Organon F

Volume 29, November 2022, Issue 4, Pages 406–426

ISSN 2585-7150 (online) ISSN 1335-0668 (print)

The paper deals with Thomas Aquinas’s (1225–1274) theory of predication. Aquinas’s numerous works contain passages devoted to the issue of how predication works, usually in various theological or philosophical contexts. Assuming Aquinas’s account of predication was sufficiently uniform in relation to essential and accidental predications, there are several distinct interpretative models of predication possible in relation to the texts. They differ in ascribing different semantic roles to the copula. The first model sees the copula as expressing inherence of a form expressed by the predicate term in the entity denoted by the subject term. The second model interprets the copula as designating identity. The third model incorporates inherence with the fact that Aquinas combines predicative and existential functions of the copula. I argue that the identity model is closest to what Aquinas has in mind when speaking about predication as opposed to extensional truth conditions.

Copula; identity; predication; Thomas Aquinas; inherence.

Author

Petr Dvořák

Affiliation

Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences

Address

Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences, Jilská 1, Praha, Czech Republic

E-mail

petr.dvorak@flu.cas.cz 

Received

12 January 2021

Revised

4 November 2021

Accepted

1 June 2022

Publishers

Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences

Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences

APA

Dvořák, P. (2022). The Theory of Predication in Aquinas: Inherence or Identity? Organon F, 29(4), 406–426. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2022.29401

Chicago

Dvořák, Petr. 2022. "The Theory of Predication in Aquinas: Inherence or Identity?" Organon F 29 (4): 406–426. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2022.29401

Harvard

Dvořák, P. (2022). The Theory of Predication in Aquinas: Inherence or Identity? Organon F, 29(4), pp. 406–426. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2022.29401

© Petr Dvořák

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