Aristotle, Boethius and the meaning of words

Abstract

One of the classic problems of the philosophy of language is that of meaning. This problem arises from the moment it is accepted that words do not directly designate objects, but rather mean something, and it is rather that meaning that refers to the things themselves. The nature of meaning, an intermediate instance between words and things, is the reason for the problem. In the present work we refer to the first philosophical attempts to clarify the question of meaning, specifically in the line that leads from Aristotle to Boethius, that is, from the theory that explains meaning based on certain mental facts or "affections of the soul", as Aristotle calls them, to the idea that our intellects apprehend some kind of incorporeal form in objects, these metaphysical apprehensions constituting the "universal" meanings of the nouns that name genera and species.