The text is known in five manuscripts and has been partially edited by de Rijk (1969). The author is quite critical towards the text on which he is commenting and develops original positions in his theory of supposition (see Brumberg-Chaumont 2010). It has been thought that William’s teaching in logic should be understood within the new general framework introduced by the modists in logic. Envisaged in this way, his commentary could be seen as a very interesting testimony of the encounter between the new paradigm and the revival of the interest in the theoRy of The properties of terms observed elsewhere at the end of the thirteenth century (see Pinbord and Ebbesen 1984). Nonetheless, the immediate inspiration of the text is to be found in Thomas Aquinas’ logical and ontological works on a philosophical point of view. William introduces into the analysis of the theory of signification and supposition Avicenna’s theory of essence as interpreted by the Dominican on a semantic point of view (especially in the De ente et essentia and in his commentary on the Peri hermeneias). Conversely, R. A. Gauthier has shown how Thomas Aquinas was dealing with the same referential problems as the terminist treatises did when analyzing the signification and the scope of universal nouns as subject and as predicate, but that Thomas used different tools, though he knew the terminist tradition (Gauthier 1989a:55*-56*). Similar examples are used, studied in detail by R. A. Gauthier who mentions the defense William gives of the Thomistic interpretation against Peter of Spain (Gauthier 1989a:54*-56*). One can say that William translates Thomas Aquinas’ approach into the language of terminism, as can be seen in the analysis of the supposition of the predicate, a very interesting case from the philosophical point of view. According to Peter of Spain, the predicate ‘‘man’’ is in simple supposition, the supposition the term can also have in a subject position in propositions such as ‘‘man is a species.’’ But this is impossible in a Thomistic approach inspired by the Avicennian paradigm, because the property of being a universal predicable as a species cannot be possessed by the essence itself, but by the essence as it is thought, the intention, whereas it is the essence itself that is predicated of the thing in which it has its being, so that ‘‘man’’ in the two propositions (‘‘Socrates is a man,’’ ‘‘man is a species’’) cannot have the same supposition. For William, simple supposition is the supposition for the intention in the soul and cannot be the
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Supposition of the predicate because propositions such as ‘‘all men are animals’’ would always be false (Lectura tractatuum, p. 147). The predicate is in personal supposition and the proposition is about things, not concepts. The proposition can all the same remain true even if there is no man left, because William favors the signification of the thing as thought, so that nouns do not lose their signification if the things named are destroyed, and because he sees natural supposition as the supposition for the form as preserved in particulars whether they exist or not (Lectura tractatuum, p. 146).
See also: > Giles of Rome, Political Thought > Peter of Spain > Thomas Aquinas
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