WALTER BURLEY ON SUPPOSITIO MATERIALIS

Abstract

This chapter examines the afterlife of late antique discussions of nonsignification among medieval Oxford logicians, focussing in particular on Walter Burley. It shows how, although their discipline was explicitly founded on a refusal to work with meaningless words, they ended up having to discuss them in connection with the phenomenon of material supposition, or the use of a word to refer to itself as a word (e.g., man is a monosyllable). Burley proposed a strange doctrine according to which the meaningless sound of the bare utterance can appear in a logical proposition; he insisted that the truth of such a proposition can be known and indicated that it provides a kind of mirror in which the mind can encounter itself in its very failure to cognize.