Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

Logic in the 14 th Century after Ockham 455
differs from every man’. According to Maulevelt, the descent allowed for the term
‘man’ giving the intended meaning of the proposition is ‘Socrates differs from this
man and that man and. . . ’, and not ‘Socrates differs from this man or that man
or...’ (although in principle, the second descent should also be allowed, since
nominal conjunction should imply the corresponding nominal disjunction). In
other words, according to Maulevelt, nominal conjunctive descent is not only a
logical possibility; it is also the actual descent required by some real cases.
Albert of Saxony, writing after Maulevelt, explicitly rejects his analysis of
‘Socrates differs from every man’ as requiring nominal conjunctive descent; according
to him, ‘man’ in this case should have determinate and not merely confused
supposition (cf. [Read, 1991b, 80]). Moreover, Albert criticizes the inclusion
of the clause for nominal conjunctive descent in the definition of merely confused
supposition, thus implicitly defending the idea that nominal conjunctive descent is
not a phenomenon that needs to be taken into account in the definition of modes of
personal supposition (being at best only a logical possibility). Obviously, for those
who reject nominal conjunctive descent as a relevant phenomenon, such as Albert
of Saxony, three modes of personal supposition provide a complete picture of the
(personal) supposition of all terms not only in the sense that all cases were taken
into account (which happens anyway if merely confused supposition is defined as
a catch-all clause), but also in the sense that these three categories are sufficiently
fine-grained and discriminating so as to give a coherent grouping of these semantic
phenomena, since they correspond to the three relevant kinds of descent.
Among those who recognize nominal conjunctive descent as an important phenomenon,
two positions are possible; either to associate nominal conjunctive descent
to merely confused supposition, together with nominal disjunctive descent
(as did Maulevelt and later Paul of Venice — cf. [Read, 1991a, 53]), yielding thus
a rather heterogeneous notion of merely confused supposition as a ‘miscellaneous’
category; or to associate nominal conjunctive descent to a fourth mode of personal
supposition altogether. According to our current state of knowledge, while
the notion of a descensus copulatim (nominal conjunctive supposition) seems to
have been familiar in Paris and Oxford in the 1350s and 1360s, the first to associate
a fourth mode of supposition to nominal conjunctive descent seems to have
been Thomas of Cleves (cf. [Read, 1991a; 1991b]) in his Suppositiones written in
the first half of the 1370s in Paris 23 , before he moved on to be the rector of St.
Stephen’s cathedral school in Vienna This fourth mode of personal supposition
became known as collective supposition.
Some of the examples usually associated with nominal conjunctive descent (from
[Read, 1991a]) were: ‘You are not every man’, ‘No animal is every man’, and ‘Some
penny will be seen by every man’ (in all three cases with respect to ‘man’). But
in such cases, the opponents of descensus copulatim usually proceeded by showing
that, if this kind of descent was possible at all, so were other kinds of descent,
23 At this point, no surviving manuscript of Thomas of Cleves’ Suppositiones has been located;
but a reconstruction of it has been made recently (in [Bos, 2004]) on the basis of references made
to this work in other texts.