confront them. In the mind-thirteenth century, when the study of suppositio moved outside the sphere of grammar and gained a role within that of logic, suppositio itself became the fundamental property of terms. Treatises on supposition revealed themselves at that point to be eager to analyse the semantics of terms within a proposition, for, as John of Salisbury asserted, «it is necessary to analyse with great care what meaning words have in order accurately to establish that which they possess in themselves and that which they possess by virtue of the context in which they occur, so as to be able to dispel the benighting shadow of sophisms». This treatise on supposition by Vicent Ferrer shows a young Dominican possessing deep familiarity with the great debates surrounding the philosophy of language in the fourteenth century.