Thinking and interpreting reality : John Buridan's Commentary on the Categories

Buridan's theory of categories must be viewed as one of the most interesting output of the Nominalist interpretative tradition after Ockham. Whereas the semantics that Ockham wished to construct was a sort of formal language, Buridan rather directed his efforts towards building up a semantics as a sort of empirical analysis of our language. For him, to understand an expression is not merely to be aware of the entity (or entities) somehow connected with it, but also to be aware of its actual or potential use. Again, unlike Ockham, who affirmed that spoken and written terms directly signify the (individual) things in the world, Buridan follows Boethius and states that the direct meaning of any expression is a conceptual entity in the mind. Given the main goal of this paper, namely to study and clarify the most important semantic aspects of Buridan's theory of categories (as, for example, his conception of essential predication), these assumptions are explained in accordance with some crucial questions from Buridan's commentaries on the De anima, so that the general features of his theory of cognition can be drawn, and particularly the way in which our mind produces universals concept and builds up the categorial fields.