LOGIC AND LANGUAGE prison in which delinquent Oxford students were incarcerated Mnemonics such as these, ingenious though they are, were mocked by Renaissance writers as being, literally, barbaric; and they contributed to the disrepute of medieval logic in early modern times Aquinas on Thought and Language Thomas Aquinas made little contribution to formal logic, but he reXected upon the nature of language and the relationship of language to thought: he oVers various classiWcations of speech-acts, and of what we might call the corresponding thought-acts He begins from a text of Aristotle which makes a distinction between two kinds of intellectual activity There are, as Aristotle says in the De Anima, two kinds of activity of our intellect One consists in forming simple essences, such as what a man is or what an animal is: in this activity, considered in itself, neither truth nor falsehood is to be found, any more than in utterances that are non-complex The other consists in putting together and taking apart, by aYrming and denying: in this truth and falsehood are to be found, just as in the complex utterance that is its expression (DV 14 1) The distinction between these two types of thought is linked to the diVerence in language between the use of individual words and the construction of complete sentences This is brought out when Aquinas explains that any act of thinking can be regarded as the production of an inner word or inner sentence The ‘word’ of our intellect is that which is the terminus of our intellectual operation It is the thought itself, which is called an intellectual conception: which may be either a conception which can be expressed by a non-complex utterance, as when the intellect forms the essences of things, or a conception expressible by a complex utterance, as when the intellect composes and divides (DV 2c) As we have seen, the notion of intellectual ‘composition and division’ is not a straightforward one The paradigm example of such composition and division is the making of aYrmative and negative judgements But there are other types of complex thought Besides judging that p and judging that not-p I may wonder whether p, or simply entertain the idea that p as part of a story Consider any proposition, for example ‘Smoking causes deafness’ or ‘Saudi Arabia possesses nuclear weapons’ With respect to 136