Several items that in contemporary sources were labeled characteristic of the via alherti were not mentioned by Heymericus in his Tractatus prohlematicus, but appear only later, in the second half of the fifteenth century. The most significant of these is the view that logic is primarily concerned with second-order rather than with first-order concepts. First-order concepts are concepts of things in reality, such as men and living beings. Second-order concepts, on the other hand, are concepts attributed to these first-order concepts, such as ‘‘species’’ and ‘‘genus,’’ in propositions like ‘‘man is a species’’ and ‘‘living being is a genus.’’ In maintaining that logic primarily deals with second-order concepts, the Albertist was in full agreement with the Scotist, against the Thomists and Nominalists. Although the debate concerned the genuine nature oflogic according to Aristotle, its immediate source was a remark made by Avicenna in his Metaphysics, which stated that the subject of logic is second-order concepts added to first-order ones. Albertists thus saw themselves as the true followers of Avicenna’s reading of Aristotle on this point; a reading which, according to them, was imperative, because otherwise the distinction made in the Aristotelian tradition between logic on the one hand and physics and metaphysics on the other, would collapse. Logic is a rational science, whereas physics and metaphysics are real ones. Although all these sciences can talk about man, logic is not interested in man as a real man, nor in the concept of man, but rather in the concepts that can be predicated of the concept used in the real sciences to refer to real men. Because, the Albertists argued, the concept of man is predicated of numerically distinct men in reality, this concept has the nature of a species, and thus the second-order term ‘‘species’’ can be predicated of it. The Albertists admitted that there is a certain relationship between first and second order concepts, inasmuch as the latter, say ‘‘species,’’ are attributed to the former, say ‘‘man,’’ dependent on the fact that the first-order concept ‘‘man’’ refers to different individuals in reality. However, and this is crucial, they did not consider second-order concepts to be a natural property of first-order concepts, as the Thomists claimed, nor to be a natural sign of them, as the Nominalists maintained. Logic, for the Albertists, was a science concerned with second-order concepts ontologically independent of first-order concepts. In short: Logic is a true science in its own right.
World History
