William of Ockham

O objetivo deste artigo é evidenciar qual seja o papel exercido pelo argumentum libertatis (argumento da liberdade) na Opera Politica de Guilherme de Ockham. Tal argumento foi elaborado pelo Venerabilis Inceptor com a finalidade de fundamentar sua crítica à pretensa plenitude do poder (plenitudo potestatis) arrogada pelos papas. Assim sendo, apresentamos, inicialmente, o conceito de plenitudo potestatis papalis e, em seguida, analisamos a noção de naturalis et divina libertas a partir de seis obras políticas redigidas por Ockham na última década de sua vida.

Se comprende por "contractualismo" la teoría por la cual se explica y justifica el fundamento y la posibilidad de la sociedad a partir de un pacto entre sus miembros y que fuera desarrollado en toda su expresión en la Modernidad. Los motivos que condicionaron en la Modernidad el surgimiento de esta teoría social fueron la secularización de la sociedad, que ya había comenzado a gestarse en el Medioevo y una concepción atomista de la sociedad. Rastreando los orígenes de esta doctrina pueden hallarse desarrollos incipientes en los sofistas. Otros teóricos teóricos del Derecho y del Estado, como M. Villey, colocaron el acento en el papel que le cupo en este aspecto a William of Ockham. En este sentido es posible afirmar que sobre el contractualismo moderno se perciben influencias no puramente políticas, provenientes de la corriente nominalista fundada por Ockham.

Varios elementos que conforman la ética y la filosofía política modernas, como así también la filosofía del derecho, tienen como precedente al pensamiento de la Edad Media tardía. Nos referimos a la filosofía del siglo XIV, y más específicamente a Guillermo de Ockham. En quien fuera reconocido como el gran “sabio de Oxford” y por ello fundador de toda una escuela de pensamiento, en inextricable relación con su propia biografía, se perciben los primeros motivos liberales y con suma fuerza, la moral voluntarista, los derechos subjetivos de las personas, una teoría política contractualista y, más nítidamente aún y como consecuencia de lo anterior, la separación entre Iglesia y Estado. Al desarrollo de esta temática y sus interrelaciones con su postura epistemológica nominalista nos dedicaremos en el presente artículo.

Faith as to reason and religion as to science are two examples of different concepts that continually give us the hard time to comprehend if these things go together. The implication of these extremes is either a person is being too dogmatic or too analytical. However, the real score between these two different sides is something worth being reciprocal to each other.

Philosophy needs religion as religion needs philosophy. These two complements one another, the former fills the gap when the latter cannot anymore comprehend and vice-versa.

The Catholic Church has survived and flourished because of philosophy. During the course of the history of philosophy particularly in the medieval period, the Church, as a young emerging organization, has needed philosophy in order to establish and defend the Christendom – its theology, doctrines, and profession of faith. It is through Philosophy that molded the ideas of basic Christian tenets, Church doctrines, and Apologetics against rising attacks of heresy, apostasy, and schism, in which philosophy became a great help in the development of theology. However, like any other relationship, the struggle to balance two contrasted thoughts brought confusions, debates, and event violent actions that affected much of our history.

Christian philosophers will be grouped according to three periods: a) Patristic Period; b) Anselm Period and; c) Scholastic Period. One main philosopher will be tackled for every period -- Augustine of Hippo, Anselm of Canterbury, and Thomas Aquinas, respectively. These philosophers whose lives were not only significant in the history of the Catholic Church but also their ideas, particularly on philosophy brought substantial contribution in the field of Medieval philosophy.

