Abstract
This chapter examines what is needed in principle for a historian of philosophy to bring out the relevance of certain past theoretical texts for today’s philosophical discussions. Three conditions are thus spelled out: (1) the historian should be able to identify the referents of (some of) the non-theoretical concrete terms of the relevant texts; (2) the historian should master the inferences that are acceptable within the past doctrines in question; (3) he or she should make it clear on that basis how these doctrines dealt with phenomena that are still taken to be philosophically problematic, especially logico-linguistic phenomena such as predication, ambiguities, modalities, indexicality, self-reference and so on. How all of this in turn requires a special sort of historical contextualization is illustrated with the case of Anselm of Canterbury’s De grammatico.
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Notes
- 1.
De Libera has reflected on his discontinuist methodology in various other writings; see in particular de Libera (1999) and de Libera (2000). He is very much inspired on this by R. G. Collingwood’s critique of the same-problem approach to the history of philosophy; see in particular Collingwood (1978, 53-76).
- 2.
I borrow this example from de Libera’s discussion of my co-referentiality condition in de Libera (2000, 562–3). As de Libera correctly notes, we cannot even presume that the corresponding phrases in Themistius and Averroes are co-referential with each other. If we translate both of them as “theoretical intellect,” the latter English phrase, consequently, might very well become ipso facto equivocal.
- 3.
See in particular Martial Gueroult’s classical work on Descartes (Gueroult 1953).
- 4.
Ockham first uses the idea of subordination to characterize the relation between conventional spoken words and mental concepts seen as natural signs: “I say that spoken words are signs subordinated to concepts […] The point is that spoken words are used to signify the very things that are signified by concepts of the mind, so that a concept primarily and naturally signifies something and a spoken word signifies the same thing secondarily” (Ockham, Theory of Terms, 50, translation by Loux). But he then extends it to the parallel relation between written and spoken words, and nothing prevents us from extending it even further as I propose here. I have examined this ockhamistic idea of subordination on several occasions; see in particular Panaccio (2004, 165–171) and Panaccio (2015, 168–173).
- 5.
Of course, the historian might previously be familiar with other uses of the terms she thus subordinates. The English terms “matter” and “form,” after all, were not especially struck for reporting on Aquinas’s philosophy. But once the historian subordinates them anew, they acquire a new meaning and keeping the meaning such terms had prior to their technical subordination by the historian too much in mind is often a source of deep misunderstandings when reading such historical reports. English speaking historians of German philosophy, for example, usually subordinate the English term “transcendental” to Kant’s German word “transzendental,” but the reader should then bracket (at least temporarily) whatever other use of this English term he was previously familiar with.
- 6.
Saying that these phenomena are “external,” then, does not prevent them from being of a subjective or cultural nature in some cases.
- 7.
I do not mean to reduce all of philosophy to purely linguistic analysis. Such logico-linguistic phenomena as predication or intensionality, for example, might have to be accounted for by properly metaphysical considerations.
- 8.
I am presently working on a book on these and related questions.
- 9.
Aristotle introduces “parônuma” in the first chapter of the treatise On Categories.
- 10.
See De grammatico 21.
- 11.
In De grammatico 5–9, for example, Anselm discusses various puzzling inferences such as the following: no literate person can be understood without reference to literacy, any man can be understood without reference to literacy, therefore no literate person is a man.
- 12.
See especially De grammatico 12ss.
- 13.
I am deeply grateful to the Canada Research Chair Program for the generous support it gave over the years to my researches on this and related topics. I also want to express my warmest thanks to the participants of the McMaster University workshop on “The Foundations of Methodology in the History of Philosophy” held in the Niagara area in April 2016, and most particularly to its organizer, Sandra Lapointe.
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Panaccio, C. (2017). Grasping the Philosophical Relevance of Past Philosophies. In: Pelletier, J., Roques, M. (eds) The Language of Thought in Late Medieval Philosophy. Historical-Analytical Studies on Nature, Mind and Action, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66634-1_26
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