Concepts and Concept Formation in Medieval Philosophy

Abstract

The opening passage of Aristotle’s De interpretatione, usually read together with Boethius’s commentaries, was an important source for the medieval understanding of concepts: they are likenesses of things and mediate between spoken words and external things in signification. Augustine’s writings were another main source already available in the early Middle Ages. He maintained that the universals exist ante rem as ideas in the divine mind, advocated the theory of illumination, and developed the view of interior words of a specific kind. Third and most important, the Aristotelian De anima tradition of psychology, developed further by Arabic thinkers like Avicenna and Averroes, entered the Latin discussion gradually during the latter half of the twelfth century and the first half of the thirteenth century. These and other influences led to complex discussions about what kind of entities in the mind relating to concepts one should postulate and how they should be described. In the Aristotelian view, the intellectual cognition of an external object requires the presence of the object’s form in the intellect. The late thirteenth-century standard account of how the form of the object gets into the intellect further developed the description of the complex psychological mechanism that had emerged in the Arabic tradition. The active intellect illuminates the phantasms and abstracts the intelligible content in them by stripping them from their accidental features. The universal forms thus abstracted will be imprinted in the possible intellect as intelligible species. The standard view, developed especially by Thomas Aquinas, was to regard the intelligible species and the concept proper as two distinct entities. There was a great deal of dispute concerning issues related to concepts in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century. The thought of William of Ockham opened a new phase in discussion. He rejected the idea that intellectual cognition requires the presence of the object’s form in the intellect. The concept or mental word, identified as an act of understanding, became the basic unit in the theory of mental language that Ockham put forward.