PHIL 250A Study Guide - Final Guide: Syncategorematic Term, Spoken Language, Nominalism

• School: University of Waterloo
• Department: Philosophy
• Course: PHIL 250A
• Professor: Andrew Stumpf

Document Summary

Part a: paragraph answers on 7 of 10 topics. The universal thing is not a thing outside the mind. In chapter 14 of the first part of the summa logicae, ockham starts by stressing the importance of having a deep understanding of terms. Aristotelian logic, in the sense that arguments are composed of propositions and propositions consist of terms. Ockham points out that if a universal is a concept in a person"s mind, then it is in a sense something particular. This sounds odd, because the two concepts are supposed to be contraries; something can be either universal or particular, but not both. But a concept in a person"s mind is a quality of the person"s mind, which is a particular thing, and any quality of a particular must itself be particular. And while ockham thinks this makes good sense, he denies that something can be a universal in the sense that it is not one in number but many.