However, for every philosopher and his idea, a certain philosopher or group of philosophers were becoming his critique, as well. Thus, we will also give light to the claims of these contemporaries who tried to argue on these ideas. Group of philosophers like Pseudo-Dionysius, John Scotus Erigena, Roscellinus (Patristic Period); Peter Abelard (Anselm Period); Roger Bacon, John Dun Scotus, and William of Ockham (Scholastic Period) will be mentioned based on their short profile and their philosophical claim will be analyzed in against to the ideas of their respective contemporary philosopher

The seven above-mentioned philosophers were also significant in two ways: first is that they were the critiques of the three main philosophers, and second, though their intention is to improve Church doctrine philosophically, their ideas were contrary to the Church doctrines which was already established by the Church Fathers, based on Divine Revelation.  I the end, these their ideas where condemned as heresies. Such events manifested the limitations of philosophy in understanding such Divine Revelation.

Philosophers during the Medieval Period has recognized the aid of philosophy in order to understand their faith. However, it is also to understand that the mind has its limits in comprehending faith. At the end of the day, the need first to believe is important before understanding, and as the famous quote suggests, “Faith begins when reason ends.

This article aims to rehabilitate and restore the concept of heresy in the analysis of “religion” in a broad sense. Heresy is largely considered as a paradigmatically Christian, pre-modern, and, by implication, useless concept for scholarly investigations into religious phenomena today. A re-examination of the medieval concept of heresy, particularly that of William of Ockham, reveals that pertinacity as a defining feature of heresy in the medieval sense indicates heresy is the observed failure to recognize the obligatory nature, not the truth, of what authority asserts. The medieval idea of heresy may thus be redefined as the interference with the sacred, because obligations that generate the sacred are at the heart of what Emile Durkheim called “religious phenomena.” The Durkheimian reconceptualization of the medieval idea of heresy serves to illuminate the mechanism of social exclusion in both religious and secular contexts.

With William of Ockham and John Buridan, Walter Burley is often listed as one of the most significant logicians of the medieval period. Nevertheless, Burley’s contributions to medieval logic have received notably less attention than those of either Ockham or Buridan. To help rectify this situation, the author here provides a comprehensive examination of Burley’s account of consequences, first recounting Burley’s enumeration, organization, and division of consequences, with particular attention to the shift from natural and accidental to formal and material consequence, and then locating Burley’s contribution to the theory of consequences in the context of fourteenth-century work on the subject, detailing its relation to the earliest treatises on consequences, then to Ockham and Buridan.

Resumo: Retomando alguns dos principais estudos sobre o conhecimento intuitivo do não existente em Guilherme de Ockham, pretendemos mostrar tanto alguns equívocos do que ficou estabelecido como a atual interpretação do problema, como também oferecer uma nova análise que enfatiza os vínculos entre os conceitos de evidência e de causalidade na argumentação ockhamiana. Fundamentando nossa exposição, estará a análise de pequenos trechos dos textos de alguns dos principais debatedores e intérpretes medievais do texto ockhamiano quanto a esse tema, como Walter Chatton, Adão de Wode-ham e Gabriel Biel, os quais nos pareceram essenciais para uma boa compreensão da própria posição ockhamiana. Palavras-chave: Guilherme de Ockham, causalidade, notícia intuitiva e abstrativa, notícia evidente, notícia intuitiva da coisa não existente. Abstract: Turning back to some of the main studies on William of Ockham's Intuitive Cognition of non-existents, I aim to show what could be some misconceptions on what has been stablished as the current interpretation of the question, and also to present a new analysis emphasizing the connections between the concepts of evidence and causality in Ockham's arguments. Fundamental to my exposition will be the presentation of short excerpts from the texts of some of the major medieval contenders and interpreters of Ockham's Opera on this subject, such as Walter Chatton, Adam of Wodeham and Gabriel Biel, what seemed to be, in my view, an imperative expedient for a good understanding of the Ockhamian position itself. Keywords: William of Ockham, Causality, Intuitive and Abstractive Cognition (notitia intuitiva et abstractiva), Evident Cognition (notitia evidens), Intuitive Cognition of non-existents (notitia intuitiva de re non existente).

