Universa Philosophia

Soto, in part 1 of the Summulae, chapter 5, sole lecture, note 1, teaches from Boethius that any part of a categorical proposition is a term; Villalpando, book 1 of the Summulae, chapter 1, agrees with him. Others take term to mean only the predicate and subject, prompted by Aristotle, who supports this view. The question, however, concerns not so much the thing as the word. For it is clear that the union, as well as the predicate and subject, are parts of an enunciation. Which of them should be called a term, and which should not, matters little. Soto follows the grammatical meaning; the others follow the Aristotelian and philosophical one. For a union is generally called a joining of extremes, and the extremes are the terms of the thing whose extremes they are. Indeed, precisely because it is a union, it is the middle by which the extremes are linked; for a middle implies a relation to extremes. I use term in this sense, with the Fathers of Coimbra, book 1 of the Prior Analytics, chapter 1, question 7, article 3, because term comes from terminating, as indivisibles are said to terminate the quantity whose extremes they are. This is confirmed by the fact that the whole proposition is not a term among Dialecticians, yet in Soto’s sense it would be a term, because as a whole it is a meaningful expression and is called an expression by Grammarians. Therefore, among Dialecticians term does not mean “expression.”