Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Albert of Saxony

Albert accepts Ockham's conception of the nature of a sign. He believes that signification rests on a referential relation of the sign to the individual thing, and that the spoken sign depends for its signification on the conceptual sign. He follows Ockham again in his conception of universals and, for the most part, in his theory of supposition. In particular, he preserves Ockham's notion of simple supposition, the direct reference of a term to the concept on which it depends when it signifies an extra-mental thing. Finally, Albert follows Ockham in his theory of categories: contrary to Buridan, he refuses to treat quantity as a feature of reality in its own right, but rather reduces it to a disposition of substance and quality. On a few points, however, Albert distances himself from Ockham. For instance, he denies that in disputation an equivocal proposition must be the object of a distinction through which it is assigned multiple senses: in disputation, even equivocal propositions can only be granted, denied or doubted. In his Sophismata, Albert often follows William Heytesbury (for example, in the analysis of epistemic verbs or of infinity). He admits that a proposition has its own signification, which is not that of its terms: just like a syncategorematic word, a proposition signifies a 'mode of being'.