1 Form, Intention and Information Gyula Klima (The “Aquinas Lecture” delivered at Ave Maria University, February 1, 2019) 1. Form as Meaning In this talk, I will provide a systematic account of what I take to be the most intriguing aspects of the pre-Ockhamist scholastic notions of form and intention, insofar as I believe they can be the most helpful to us in logic, metaphysics, and the philosophy of mind and action. My primary guides in this enterprise will be Thomas Aquinas and Hervaeus Natalis, the latter of whom is credited with introducing the term ‘intentionality’ into our philosophical parlance. But to understand ‘intentionality’, we need to understand ‘intention’, and to understand ‘intention’, we need to understand ‘form’, given that an intention, as I will argue, is just some form in its essential relation to some cognitive and appetitive powers. However, to understand the notion of ‘form’ in its broadest sense, we need to understand it first in its use in pre-Ockhamist scholastic logic. Not because it is the primary notion of form, absolutely speaking (secundum se or simpliciter), but because it is the broadest and simplest to grasp; so, it is primary to us (quoad nos). In this usage, although no scholastic philosopher described it as such, a form is nothing but a “truth-maker” of the common term signifying it in an individual in the following sense: (ITP) If the variable x stands for an individual, and the letter F stands in for a common term, then the simple predication ‘x is F’ is true, just in case the form signified by F in x, which we can refer to as the F-ness of x, is actually present in x, or in other words, F-ness actually inheres in x. So, a form in this sense is just something signified by a common term in an individual, on account of which the term denominates this individual, provided this denominating form is actual in that individual. But this characterization of a form signified in an individual (a forma significata), denominating that individual (a forma denominans) should make it clear at once why I described this logical notion of form as the broadest, and the simplest to understand. This logical notion is the broadest, because it obviously covers all sorts of items, whatever they are in their own nature, which we would normally not take to be forms in the more restricted metaphysical sense to be discussed soon. And it is the simplest, precisely because this logical notion of form does not presuppose any knowledge in us about the nature of the things signified by our common terms: these signified or denominating forms can be just any sort of items if they are related to our terms as their truth-makers. In fact, the semantic principle stated above (which is often referred to in the literature as the inherence theory of predication) is to be read as a semantic triviality, stipulating the semantic relations between our common terms and whatever they signify in individual things on account of which they are true of them, provided these significata are actual in these individuals. In fact, that the significata of our common terms in individuals denominating these individuals, that is, these denominating forms, need not necessarily be regarded metaphysically as forms in all cases was a commonplace for thinkers who otherwise were committed to a hylomorphist metaphysics. As St. Thomas wrote: “We should say that that by which something is denominated does not always have to be a form by the nature of the thing in question, but it is enough if it is signified by way of a form,