Naming Particulars: A Thirteenth-Century Debate on Whether Individuals Have Proper Names
type: CreativeWork
description: This dissertation is about a debate that occurred in thirteenth-century philosophy over an apparently bizarre question: Can individuals really have proper names? While scholarly studies have appeared previously on philosophers in the fourteenth century who discussed this question (most notably John Buridan), I show that the question was widespread in the thirteenth century and involved many participants. Historically, I offer the first comprehensive account of how the thirteenth-century debate over the possibility of proper names arose. I argue that it was instigated by Michael Scot’s translation of the Metaphysics and perpetuated by tensions within the new Aristotelian metaphysical and cognitive theories of the 1230’s-1260’s. Philosophically, I offer a detailed analysis of the arguments on both sides of the question, presenting and explicating over 15 arguments for and against proper names, in texts by eight different philosophers: Richard Rufus of Cornwall, Adam Buckfield, Geoffrey of Aspall, Robert Kilwardby, Pseudo-Kilwardby, Roger Bacon, Siger of Brabant, and Richard of Clive. The questions I ask are the following. First, how was it theoretically possible to doubt the nameability of individuals? To answer this question, I look at the medieval traditions in the language arts. Specifically, I argue that Boethius’s commentaries on Aristotle’s Perihermeneias provide criteria for what counts as a nomen or “name” in a philosophical sense, but those criteria specifically exclude words that might otherwise be regarded as nomina or “nouns” in a grammatical sense. Granting this distinction, I then ask the second question of the thesis: On what reasonable grounds might a philosopher think that a name of an individual is merely a grammatical “noun” rather than a genuine philosophical “name”? Here the answer seems to be that individuals cannot be named as such because they cannot be understood as such. I investigate two broad motivations in the arguments: (a) human cognitiv…
abstract: This dissertation is about a debate that occurred in thirteenth-century philosophy over an apparently bizarre question: Can individuals really have proper names? While scholarly studies have appeared previously on philosophers in the fourteenth century who discussed this question (most notably John Buridan), I show that the question was widespread in the thirteenth century and involved many participants. Historically, I offer the first comprehensive account of how the thirteenth-century debate over the possibility of proper names arose. I argue that it was instigated by Michael Scot’s translation of the Metaphysics and perpetuated by tensions within the new Aristotelian metaphysical and cognitive theories of the 1230’s-1260’s. Philosophically, I offer a detailed analysis of the arguments on both sides of the question, presenting and explicating over 15 arguments for and against proper names, in texts by eight different philosophers: Richard Rufus of Cornwall, Adam Buckfield, Geoffrey of Aspall, Robert Kilwardby, Pseudo-Kilwardby, Roger Bacon, Siger of Brabant, and Richard of Clive. The questions I ask are the following. First, how was it theoretically possible to doubt the nameability of individuals? To answer this question, I look at the medieval traditions in the language arts. Specifically, I argue that Boethius’s commentaries on Aristotle’s Perihermeneias provide criteria for what counts as a nomen or “name” in a philosophical sense, but those criteria specifically exclude words that might otherwise be regarded as nomina or “nouns” in a grammatical sense. Granting this distinction, I then ask the second question of the thesis: On what reasonable grounds might a philosopher think that a name of an individual is merely a grammatical “noun” rather than a genuine philosophical “name”? Here the answer seems to be that individuals cannot be named as such because they cannot be understood as such. I investigate two broad motivations in the arguments: (a) human cognitiv…
author: Bauder, Rachel
keywords: Cognitive Theory, Epistemology, Metaphysics, Proper Names, Semantics, Thirteenth Century
date published: 2016-06
date modified: 2026-07-27T21:28:07Z
provider: University of Toronto
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Toronto

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/1807/72926