ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a systematic account of the most intriguing aspects of the pre-Ockhamist scholastic notions of form and intention, insofar as they can be the most helpful to us in logic, metaphysics, and the philosophy of mind and action. The notion of form first developed here is a purely logical one, in contrast to a narrower metaphysical notion presented later. The author argues that the quasi-ontology of the via antiqua semantics provides an exact means of conceptual modelling, or conceptualization, through simply specifying the classes of semantic values needed for the interpretation or conceptualization of our language. As a result, we should not worry about the ‘weird entities’ of our ontologies. The last section briefly reflects on how the conceptual framework of logic and metaphysics outlined here can be helpful in providing a natural logic for a semantics-driven approach to natural language processing in contemporary artificial intelligence research.
