Twelfth century (The): translation
The twelfth centuryJohn MarenbonINTRODUCTIONThe twelfth century began and ended with events which mark it off, atleast symbolically, as a discrete period in the history of Westernphilosophy. It was in about 1100 that Abelard—the most wide-rangingand profound philosopher of the period—arrived in Paris to study,and very soon to teach, logic. The competing, quarrelling, disorganizedschools of Paris, whose growth Abelard did so much to stimulate, wouldbe the setting for much of what was liveliest and most sophisticated intwelfth-century philosophy. It was in the year 1200 that Philip Augustusissued the privilege to the schools of Paris which, symbolically at least,marks the beginning of Paris University. The schools would henceforthbecome a more homogeneous and tightly-regulated organization,imposing a rigid framework on thirteenth- and fourteenth-centuryscholastic thought. Works newly translated from the Greek and Arabicgradually entered the curriculum and the work of almost all the twelfthcenturyphilosophers was rapidly forgotten.Modern historians of philosophy have set out to repair this neglect.But (at least until very recently) they have characterized the period intwo main ways, each of which leaves in question whether twelfthcenturyphilosophy itself contains much worth studying. The first wayhas been to see the time as one of beginnings. Between 1100 and 1200,it is said, the ground was prepared for the great flourishing ofscholasticism in the mid- and late thirteenth century. Such a descriptionmight well suggest that the twelfth century, fascinating as it may be forthe intellectual historian who wishes to see how, and against whatbackground, ideas develop, produced little of independent philosophicalinterest.The second way of characterizing the twelfth century has been interms of its ‘humanism’ (and, closely linked to this, as a time of‘renaissance’). The period is presented as one of revived activity in allbranches of learning, closely connected with a respect for the classicalpast and a wish to rediscover its literature in all its various branches,poetic, scientific, legal and philosophical.The achievements of thethirteenth century are presented as being narrower: its sophisticationin logic, philosophy and theology must be balanced against the aridityof the scholastics’ style, their rejection of the variety and complexity inform found in twelfth-century writing, their apparent contempt forpoetry and fine latinity. Such a contrast can easily be turned againstthe thinkers of the twelfth century by the modern reader of philosophy.They are suspected of being dilettantes; their writings, full of interestto the literary historian, are thought to lack the precision and singlemindednessnecessary for good philosophy.
1There is some truth in the rationale behind each approach. Twelfthcenturyscholars did, indeed, elaborate the logical and theologicaltechniques which served the philosophers of the thirteenth- andfourteenth-century universities. Many were attentive to the literary formof their writings and enthusiasts of ancient literature as well as ancientphilosophy. And even the sharpest-minded of them, such as Abelard,can be clumsy or imprecise in their technical vocabulary and sometimesinattentive to the complexity of the issues they are treating; whilst somewell-known thinkers of the time, especially those most influenced byPlatonism, are more inclined to system building than to detailedargument and analysis. Yet there is a substantial body of twelfth-centurythought sufficiently rigorous to require careful philosophical analysisand certainly interesting and unusual enough to deserve attention inits own right, rather than just as the forerunner of something else.Much of it is linked to the most striking feature of intellectual life inthe period: the importance of the ‘trivium’: the three language-baseddisciplines of grammar, rhetoric and, most prominently, logic. (Indeed,the humanistic interest in ancient literature and in rhetoric was part ofa general enthusiasm for the verbal arts, among which logic wasdominant.)This chapter must be selective. More than half of it is devoted to theoutstanding philosophers of the time: Peter Abelard and his nearcontemporary,Gilbert of Poitiers. The section following this one looksmore briefly at four important masters working at the turn of thecentury. A later section sketches the Platonic current in twelfth-centurythought, looking especially at the work of William of Conches andThierry of Chartres. The concluding sections provide a quickintroduction to the logical schools and theological methods of the periodfrom 1150 to 1200, a time still far less well investigated than theprevious half century.
FOUR MASTERS AT THE BEGINNING OF THE CENTURYFour masters, already established by 1100 or shortly afterwards, indicatethe most important directions philosophy would take in the centurywhich followed. Three of them, Garlandus of Besançon, Roscelin ofCompiègne and William of Champeaux, were logicians, althoughRoscelin also put forward controversial views on the Trinity and Williamwould write on moral and theological topics, such as natural law, sinand free will. Bernard of Chartres, however, was a grammarian, interestedboth in grammatical theory and in careful reading of ancient paganphilosophical texts, in particular Plato’s
Timaeus.The tradition of medieval logic was well established by the late eleventhcentury. Like other branches of study in the Middle Ages, it was basedon ancient texts. Six were in common use by 1100: Aristotle’s
Categoriesand
On Interpretation, Porphyry’s
Isagoge (all in Boethius’ translations,and approached using Boethius’ commentaries) and Boethius’ own
OnDivision, treatises on categorical and hypothetical syllogisms and
OnTopical ‘differentiae’. Taken together, these works provided anintroduction to constructing and analysing arguments. The
Isagoge andthe
Categories could be read as guides to the various sorts of term whichcan appear as subject or predicate in a statement.
