Scholastic semiotic: William Ockham

A philosopher of Scholastic is a philosophical address that, during Middle age 13^th and 14^th centuries, was the principal school for philosophers that from convent schools was extended to Universities, as for examples that of Paris, Oxford, Bologna, Napoli and other; a exponent of this address was William from Ochkam(1280-1349), British Franciscan that taught in Oxford, and in a his book he explains the nominalism; but we can think this philosopher as semiotic post Aristotle(384-322), because for me Aristotle is the first semiotic in the philosophy; the semiotics, that has had his independence as single matter alone in 19^th century, but that has its origin in Aristotle, that William from Ockham has read through a translated book that he mentions, as the Analytics, this is the syllogism, may from the De interpretatione of Boethius(480-526 b.Ch), that has descripted the Analytics of Aristotle, anyway William gives some relevant motive for this analysis semiotic alone: “All those who treat of logic try to show that arguments are composed of proposition of terms. Thus a term is simply a component part of a proposition. When he defines the notion of a term in the first book of the Prior Analytics, Aristotle says, “I call that a term into which a proposition is resolved(for example the predicate or that of which it is predicated) when it is asserted or denied that something is or is not the case.” Although every term is(or could be) a part of a proposition, not all terms are the same kind. Thus, to gain a full understanding of a nature of terms one must know some of the divisions that are drawn among them. As Boethius points out in Commentary on the book of De Interpretatione, discourse is of three types, the written, the spoken, and the conceptual(this last existing inly in the mind). In the same way there are three sorts of terms, written, spoken, and conceptual”. It is alone a speculative, hence Aristotelian, description of logic organization of concept that after we organize rationally, or at last we try, but it is alone semiotics, in Medieval time, that took from other authors this is Aristotle and Boethius, that are before of Scholastic but Ockham is in the Scholastic and interesting is the follow that indirectly Aristotle has in the Middle age, that is a datum by now certain, because Aristotle is every present until the philosophy of 19^th century; therefore in Middle age, also in Pagan authors as Saint Thomas from Aquino(1225-1274), in the Summa theological; whereby Aristotle is a presence always present, at last in intellectual traits, but to semiotic level, except Boethius, he is absent; the merit of Ockham is that he took the basilar concepts od Nominalism, but after he developed this concept through the semiotics, that is the first clear example of semiotics, and I say the first because Aristotle has had the sake of explication of logic search, thereby the syllogism is a tool or method alone, that Aristotle has explained, but his principal duty was the explication of search not certainly the semiotics, Ockham instead uses the semiotics, and for him the valor is alone the words, hence the semiotics.

Alessandro Lusana