Il "Dialogus" di Ockham ci offre l'occasione per tornare a riflettere sulle critiche che Dante mosse ai "giuristi presuntuosi" nelle pagine della "Monarchia". Quale fosse  il motivo delle invettive di Dante nei riguardi di certi "legisti" - come il poeta amava definirli nel "Convivio" - poco amanti della verità ma molto attenti ai guadagni, non sappiamo con certezza. Riguardo ad Ockham, possiamo dire che il filosofo inglese - in esilio a Monaco di Baviera - criticava alcuni giuristi e canonisti del suo tempo, i quali sostenevano la "plenitudo potestatis" papale. Un bisogno di giustizia e di verità? Il filosofo inglese esprimeva il suo favore nei confronti di un sapere tradizionale che considerava "theologi et veri philosophi" come i veri esperti nella scienza morale razionale e nel diritto naturale, scienze speculative. Siamo ancora lontani dall'affermazione della scienza giuridica moderna, un sapere che si sarebbe sganciato da qualsiasi rapporto con l'autorità (civile o ecclesiastica) per secolarizzarsi e raggiungere così una piena autonomia. Il giusnaturalismo di Ugo Grozio si sarebbe affermato solo nel XVII secolo ('etiamsi daremus non esse deum'). Il francescano Ockham, invece, continua ad avere una mentalità tipicamente medievale dove primeggiano la legge di Dio e della natura. Il filosofo inglese presenta così i tre modi del diritto naturale: "...quod non solum 'in lege et in evangelio' sed etiam in vera philosophia morali habetur..." (Dialogus, I, 1, 9).

OCKHAM'S SYLLOGISTIC SEMANTICS—PORTUGUESE
TRANSLATION BY DANIEL BATISTA

Ockham's Syllogistic Semantics, JSL 46 1981 197–198 AC ABSTRACT.
1981. Ockham's Syllogistic Semantics, Journal of Symbolic Logic 46, 197–198. J PDF
https://www.academia.edu/s/5379428661/ockhams-syllogistic-semantics?source=link
https://www.academia.edu/23406074/Ockhams_Syllogistic_Semantics

William of Ockham, brilliant and courageous Franciscan logician-priest, created a new logic by adopting Aristotle's syllogistic language and Aristotle's syllogistic natural deduction system but taking as his third component a new semantics with a richer ontology and different truth conditions. For more on logics as three-part systems composed of language, deductive system, and semantic system: 1973. Gaps between logical theory and mathematical practice, in Methodological Unity of Science, ed. Mario Bunge, Reidel Publishing Co., Dordrecht, 23–50. https://www.academia.edu/12337042/Gaps_between_logical_theory_and_mathematical_practice_in_Methodological_Unity_of_Science_ed._Mario_Bunge_Dordrecht_1973_pp.23_50


1978. Logical Structures of Ockham's Theory of Supposition (Co-author:  J. Swiniarski), Franciscan Studies 38, 161–83.
https://www.academia.edu/27567205/CORCORAN-SWINIARSKI_ON_OCKHAMS_THEORY_OF_SUPPOSITION

Ockham's Syllogistic Semantics, JSL 46 1981 197–198 AC ABSTRACT.
1981. Ockham's Syllogistic Semantics, Journal of Symbolic Logic 46, 197–198. J PDF

