Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

370 Ria van der Lecq
that is not the result of this imposition. Furthermore, he rejected the notion of
a common ratio, with the result that there is, in his view, no room for analogical
predication of the first and second type. The first type of analogy –Scotus uses
‘cause, ‘end’ and ‘principle’ as examples – really involves univocal predication.
Terms like ‘being’, as applied to substance and accident, are really equivocal.
Terms belonging to the third type are really univocal. For example, ‘healthy’ is
a univocal term, because it only signifies health: in the animal as in a subject, in
urine as in a sign and in diet as in a conserving agent. 121 Thus, from a logical
point of view there is no need for something in between univocal and equivocal
predication. In one of the previous paragraphs we saw that Scotus rejected the
parallel between understanding and signifying. Now it is clear that he also rejected
the strict correspondence between language and reality.
PART II: THE LOGIC OF INTENTIONS
Second intentions: the primary subject of logic
The second half of the 13 th century is characterized by the rise of the theory of
second intentions as the primary subject of logic. Second intentions are concepts
of a certain kind, which give logic its status as a science, because they are supposed
to be universal and objective, as will be explained below. All the authors writing
in this period regard second intentions as mental entities, which somehow have a
foundation in reality (fundamentum in re), but the way they see this foundation
differs. They agree, however, that one should distinguish between the mental
existence of a concept, which is studied by psychology, and its content, which is
the proper subject of logic. 122
Examples of terms signifying second intentions are ‘universal’, ‘genus’, ‘species’,
‘proposition’, and ‘syllogism’. Some authors, Thomas Aquinas for example, consider
second intentions as second order concepts, representing not things but other
concepts, but other authors, e.g. Simon of Faversham and Radulphus Brito, assume
that second intentions are representations of things as related to other things
and that they are founded upon special properties of extra-mental objects. Finally,
Duns Scotus, Hervaeus Natalis and Peter Aureol ascribe to second intentions a special
kind of being: objective being, to be distinguished from material being on the
one hand and purely mental being on the other. As we shall see below, the answer
to the question: what do second intentions represent, is related to epistemological
and ontological issues. But first we need to understand what an intention is.
When I think, I think about something: a book, a child, my holidays last
summer, my future plans etc. Sometimes it is clear what the thing is I am thinking
about, sometimes it is not, but in any case my intellectual act is intentional, i.e. it
is directed to something. One might even say that there is a relationship between
121For references and more details especially concerning Aquinas, see: Ashworth [1992, pp.
121–131].
122Pini [2002, p. 13].