CATs and CSIs: Concrete Accidental Terms and Concrete Second Intentions in Brito’s Logical Questions

After the pioneering studies of Pinborg and Roos (back in the 1970s), second intentions have not been the subject of much scholarly work. In this contribution I would like to shed some lights on the dis- tinction between abstract and concrete second intentions (ASI and CSI), and on the treatment the latter receive in Brito’s Questions on Porphyry and on Aristotle’s Topics, which parallels his positions on CATs developed in other sets of questions. This article provides first an overview of how names and verbs were defined in commentaries on De interpretatione and on Peter of Spain’s Tractatus, and second an account of how second intentions work in Brito’s endeavor to give logic an ontological foundation based on the notion of modus essendi, which parallels the ontological foundation of modistic grammar and is typical of modistic continental circles at the end of thirteenth century.