Anyone who reads much philosophy will encounter a lot of Latin phrases. Leaving formal and informal fallacies out of it, the following are some of the most common. I have translated for the uninitiated.
a fortiori – all the more so; e.g., if you can refute a more general or more plausible version of a thesis, then it follows a fortiori that more specific and/or less plausible versions of that same thesis have been refuted.
a posteriori – known or believed on the basis of looking around and seeing that it is so; e.g., we know a posteriori that cats like milk–no one could have arrived at that conclusion apart from observation.
a priori – assumed or knowable at the outset, without looking around to see if it’s so; e.g., we know a priori that, necessarily, a part cannot be greater than the whole of which it is a part–we see this with the “eye of the mind”, so to speak; no set of empirical observations could show that this is a necessary truth.
ceteris paribus – all other things being equal.
ex hypothesi – according to the hypothesis currently under discussion.
mutatis mutandis – with the appropriate changes.
pace – contrary to, as in “pace Hume, the self is not just a ‘bundle of impressions.'”
simpliciter – without qualification of any sort; e.g., one might say that a proposition is true-at-a-time if and only if what it posits is true at that time, but what then does it mean to say that a proposition is true simpliciter (i.e., independently of the “at a time” qualifier)?
sui generis – in its own unique category; not reducible to other categories.
Vini, Vidi, Visa
There are many others, particularly in the area of logic. Ex falso quodlibet, &c. Btw “secundum quid” is the opposite of “simpliciter”.
I recently started studying Latin philosophy, stuff like Ockham, Aquinas Suarez &c in the original. It was a complete revelation. Some observations
1. Most of the stuff you read in textbooks is wrong or misleading. Because modern philosophers don’t as a rule learn Latin, they rely on a very small number of secondary sources.
2. One fallacy is that medieval Latin is different from classical Latin. It isn’t.
3. If you study the Latin philosophy of the 16c, you are struck by how modern it is. The idea that we contrast scholasticism which was moribund, with the new philosophy of Leibniz, Descartes &c is misleading.
4. There is something called the “continuity thesis”. This is the that there was no “scientific revolution” in the 17C. There was change, but it was continuous change. My own experience suggests the thesis is correct.
5. On the supposed decline in the period between Ockham and Descartes, very few philosophers who make this claim have probably studied any of the philosophy from that period.One philosopher who did study it was William Hamilton (18C philosopher, editor of Reid, much maligned by Mill), and he claims that the 16C was the golden age of Latin philosophy. There was comparatively little innovation during the period; however, this may be a consequence of the huge consolidation during the period. There are two huge battles going on. Between Protestantism and the established Church, which originates with Ockham. And between realism and nominalism, whose systematic formulation also originates with Ockham (this is no coincidence).
6. The reason the period is so neglected is probably (a) that the scientific revolutionaries, like all revolutionaries, have a vested interest in claiming that history begins with their work (b) the only vested interest against that view is of the modern neo-scholastic philosophers, who are mostly Thomists, who see philosophy as beginning and ending with the Divine Thomas. Thus the stuff in between Ockham and Descartes gets ignored.
7. A more radical idea (just an idea). What we call “Philosophy” is essentially Latin philosophy. As you note, our vocabulary is Latin. Subject, predicate, reference, denotation, essence, existence, singular proposition, term, existential generalisation. &c &c. So perhaps are our core concepts. Example: existence. You are familiar with the idea that there are two sense of “exist”. So also in Latin. Ex-sistere means to appear or show or stand out in some way. Thus existence really is a predicate. The verb sum, by contrast, is directly comparable to the “is” in “Socrates is wise”.
8. Though I wonder if the same applies to Theology. Though many key concepts of theology are Latin ones (Transubstantion, redemption, salvation, predestination), many are also Greek (soteriology, kerygmatic). Also, obviously, Hebrew.
