The main focus of the discussion is Buridan’s deployment of the Ockhamist conception of a “mental language” for mapping the complex structures of written and spoken human languages onto a parsimoniously construed reality. This book critically examines what is most intriguing to contemporary readers in Buridan’s medieval philosophical system: his nominalist account of the relationships among language, thought, and reality. But these items are universal only in their signification they are just as singular entities themselves as are any other items in reality. John Buridan has worked out perhaps the most comprehensive account of nominalism in the history of Western thought, the philosophical doctrine according to which the only universals in reality are “names”: the common terms of our language and the common concepts of our minds. For these reasons, Klima concludes that a "moderate semantic realism" of Thomas Aquinas provides the most promising way of overcoming these issues while 1) avoiding the "ontological extravagance" of the realists and 2) without conflating the mere indifference of singular representation with genuine universality, and 3) without having to deny spectuality to our quidditative universal concepts formed by abstraction. Furthermore, Klima argues that although Buridan provided an abstractionist theory of the formation of genuinely universal representational content, his solution relies on attributing what Klima terms "aspectrality" to universal absolute concepts that is not supported by his Ockhamist semantics. However, Ockham's conception of universal representations in terms of the indifference of information content among non-distinctive singular representations fails to provide an account of genuinely universal symbols. In this paper, Klima argues that nominalists (including Ockham and Buridan) are right to insist against ontological realists (Plato and Scotus included) that semantic universality does not require a commitment to universal entities, that is, to ontological universality. Semantic universality of a representation is such only when the representation is related to many things and not to just one (whether or not that one thing would be related to many, for instance as a Platonic form).
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