This walk-through is written for Studium Institute. It is not a hidden digest of other people’s books. Where a claim is Kearns’s, it is marked and quoted. Where a supporting author is used as a guide to structure, the prose is recast in this course’s voice and the source is named. Extended quotations are set in blockquotes and attributed by author, work, and place.
Where this course stands
A reader is owed the framework as well as the citations. This walk-through is written from within the Aristotelian and Thomistic tradition, and its author says so plainly in the book that grounds it: “The most elaborate and detailed philosophical perspective on these principles is that of St. Thomas Aquinas and the Thomism, a tradition of which I count myself a member.” That is why the account of signification here is Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s rather than a modern theory of meaning, and why logic is treated as an art of ordering discourse rather than as a calculus.
The lesson pages do not open by saying this, and that is deliberate. The method of this course is to begin from what a reader has already undergone and to let authorities name it afterward. But the framework is not concealed, and naming it here lets you weigh the pages against it.
Primary doctrinal spine
Timothy Kearns, The Principles of Discourse: Language, Logic, and Persuasion (chapters and notes). This course uses the Preface, the Introduction, and Chapter 1 (“The Purposes of Language”). Chapter 2 (“How Language Relates to the World: Words, Concepts, and Things”) is unfinished. Rather than guess at its contents, the foundation pages on words, concepts, and things answer that question from the older sources listed below, and say so on the page. What those sources leave open — the formation of the concept as an inner word — is marked as open and nothing depends on it. Finished chapters on persuasion, beyond the Introduction, are not in the file used here and are not invented.
Supporting
Aristotle, On Interpretation 1, 16a3–18 — the order of signification (writing, speech, concept, thing), the asymmetry between what differs among peoples and what does not, and the point that truth and falsity require composition and division. Also the definition of the noun as significant by convention (2), and that not every sentence is a statement (4). Quoted in the translation printed with Aquinas’s commentary, and in the Edghill translation where Andres prints it.
Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s On Interpretation, Book I, Lessons 1–3 — that names signify conceptions of the intellect immediately and things by means of them; that concepts have their origin from things; that speech signifies by human institution and not naturally; and the argument from “man” signifying human nature in abstraction from singulars.
Porphyry, Isagoge, opening — the three questions about universals, and his refusal to settle them in an introduction. Quoted as printed in Andres.
Anthony Andres, Introduction to Aristotelian Logic (The Arts of Liberty Project) — the definition of a sign; the plain statement that logic is about words insofar as they signify things through our thoughts; universal and singular; univocal, equivocal, and denominative naming; and the comparison of the mind to the hand, which is his. The Aristotle passages in the Edghill translation are quoted as he prints them.
Jacques Maritain, Formal Logic, trans. Imelda Choquette (Sheed & Ward, 1937) — the distinction between the mental concept, which is that in which we attain the thing, and the objective concept, which is that which we know; the word as an instrumental sign known first; comprehension and extension; the argument that a universal is not a collection of individuals; and the concrete/abstract pair behind man and humanity. Maritain notes that the account of the mind’s forming a mental word is the Thomistic school’s position, held against Suarez on one side and Scotus on the other; this course follows him and does not adjudicate that dispute.
Walshe, Commentary on the Categories of Aristotle — the split between well-formed speech and true speech, and the warning that a category is not a grammatical form. Not used as a full course in the ten categories.
R. E. Houser, Logic as a Liberal Art: An Introduction to Rhetoric and Reasoning (Catholic University of America Press, 2020) — a guide to the three acts of the mind, to logic as an art rather than a science of one subject, and to demonstrative, dialectical, and sophistical reasoning. Lesson 7, “Language, Thought, and Reality,” supplies the division of signs into natural and conventional, instrumental and formal, used on the foundation pages. Houser also orders his own book grammar, rhetoric, logic, and argues for that order; the three-arts page states his argument and says why this course still recommends logic second. The wording on these pages is this course’s except where quoted.
Pierre Conway, Aristotelian Formal and Material Logic, ed. Mary Michael Spangler (University Press of America, 1995) — the stages of the reasoning process, and the definition of a fallacy as reasoning that appears to conclude but does not.
Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. W. Rhys Roberts — the definition (I.2), the pairing with dialectic (I.1), the three artistic proofs, and the line that a sophist is made by moral purpose, not by the faculty. The practice application uses the same translation.
Practice applications
Ars Grammatica — https://grammatica.studiuminstitute.org
Ars Syllogistica — https://syllogistica.studiuminstitute.org
Ars Rhetorica — https://rhetorica.studiuminstitute.org
Later neighbors, named on the quadrivium map, not assigned as this course: Arithmetica, Geometria, Musica.
Home: studiuminstitute.org. Suggested path for this course: https://studiuminstitute.org/trivium/.
Limits of this course
The quadrivium page is an invitation and a map, not the sister course. No Kearns doctrine of quantity is claimed beyond the Preface’s line that the trivium founds the other disciplines. No system of modi significandi is imported. Chapter 2 of Principles of Discourse remains unfinished, and nothing in the foundation pages on signification is attributed to it; the doctrine there is Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s, with Walshe, Andres, Houser, and Maritain as guides. The formation of the concept as an inner word is left open on purpose, and the pages say why: it is a question about the mind rather than about logic, and Porphyry, Andres, and Maritain all decline it at the same point.