Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

288 Henrik Lagerlund
term is hence a term that signifies two or more concepts or understandings in the
intellect. This goes together with his view that signification is additive, that is,
the signification of the complex term is a sum of the signification of its simple
parts.
The third division of terms (dictionis) is into singular and universal terms. A
term is singular if its signification prohibits it to stand for more than one particular
thing or limits it to only one. His examples are ‘this Peter’, ‘this horse’ or ‘this
tree’. A term is on the other hand universal if its signification does not prohibit
it to stand for more than one thing, like ‘horse’, ‘tree’ or ‘human being’. He
seems not to distinguish between proper names and singular terms, and given his
example of ‘this Peter’ he seems not to think that proper names like ‘Peter’ are
what is nowadays often called rigid designators. ‘Peter’ is just a universal term
like ‘horse’, which can apply to many.
The fourth division (3.1.8) is between verbs, names and particles. He notes first
that particles do not appear by themselves in the intellect only in connection with
other terms. A verb is different from a name in that it signifies an intention and
a time at which it is done. His example is ‘He struck’, which signifies a striking
of something by someone and a past time when this was done. A name does not
signify a time. The last division is between different intentions or meanings of
terms. He lists five, namely univocal terms, divers terms, that is, many terms for
the same thing, multivocal terms, that is, many terms for many things, equivocal
terms, and something he calls convenient (conveniantia) terms. The last is, he
says, something between univocal and equivocal and an example is ‘being’, which
is said of both substances and accidents.
The title of the part of Al-Ghazālī’s logic that deals with universal terms is “on
the intention of universal terms”. In the sentence: ‘This human being is white
and an animal’, the predication of ‘white’ and ‘animal’ of ‘human being’ is quite
different. Al-Ghazālī calls the first accidental and the second essential. To explain
this difference he first explains what essential and accidental mean in these cases.
There are three conditions for essentiality:
(3.1.10) A is essential to B, if B cannot be understood or thought
without A;
(3.1.11) A is essential to B, if A is necessarily prior to B;
(3.1.12) A is essential to B, if B cannot be posited to be without A.
It seems that all of these, (3.1.10)-(3.1.12), must be fulfilled for something to be
essentially something else. The first condition says simply that if we cannot think
about one thing without also necessarily thinking about something else, like in
the case of human being and animal. Thinking about a human or a horse brings
also the concept of an animal into the mind. This means that these concepts or
terms are essentially tied. The second condition is a little bit less straightforward,
but he seems to mean, as Aristotle indeed thought, that what is essentially tied
to each other is also ordered in a special way, namely in the sense that animal is
prior to human being and horse. In the third condition, the idea seems to be that