For some years it has been known both that Aristotle's assertoric syllogistic contains a fully formalizable natural deduction system and that this system of deductions is sound and complete with respect to the semantics which Aristotle seems to have presupposed (T. SMILEY,Journal of Philosophical Logic, 1973, pp. 136-154; J. CORCORAN, this JOURNAL, vol. 37(1972), pp. 696-702). The interpretations (models) in the Aristotelian semantics are taken to be assignments of nonempty sets to "terms" and the truth-conditions for the four categorical sentences are essentially the same as those for the corresponding English sentences (every S is a P, some S is a P, no S is a P, some S is not a P). Since a nonempty term does not occur, no question of existential import of "every" arises. In Summa Logicae, Ockham developed for the categorical sentences a semantics whose interpretations are assignments of arbitrary sets. Ockham's peculiar truth conditions are as follows: "S is a nonempty subset of P" for 'every S is a P', "S is not disjoint with P" for 'some S is a P', "S is disjoint with P" for 'no S is a P' and "S is not a nonempty subset of P" for 'some S is not a P'. Not only has Ockham attached existential import to "every" but also he has detached existential import from "some-not". The strangeness of this semantics has been noted by others. In particular, there is difficulty in reading "some S is not a P" (or its Latin correlate) as if true when there are no S's. It would be natural to conjecture a mismatch between these two semantic systems i.e. that there is an implication which holds in one but not in the other. This would mean that Aristotle's deductive system is either unsound or incomplete relative to Ockham's semantics. But since Ockham's truth-conditions agree with Aristotle's on Aristotle's interpretations, every Aristotelian interpretation "is" an Ockham interpretation and, thus, every Ockham implication is an Aristotelian implication. Since Aristotle's deductive system is complete relative to Aristotle's semantics, it is therefore also complete with respect to Ockham's semantics. To see that Aristotle's deductive system is sound relative to Ockham's semantics it suffices to check the soundness of the "rules" (this JOURNAL, vol. 38(1973), p. 697). Thus the Ockham implications are exactly the Aristotelian implications, i.e. Ockham's semantics is precisely equivalent to Aristotle's (on the categorical arguments, of course). Therefore, by checking Aristotle's deductions there was no way that Ockham could have discovered that his semantics was not the one that Aristotle had in mind (assuming that it is not). Either way, this is a nice example of the principle that semantics is "under determined" by the deductive system.

The Avignon papacy (1309–1377) represented the zenith of papal power in Europe. The Roman curia’s move to southern France enlarged its bureaucracy, centralized its authority, and initiated closer contact with secular institutions. The pope’s presence also attracted leading minds to Avignon, transforming a modest city into a cosmopolitan center of learning. But a crisis of legitimacy was brewing among leading thinkers of the day. The Avignon Papacy Contested considers the work of six fourteenth-century writers who waged literary war against the Catholic Church’s increasing claims of supremacy over secular rulers—a conflict that engaged contemporary critics from every corner of Europe.

Unn Falkeid uncovers the dispute’s origins in Dante’s Paradiso and Monarchia, where she identifies a sophisticated argument for the separation of church and state. In Petrarch’s writings she traces growing concern about papal authority, precipitated by the curia’s exile from Rome. Marsilius of Padua’s theory of citizen agency indicates a resistance to the pope’s encroaching power, which finds richer expression in William of Ockham’s philosophy of individual liberty. Both men were branded as heretics. The mystical writings of Birgitta of Sweden and Catherine of Siena, in Falkeid’s reading, contain cloaked confrontations over papal ethics and church governance even though these women were later canonized. While each of the six writers responded creatively to the implications of the Avignon papacy, they shared a concern for the breakdown of secular order implied by the expansion of papal power and a willingness to speak their minds.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674971844

Aristotle explains existence through postulating essences that are intrinsic and percep- tion independent. I argue that his theory is more plausible than Hume’s and Russell’s theories of existence. Russell modifies Hume’s theory because he wants to allow for the existence of mathematical objects. However, Russell’s theory facilitates a problematic collapse of ontology into epistemology, which has become a feature of much analytic philosophy. This collapse obscures the nature of truth. Aristotle is to be praised for starting with a clear account of ordinary objects rather than immediately reifying mathematical objects. He thus allows us to have a coherent account of existence and truth, and to easily resist collapsing ontology into epistemology.

