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(6) All concrete and abstract names that pertain to shape are reduced to [this] same mode, according to the view of those who maintain that shape is not a thing other than quantity (that is, than substance and quality),9 and so [too] for the other species of quantity. Thus, they have to maintain that ‘shape’ and ‘shaped’, ‘straight’ and ‘straightness’, ‘curved’ and ‘curvedness’‘, ‘hollow’ and ‘hollowness’, ‘snub’ and ‘snubness’ ‘angular’ and ‘angle’, ‘convex’ and ‘convexity’, and the like, are synonymous names. All these [claims] are to be understood [as holding only] if none of these names equivalently10 includes some word that the other one [of its pair] does not include.

(7) Not only concrete and abstract names like these are synonyms, as those who hold such a view have to say, but also, according to the view of those who maintain that a relation is not another thing really distinct from absolute things,11 concrete and abstract relative [terms] are synonymous names. For example, ‘father’ and ‘fatherhood’, ‘like’ and ‘likeness’, ‘cause’ and ‘causality’, ‘potency’ and ‘potentiality’, ‘risible’ and ‘risibility’, ‘capable’ and ‘capacity’, ‘double’ and ‘doubleness’, ‘calefactive’ and ‘calefactivity’, and so on.

(8) Nevertheless, those who hold this view of relation could keep such concrete and abstract [terms] from being synonymous names by maintaining that the abstract [form] supposited for two [things] at once. For example, that ‘similitude’ supposit for two similar things. In that sense, ‘A similar is a similitude’ would be false, and yet ‘Similars are a similitude’ would be true.

(9) In [another] way too, all those who hold the above views12 could keep it so that no such concrete and abstract names are synonymous. This will be discussed below.13 In that case, they could say that in such instances it is always false to predicate the concrete [form] of the abstract [form]. But those who hold the above views and refuse14 to adopt the manner of speaking below,15 ought in all such cases — if they are speaking consistently — to grant the concrete’s being predicated of the abstract, and conversely.

(10) Thus, those who hold the first view16 have to grant the following predications: ‘A man is a humanity’, ‘An animal is an animality’. Consequently, they have to grant: ‘A humanity runs’, ‘An animality is white’, and so on. [Those who] hold the second [view]17 also have to grant such propositions as ‘A substance is a quality’, ‘A substance is a quantity’, ‘A substance is a length’, ‘A quality is a breadth’. Consequently, ‘A quantity runs’, ‘A length argues’, ‘A breadth speaks’, and so on, [must likewise be granted]. [Those who] hold the third [view]18 have to grant ‘A relation is a substance’, ‘A quality is a relation’, ‘A man is a relation’, ‘A likeness runs’, ‘A fatherhood is a filiation’, ‘A likeness is a doubleness’, and so on.

(11) Now it will be shown later19 how those [people] who grant the bases of the former views could deny such propositions. In that way too, they could deny propositions like ‘Matter is a privation’, ‘Air is a shadow’, ‘A man is a blindness’, ‘A soul is original sin’, ‘A soul is an ignorance’, ‘A man is a negation’, ‘The body of Christ is a death’ — despite the fact that some people20 would grant that ‘privation’, ‘shadow’, ‘blindness’ and the like do not convey anything on the part of reality distinct in any way from [their] subject — that is, from a man, matter, and the like.

Translation by Paul Vincent Spade, CC BY 4.0. Source: Indiana University ScholarWorks. Changes: format conversion only (PDF to Markdown; footnotes, italics and paragraph numbers kept; margin line numbers and page headers dropped).

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Footnotes

  1. That is, if someone were to think that ‘divinity’ did not signify God, but only the essence or nature of God. For Ockham, this is an erroneous distinction, and the terms ‘God’ and ‘divinity’ signify the same thing in every way. ↩

  2. But see Ch. 7. ↩

  3. ‘cold’ = frigus, i. e., the noun rather than the adjective. ↩

  4. Presumably this refers to the kind of concretes and abstracts discussed in Ch. 5, para. 3, above. ↩

  5. Ditto. ↩

  6. The “Commentator” on Aristotle is Averroes. ↩

  7. ‘proper attributes’ = propriae passiones. ↩

  8. Ockham himself maintains this. ↩

  9. Again, this is Ockham’s own view. ↩

  10. That is, implicitly. ↩

  11. Again, this is Ockham’s own view. ↩

  12. In para. 4–8. ↩

  13. See Ch. 8, below. ↩

  14. Conjecturing ‘nolunt’ for the edition’s ‘volunt’ (line 83). ↩

  15. That is, in Ch. 8. ↩

  16. In para. 4, above. ↩

  17. In para. 5–6, above. ↩

  18. In para. 7–8, above. ↩

  19. See Ch. 8, below. ↩

  20. Including Ockham himself. See his Summa Physicorum, Pars I, c. 10: “Yet first it must be shown that a privation is not anything imaginable outside the soul [and] distinct from matter and form and the composite [of the two].” (Ed. Rome, 1637, 12.) ↩

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