On Interpretationexplained how terms are combined to make statements, and howstatements are related to each other as, for instance, contraries (‘All menare bald’—‘No man is bald’) or contradictories (‘All men are bald’—‘Some man is not bald’). Students could then learn from Boethius’ owntextbooks how to construct syllogistic arguments, either using atomicstatements as premisses so as to form categorical syllogisms or molecularstatements as premisses to form hypothetical syllogisms, and they couldstudy arguments based on ‘topics’, commonly accepted maxims ofreasoning.
2 These texts, especially the two by Aristotle, also contain farmore than such an introduction. The
Categories can be read as the concisestatement of an ontology, whilst the
On Interpretation raises problemsabout the nature of truth and meaning, about perception and knowledge,and about modality and free will. Sporadic evidence—occasional glosses,and passages in Peter Damian and Anselm of Canterbury—suggests thateleventh-century scholars were already aware of some wider implicationsof the logical texts. But the main emphasis at this stage seems to havebeen on mastering the basic skills of logic through careful study of thetexts. If more digressive discussion was wanted, the earliest commentatorswere happy to turn to Boethius and copy passages of his commentariesverbatim.
3Garlandus of Besançon is known for his
Dialectica, a comprehensivetextbook on logic which was probably written at the turn of the twelfthcentury. Some scholars have described Garlandus as an early nominalist:an exponent of the view that nothing exists which is not a particular.But it is more accurate to see him as following a particular interpretativemethod in his approach to the
Isagoge and the
Categories. In commonwith a number of other scholars of the time (including the youngAbelard), Garlandus read these texts
in voce rather than
in re: as talkingnot about things but about words.
4 For instance, when Porphyry writesabout genera or about accidents, Garlandus takes his remarks asconcerning words such as ‘animal’ and ‘whiteness’. Roscelin’s viewscan be surmised only from allusions (usually hostile) by other writers.The most famous of these is Anselm of Canterbury’s comment that,according to Roscelin, universals are merely the puffs of air made whenwe speak. This might be just a jibe which draws out the consequencesof
in voce exegesis. But some scholars—especially Jean Jolivet—havegiven a more ambitious reconstruction of Roscelin’s thinking, usingother evidence too. Roscelin, they say, focused on the reference a wordhas to an individual, whole object in the world. In the case of thewords ‘genus’ and ‘species’, he would have argued that there is noindividual object in the world to which they refer, so their reference isjust to other words (such as ‘animal’, ‘man’)—and, considered as things,words are just puffs of air. Whether Roscelin ever propounded thisview coherently, and if so when (he was still alive in the early 1120s),is uncertain.
5The earliest
definite signs of a serious interest in the semantic andmetaphysical problems about universals comes from those logicianswho adopted a realist view. William of Champeaux, who taught at theschool of Notre Dame in Paris, was one of their leaders. For modernphilosophers, the problem of universals concerns properties andrelations. But William and his contemporaries approached the questionmainly in the context of a remark in Porphyry’s
Isagoge about speciesand genera, that is to say, universal substances. They had then toconsider primarily the semantics not of sentences such as ‘Socrates iswhite’, but of those such as ‘Socrates is a man’. A simple view, derivedfrom Boethius, held that there is a universal essence shared by all men,who are then individuated by their accidental attributes (being six foottall, sitting just here at six o’clock). William was forced to abandonthis theory (‘material/essential essence realism’) by the attacks of hisformer pupil, Abelard, and then espoused an ‘indifference theory’,according to which the many particulars of the same species are at thesame time one in that they are ‘not different’ from each other in respectof their nature. William’s interests as a logician were not, however,confined to speculations about universals. He was probably the authorof a general
Introduction to logical method, and it is clear fromAbelard’s
Dialectica that he discussed the problems raised by thedifferent meanings of the verb ‘to be’—as the copula and as implyingpresent existence.William was a theologian as well as a logician. He studied underAnselm of Laon, a leading scriptural exegete. Like Anselm’s, William’stheological teaching survives in the form of ‘Sentences’
(sententiae),ranging in length from a couple of lines to several hundred words,which may originally have been stimulated by dispute over theinterpretation of a passage from the Bible, but take the form of freestandingdiscussions of a problem. William is more speculative andmore analytical than Anselm, ranging over topics such as intentionsand acts, the ontological status of evil, and implicit faith. He approachesthe question of divine prescience ([7.28] 195–6) and human free willin the manner of a logician, trying (though not very successfully) toshow that the statement, ‘It is possible for things to happen other thanas they will happen’ does not imply ‘It is possible for God [who foreseesall things] to be mistaken.’Bernard, master at the cathedral school of Chartres in the first twodecades of the century, represents a different tradition of earlymedieval teaching. He concentrated, not on logic, but on grammar.Part of his work as a grammarian was connected with the theory ofgrammar, as expounded by Priscian in his elaborate
Institutionesgrammaticae. Eleventh-century scholars had already composed arunning commentary (the
Glosule) to the
Institutiones, which dealtwith philosophical questions about semantics far more thoroughlythan Priscian himself had done. Unfortunately, Bernard’s work inthis area is known only through a few remarks made, long after hisdeath, by John of Salisbury.