This thesis is a detailed examination of the logico-semantic system propounded by the English philosopher and theologian William of Ockham (c.1287 – c.1347). It provides a reinterpretation of Ockham's account of mental content and mental-language semantics, as well as of his theory of consequential goodness. It does so from the standpoint of an inferentialist theory of meaning, in rejection of previous attempts made from the standpoint of internalist and externalist theories of mental content. Chapter 1 ('The Scientific Status of Logic') provides an account of Ockham's understanding of logic as a rational, practical, ostensive science. Chapter 2 ('The Received Interpretation') presents and casts doubt upon the arguments put forward by the defenders of both externalist and internalist construals of Ockham's semantic theory. Chapter 3 ('An Inferentialist Construal') presents the central tenets of a inferentialist theory of meaning. In order to show how Ockham's system can be understood within such a semantic paradigm, we will have to set out at least three things. First, Chapter 4 ('Ockham's Propositionalism') argues that the mature Ockham actually embraced a propositionalist theory of meaning. Second, Chapter 5 ('Obligationes and the Normativity of Asserting') seeks to prove that such a theory of meaning can only be properly understood against the normative background provided by his theory of obligationes. Finally, Chapter 6 ('Consequences') argues that Ockham's theory of consequential goodness is materialist, not formalist. That is to say, that the goodness of a certain kind of consequence ultimately depends upon the meaning of its propositional parts, rather than upon its structure. It is then shown that all remaining kinds of consequences (syllogisms included) are to understood with respect to these material inferences. The main sources of this research are Ockham's Ordinatio, his Summa logicae, and his Quodlibeta septem. As regards the inferentialist theory of meaning, Robert Brandom's Making it Explicit (1994) and Wilfrid Sellars 'Inference andMeaning' (1953) were essential to this research.

Key-words: William of Ockham, logic, semantics, consequence, inference, inferentialism, normativity, obligationes.

The history of Western metaphysics is being unfold on the basis of nine outstanding philosophers. For ancient philosophy: Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus; for medieval philosophy: Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham; for the modern period: Descartes, Kant and Hegel. The final chapter outlines some prominent opponents of metaphysics in the 19th/20th Century (Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger). Metaphysics being a fundamental philosophical discipline, this book can also be read as an introduction to philosophy as such.

No que concerne à plenitude do poder papal, o Venerabilis Inceptor propôs e assumiu uma via media. Os curialistas (Egídio Romano , Tiago de Viterbo  e Álvaro Pais ), de um lado, defendiam um absolutismo pontifício, tanto espiritual quanto temporal; os anticurialistas (nomeadamente Marsílio de Pádua ), de outro lado, negavam ao pontífice romano todo e qualquer poder. O Menorita Inglês, rejeitando os argumentos de ambos os lados, limita e delimita os poderes do papado, mas não os tolhe totalmente; e assim pretende conduzir o papa ao seu genuíno múnus evangélico: ser, na terra, o vigário de Cristo, isto é, ser um ministro do próprio Cristo e também um servo dos cristãos, não um senhor e dominador com poderes absolutos e ilimitados.

In the recent secondary literature on Ockham’s philosophy of mind, it has been debated whether Ockham proposed an externalist or an internalist view of the intentional contents of intuitive cognitions. It has also been debated whether Ockham only attributes intentional content to intuitive cognitions, or rather two different properties, i.e. a likeness and an intentional content. Intuitive cognitions can be roughly understood as perceptions. In this article I propose a different perspective for analysing both debates, that is, the perspective that concerns Ockham’s theory of reflexivity. Ockham defended the idea that one can reflexively cognize two different features of intuitive cognitions; namely, their similarity or likeness, and their intentional content. Ockham proposed different  degrees and modes of reflexive cognition regarding these features.

