The Thirteenth-Century Notion of Signification

Abstract

This is the 10 th volume in the series Investigating Medieval Philosophy, published by Brill, and consists of four, somewhat uneven, chapters. In the first chapter, Mora-Márquez begins by focusing on, and explaining in great detail, the two primary sources for thirteenth-century debates about signification, viz., Aristotle's Perihermeneias and Boethius' second commentary on the same. The most important passage in the former, which is examined at length, is the second sentence, where Aristotle says (and I paraphrase) that "written and vocal words are signs of concepts and things." Thanks to Boethius, however, we are informed of a discrepancy between Aristotle's account of language in his Perihermeneias and what he presents in his Categories, namely that in the Categories, things are immediately signified by words, whereas in the Perihermeneias, concepts are immediately signified by words. In time, this conflict developed into what Duns Scotus called a magna altercatio.