ABSTRACT
Fair warning: the title of this chapter is misleading. There is no such a thing as medieval philosophy of language. At least there was no philosophical discipline recognized in medieval thought that could be justifiably identified by us as “philosophy of language.” This is not to say, however, that medieval thought did not contain systematic, philosophical reflections on language as the necessary medium of human thought and communication. On the contrary, as we shall see, the medieval philosophical literature is shot through and through with such reflections (indeed, ones that have hardly been matched in sophistication ever since), but they are not to be found in treatises classifiable under the heading of a unified philosophical discipline as we conceive of it; rather, they are to be found in works in their respective medieval disciplines.
