Likeness stories
pp. 81-94
in: Jenny Pelletier, Magali Roques (eds), The language of thought in late medieval philosophy, Berlin, Springer, 2017Abstract
This chapter explores some of Claude Panaccio's most significant contributions to the study of Ockham's account of the language of thought, construed as an exemplary model of how to do the history of philosophy. It focuses on three central issues. First, it gives a short history of the now-resolved debate over the existence of simple connotative concepts in mental language, which was essentially about whether Ockham intended his mental language to be ideal or logically perfect. Second, it describes the ongoing controversy about whether Ockham grants (or should grant) the existence of simple abstractive cognitions proper to one individual, or singular absolute concepts. Third, it gives an analysis of the tension between causality and similarity in Panaccio's account of Ockham's view on how concepts are what they are the concepts of.