En el siglo XIV se propusieron dos teorías principales para explicar el aumento y la reducción de las cualidades, entendidas éstas como formas accidentales. Quienes defendían alguna de estas dos teorías sostenían que una cualidad aumenta o se reduce debido a que se añaden o se substraen partes de sí misma, o bien, que una cualidad aumenta o se reduce debido a que una nueva forma más o menos perfecta sustituye a la forma ya inherente en una cierta substancia. Ockham defendió la primera teoría con respecto a los estados mentales, entendidos como cualidades. Chatton defendió en sus primeros escritos ambas teorías y después sólo defendió la segunda. Las teorías de Ockham y Chatton están basadas en dos perspectivas distintas sobre la naturaleza del cambio o el movimiento. Ambas teorías, además, implican mecanismos distintos para regular la mayor o menor perfección de un estado mental.

Ockham Explained is an important and much-needed resource on William of Ockham, one of the most important philosophers of the Middle Ages. His eventful and controversial life was marked by sharp career moves and academic and ecclesiastical battles. At 28, Ockham was a conservative English theologian focused obsessively on the nature of language, but by 40, he had transformed into a fugitive friar, accused of heresy, and finally protected by the German emperor as he composed incendiary treatises calling for strong limits on papal authority. This book provides a thorough grounding in Ockham's life and his many contributions to philosophy. It begins with an overview of the philosopher's youth and the Aristotelian philosophy he studied as a boy. Subsequent chapters cover his ideas on language and logic; his metaphysics and vaunted "razor," as well as his opponents' "anti-razor" theories; his invention of the church-state separation; and much more. The con...

Please visit danielshields.info/writings/ for a copy of this translation. This text supplements and fills out the material translated as "The Proof for God's Existence" in Ockham, Philosophical Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1990).
Q. 132: Whether in essentially ordered causes the second [cause] depends on the first [cause]
Q. 133: Whether in essentially ordered causes the superior cause is more perfect
Q. 134: Whether essentially ordered causes are necessarily simultaneously required for producing the effect in respect to which they are essentially ordered causes

"Fin dalle origini della storia del pensiero di ispirazione cristiana, la questione del cosiddetto fatalismo teologico è stata fra le più dibattute; si tratta, in effetti, di un problema di notevole portata, connesso con
quelli, complessi e delicati, della prescienza divina, della libertà
umana e della possibilità che esse possano rivelarsi tra loro incompatibili." dalla recensione di M. Schoepflin

The methods of intellectual history have not yet been applied to studying the invention of technology for printing texts and images ca. 1375–ca.1450. One of the several conceptual developments in this period reflecting the possibility of mechanical replication is a view of the relationship of
eternity to durational time based on Gregory of Nyssa’s philosophy of time and William of Ockham’s. Th e article considers how changes in these ideas helped enable the conceptual possibilities of the dissemination of ideas. It
describes a direct connection of human perceptual knowledge to divine knowledge that enhanced the authority of printed production to transfer and reproduce the true and the good.

The purpose of this study is to elucidate the notion of freedom (libertas) developed by William of Ockham (1284?-1347?) in his Opera Politica; having as research locus, specifically, the Book I of the Tract I, entitled On the power of pope and clergy, of the Third Part of the Dialogue. This freedom is, indeed, the Christian (or evangelical) freedom; which is understood, in this context, as a philosophical and theological principle: lex christiana est lex libertatis (the Christian law is a law of freedom). Through this argumentation, the Venerabilis Inceptor undertakes his incisive critique to plenitudo potestatis papalis doctrine (papal fullness of power); by which the Roman pontiffs sought to legitimize their pretended spiritual and temporal fullness of power. In fact, if the Christians are free, by force of evangelical law, then the pope cannot possess regularly such fullness of power; for if he possessed it, the faithful would be deprived of their religious and political freedom; and the pontiff, consequently, would become a heretic. Therefore, this Christian freedom must be characterized as religious and political freedom.

Adam of Wodeham and William of Ockham ascribe different properties to intuitive apprehensions. The properties that Wodeham ascribes to intuitive cognitions concur with his reading of one of the four scenarios that Ockham proposes in order to test the idea that an intuitive apprehension serves as an epistemic warrant. In this article, I explain that Wodeham avoids skepticism through his account of intuitive cognitions; even though, like Ockham, he accepts that God can cause us to undergo various sorts of mental acts in virtue of which we could believe that something exists when really it does not exist.

