Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

460 Catarina Dutilh Novaes
the subdivisions of the different modes of supposition are considerably more complicated
than the division between personal and material supposition (recall that
Marsilius, following Buridan, does not recognize simple supposition as a class of its
own and views the supposition for mental terms as a kind of material supposition).
Here is a tree representing his divisions:
Material
Discrete
Merely confused
Material
Personal
Personal
Supposition
Confused and
distributive
Confused
Material Personal
Common
Determinate
Material Personal
We thus have four kinds of material supposition, just as much as four kinds
of personal supposition. Thereby, Marsilius is able to present a more fine-grained
account of the phenomenon of terms standing for other terms. Indeed, a term may
stand for:
• one specific non-ultimate significate 28 only – discrete material supposition,
for example if I say ‘This ‘man’ is written in red’ pointing at a specific
occurrence of the word ‘man’ (cf. [Marsilius of Inghen, 1983, 55]);
• any non-ultimate sigificate in a disjunctive way — determinate material supposition,
for example if I say ‘Man is written on this page’ meaning that there
is at least one occurrence of the word ‘man’ in a given page (cf. [Marsilius
of Inghen, 1983, 57]);
• any non-ultimate significate with disjunction of the term — merely confused
material supposition, for example with ‘Only man is a monosyllabic word’,
from which follows ‘Only this [occurrence of] man or that [occurrence of]
man etc. is a monosyllabic word’ (cf. [Marsilius of Inghen, 1983, 59]);
28 For Marsilius, following Buridan, the ultimate significates of terms are the things that fall
under them, such as men for ‘man’, concepts for ‘concept’ etc., and the non-ultimate sigificates
of terms are the things that they also signify — the corresponding mental, spoken and written
terms — but not ultimately.