Facts vs. Things: Adam Wodeham and the Later Medieval Debate about Objects of Judgment

Abstract

DRAWING ON ARISTOTLE'S DISCUSSION in the Categories, medieval philosophers generally take for granted that reality is fundamentally constituted by entities of two basic kinds: substances (such as stones, trees, human beings) and their accidents (such as this stone's hardness, that tree's height, Socrates' pallor). As a rule, they find the analytical tools afforded by a substance-accident ontology perfectly adequate for addressing philosophical and theological problems generally. (1) As with most rules, however, here too there are exceptions. In this paper I examine one such exception: namely, that provided by a fourteenth-century philosopher, Adam Wodeham (ca. 1298-1358), who, in the course of developing a theory of judgment, in particular, a theory about the nature of the objects of judgment, is led to challenge this standard medieval-Aristotelian paradigm. (2) As with nearly every other figure in the history of medieval philosophy, the recovery of Wodeham's legacy is still in its early stages; indeed, his writings are only now becoming available in reliable Latin editions. (3) Even so, it has been clear to scholars for some time that Wodeham was a philosopher of considerable stature, standing at the center of a number of important philosophical, theological, and scientific controversies in one of the liveliest periods in the history of late scholasticism. A careful student of William Ockham and John Duns Scotus, as well as an independent and original thinker in his own right, Wodeham was a highly regarded figure both at Oxford and at Paris throughout the fourteenth century. (4) Although Wodeham's philosophical corpus covers a wide range of issues, he is best known to historians of philosophy today for his contribution to the later medieval debate about the objects of judgment. (5) The significance of Wodeham's views on this issue has to do with the fact that, in the course of developing his theory of judgment, he appears to introduce a new type of entity; one which he himself refers to using the expression sic esse (being such-and-such) and which came to be known among his contemporaries and successors as a complexe significabile (something that can be signified [only] by a propositional expression). Although it is generally recognized that Wodeham's account of objects of judgment is highly innovative, commentators disagree over the proper interpretation of this account. In general, they have been inclined to see Wodeham either as introducing items that are supervenient on--and nothing in addition to--ordinary substances and accidents, or else as postulating some type of abstract object (for example, abstract meanings or some other intentional entity). (6) In what follows, I argue against both sorts of interpretation: against the first, Iargue that Wodeham's complexe significabilia are a sui generis type of entity really distinct from individual substances and accidents; and against the second, Iargue that, like such substances and accidents, they are concrete (rather than abstract). Indeed, Wodeham's complexe significabilia are, as I see it, best interpreted as facts or concrete states of affair. If I am right about this, his account of objects of judgment constitutes a fairly radical departure from the standard medieval-Aristotelian substance-accident framework. As I will show, Wodeham himself sees his account of the objects of judgment as involving an important correction to the standard interpretation of Aristotle's Categories. (7) In order to make this argument, I rely on Wodeham's discussion of judgment in distinction 1, question l, article 1 of the second set of lectures on Peter Lombard's Sentences (hereafter d. 1, q. 1). (8) It is in this context--namely, a discussion about the nature of the objects of knowledge(scientia)--that Wodeham first invokes the notion of complexe significabilia and it is only in this context that he provides any positive account of such entities. (9) Yet, even here, the account is rather limited. …

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