Please find here a revised version of my topic on the philosophy of time found in the works of Thomas Bradwardine. Here I only begin to sketch out some possible connections between the uses of time in Bradwardine's logic, physics, cosmology, and theology. All of this has been approached from an Augustinian perspective, although I would be happy to eventually put my work into more rigorous conversion with Bradwardine's fourteenth-century context, as well.

I am indebted to Mark Thakkar of the University of St. Andrew's for pointing out that an earlier version of this paper vastly overstated the case for Bradwardine's characterization of the temporal instant as "envious" of eternity. While _simultas_ may bear the sense of something like "envious strife" in Classical Latin, that meaning seems to drop out of Medieval Latin, and would probably not have been intended by Bradwardine in his fourteenth-century context.

spent his formative years untying logical knots at Oxford. The knottiest of those knots were to be found in semantic paradoxes like that of the well-known liar who says, " I am lying to you right now. " In order to unweave these tangled threads, Bradwardine made use of an unloved instrument from the medieval logicians' toolkit: the ut nunc consequence. 1 Often translated as 'matter of fact' consequence, this logical maneuver involved the supposition of a contingent premise which may not hold 'absolutely' (simpliciter) or in every case. Bradwardine embraced the ut nunc consequence as central to his understanding of how the truth of propositions may be judged in relation to their contingent premises. By relating insolubles like the Liar's Paradox back to contingent, material states of affairs, he was able to push past the limits of paradox and ground truth anew in an apprehension of the facts of the matter—at least, as of now (ut nunc). While Bradwardine's idiosyncratic reliance upon the ut nunc has already been established, there remains work to be done on how this dependence of logic on temporality relates to the theological account of time we meet in his De Causa Dei contra Pelagianos. One central claim there is that human matters can perhaps be understood in terms of temporal instants, whereas God must not be so measured, dwelling as He does in the simultaneity of a " super-instantaneous presentiality, " which Bradwardine dubs the " envy [simultas] of the temporal instant. " 2 The goal of this paper is to unearth Bradwardine's underlying philosophy of

Reviewing Priest, G. and S. Read. "Formalization of Ockham on Supposition" Mind (1977) in Mathematical Reviews 57#27184.

William of Ockham (c. 1285--1349?) carried out a semantic study involving thorny questions about relations of a given proposition containing a “common term" to various propositions containing “singular terms subsumed by the common term". His study, known as Ockham's theory of supposition, has attracted considerable attention by logicians in recent years. After referring readers to two expositions of Ockham's theory, the authors present a “formalization" based on an infinitary language treated by J. L. Bell and A. B. Slomson [Models and ultraproducts, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1972].
The paper’s revealing observations, though mathematically elementary, could hardly have been made by historians and philosophers not versed in mathematical logic. This paper is an example of how mathematics can contribute to historical and philosophical enterprises.
Although symbolic logic has been used in previous studies in Ockham's theory of supposition, the present symbolic formalization is the most technically sophisticated and the most insightful. The use of an infinitary language contributes to the clarity of the presentation, and attribution of an infinitary language to Ockham seems justifiable historically. Some of the metalinguistic devices and mathematical observations introduced in this article will likely become standard in future discussions of supposition.

Ponencia dictada en el II Encuentro de Historia Militar «La Guerra de la Independencia. Cambio bélico y cambio político social» (Cáceres, 15 de noviembre de 2008), y que sirvió de base para el artículo «Los orígenes del mundo contemporáneo: revisión del concepto historiográfico “Crisis del Antiguo Régimen” y caracterización de la Modernidad», publicado en  el número 71 de la revista "Aportes (2009), reproducido en esta misma página.