LOGIC AND LANGUAGE it can be used to name itself Even ‘verb’ is a name The problems he spells out in this dialogue were discussed at great length by the medieval scholastics who developed the theory of supposition.3 Augustine himself, however, made no contribution to the discipline of formal logic He never made a serious study of Aristotle, whom he describes rather condescendingly in The City of God as ‘a man of outstanding intellect, no match for Plato in style, but well above the common herd’ He was, for a while, very interested in the Stoics, but it was the natural and ethical, not the logical, branch of their philosophy that principally engaged him In his youth, indeed, Augustine had read Aristotle’s Categories, at the bidding of his rhetoric teacher in Carthage In the Confessions he boasts that he mastered the text very quickly, but complains that it did him no good The book, he says, was very clear on the topic of substance and the items that belong to them, but it is useless from a theological perspective What help was this to me when the book got in my way? Thinking that everything whatever was included in the ten categories, I tried to conceive you also, my God, wonderfully simple and immutable as you are, as if you too were a subject of which magnitude and beauty are attributes I imagined them as inhering in you as a subject like a physical body, whereas you yourself are your own magnitude and your own beauty (Conf IV 16 28–9) Among the works traditionally attributed to Augustine, at least from the time of Alcuin, is a Latin paraphrase of the Categories.4 The work, however, is not mentioned by Augustine in his Retractationes, an exhaustive catalogue of his Nachlass, and it is nowadays the universal opinion of scholars that the work is not authentic However, the attribution to Augustine secured the attention of early medieval scholars to this part of Aristotle’s logic Another work, De Dialectica, long thought spurious, has recently been restored to the canon.5 It shows signs of Stoic inXuence but is concerned more with grammar than with logic or philosophy of language See below, p 130 It was edited by L Minio-Paluello as the Wrst volume of the Aristoteles Latinus (Bruges: Descle´e, De Brouwer, 1953– ) Edited by Darrell Jackson (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1985) 118