9. The one exception, which I note in the essay on my website here (http://uk.geocities.com/frege@btinternet.com/cantor/Classes.htm) is the word “class”. While this word is of course Latin, its modern meaning is non-Latin. (Btw, to forestall the question of how a word can have a “Latin meaning”, I am using that expression very deliberately. See the essay above, on the meaning of “genus” vs “set” or “class”, for clarification).
10. It’s a shame the subject isn’t more widely studied. With the advent of the internet, and the increasing number of Latin sites appearing, this may change. Apart from the language problem, the real difficulty is getting hold of the material. There are thousands upon thousands of works gathering dust in libraries. Yet it is easy enough to scan them in, once is enough! – and they are there for posterity.
11. I should add that it’s not particularly hard to learn philosophical Latin. The vocabulary is fairly limited, and as long as you are comfortable with the basis syntax, it’s pretty easy. I’d compare it to the difficulty of reading Kant or Heidegger. Once you’ve learned a core vocabulary (transcendental, manifold, dialectic, ontic, existentiel &c &c) then you’re off, since most of it is the same words reoccurring in seemingly random order. The difference being that the Latin writers (Scotus apart) are mostly very clear and careful in their language, and on the whole prefer to avoid technical language or concepts. Unlike Kant or Heidegger, of course, in my view.
Ockham makes many excellent points, but he loses me when he writes: “The verb sum, by contrast, is directly comparable to the “is” in “Socrates is wise”.
Thanks for the input, fellas.
Occam, I follow most of your points, but I agree with Bill that your claim about ‘sum’ is not very clear. Perhaps you could elaborate a bit.
Ah yes. In English, the verbs ‘exist’ and ‘is’ are etymologically distinct. The one comes from Latin, the other has Anglo Saxon roots. This is entirely parallel with the Latin, where we have the verb ‘exsistere’, from which our ‘exist’ is of course derives. This is etymologically distinct from ‘esse’ (sum, es, est and so forth). So that is one parallel. The other parallel is that their logic is similar. ‘Exist’ and ‘exsistere’ are grammatical predicates that qualify a noun phrase. Thus ‘God exists’, ‘Deus exsistit’. ‘Esse’ and ‘to be’, by contrast, are used to join a noun subject to a noun or adjective predicate. Thus ‘Deus omnipotens est’, ‘God is almighty’
This ‘is’ signifies the ‘copula’, the joining of predicate to subject. ‘Exist’, by contrast, is a predicate.
Thanks, ocham.
So “is” functions as a copula and “exists” functions as a predicate. Gotcha.
It does seem, though, that “is” in “There is a God” says the same thing as “There exists a God” or “God exists”. So, in English at least, “is” and “exists” have some overlap.
Of course, the existential sense. Thus
There is an almighty god (existential)
Some god is almighty (existential & copulative)
God is non-existent (existential, copulative & predicative)
Thus the verb ‘exists’, somewhat perversely, does not signify existence at all, at least not in the sense in which we are tempted to infer ‘something does not exist’ of ‘God is someone who does not exist’ from ‘God does not exist’
Ocham (the other one) argues that not all categorical propositions of the form ‘X is Y’ are existential. He says we can test for this by rewriting them as ‘X is something which is Y’. The ‘X is something’ part is existential. Thus ‘the chimera is a chimera’ is literally false (falsa de virtute vocis) because it means ‘the chimera is something which is a chimera’ (chimera est aliquid et illud est chimera).
Thus ‘the chimera is a non-entity’ is false, because it means the conjunct ‘the chimera is something which is a non-entity’, of which the first (the chimera is something) is false.
This is in contrast to Meinong’s theory, according to which ‘the round square is round’ is true. Boethius seems to have held a similar theory. He says, according to Ocham, that no proposition is more true than one in which the same thing is predicated of itself (nulla propositio est verior illa in qua idem de se praedicatur).
Another thing about Latin philosophy: the more you read, the more you find that the same things that philosophers are wrangling about in th 21st century, they were wrangling about in some century in the distant past. Directly before the passage from Ockham that I quoted, he proposes a theory that is virtually identical with Russell’s theory of descriptions.
The Latin helps you forget this.