6 John also records how Bernardcommented on the Latin classics, drawing out their moral teachingand he commemorates him as the leading Platonist of his time.Bernard’s Platonism seems to have owed a good deal to Boethius’
Theological Treatises, especially in its introduction of secondaryforms, enmattered images of the immaterial primary forms. But therewas one work by Plato himself that was available to him and othertwelfth-century scholars: the
Timaeus in Calcidius’ partial Latintranslation. Recently, a strong argument has been made forattributing to Bernard a commentary on the
Timaeus. Althoughthese
Glosae in Platonem are for the most part straightforwardlyliteral and heavily reliant on the commentary Calcidius had written,they contain Bernard’s characteristic views about secondary formsand they exercised an influence on later twelfth-century exegesis ofthe work.
7PETER ABELARDPeter Abelard is probably better known than any medieval philosopher,not as a thinker but as the husband of Heloise and participant in aremarkable exchange of love-letters which have held their appeal fromthe time of Petrarch to the present. It was in fact the castration plottedby Heloise’s relatives and its consequences which gave Abelard’s careerits distinctive shape, splitting it roughly into two halves. From about1102 until his castration in 1117, Abelard was a brilliant teacher oflogic in Paris and in Melun and Corbeil, small towns both connectedwith the royal court. He had studied under both Roscelin and Williamof Champeaux—and quarrelled with both. Although he did teachChristian doctrine, it was a relatively unimportant part of his work.The
Dialectica, a textbook of logic, independent in form but closelylinked to exegesis of the six standard ancient texts, probably datesfrom the end of this period. The
Logica (‘Ingredientibui’)—logicalcommentaries, of which those on the
Isagoge, Categories, Deinterpretatione survive in full—was probably written up a little later,but it too reflects his teaching at this time.
8After the castration, Abelard became a monk of St Denis. Althoughhe continued to teach logic, theological questions came more and moreto occupy him. The first fruit of this new interest was the
Theologiasummi boni, a treatise on the Trinity, rich in philosophical discussion,which was promptly condemned at the Council of Soissons in 1121.Undeterred, Abelard greatly extended the work, developing his logicalanalysis of Trinitarian relations and adding a long eulogistic accountof the ancient philosophers and their virtues, to form the
TheologiaChristiana. One logical work dates from the same time (the
Glossulaeon Porphyry, often called the
Logica Nostrorum petitioni sociorum),but Abelard’s main energies were given to theology and, increasingly,to ethical questions within theology. His
Collationes (Dialogue betweena Christian, a Philosopher and Jew), probably written
c. 1130, discussthe virtues, evil and the highest good. By this time, Abelard—who hadleft St Denis and, for a time, taught students at his own monastic/eremitic foundation, the Paraclete—was abbot of St Gildas, a monasteryon a remote peninsula in Brittany. His attempts to reform the Bretonmonks proved disastrous and, from about 1133 to (probably) 1140,Abelard was teaching again in Paris. Although he gave some lectureson logic, he devoted most of his energy to developing his ethicallybasedtheological system. The final version of his
Theologia, the
Theologia scholarium, a commentary on St Paul’s letter to the Romans,
Sententie recording his theology lectures, and (from
c. 1138 to 1139)
Scito teipsum (or, as he also called it, his
Ethics) are the most importantworks from this highly productive period. At the same time, Abelardwrote extensively at the request of Heloise, who had taken over theParaclete as abbess of a group of nuns, providing her with sermons,letters, scriptural exegesis, answers to theological queries and poetry.Even as a young logician in Paris, Abelard had been a controversialfigure, competing with William of Champeaux for students andreputation and patronized by William’s enemies in the Church and atcourt. From the time of the Council of Soissons onwards he became atarget for the hostility of the reforming party in the Church and, by thelate 1130s if not earlier, for that of its leader, Bernard of Clairvaux.His campaign culminated in the Council of Sens of 1140, where Abelardwas accused of nineteen heresies listed by Bernard. Abelard denied allcharges of heresy, but the charges were upheld by the Pope. Abelard,now sick, spent the last two years of his life at the great abbey of Clunyand one of its dependencies. There the abbot, Peter the Venerable,ensured that the sentence of excommunication was lifted and engineereda reconciliation with Bernard.Perhaps because of the controversies which accompanied and endedhis career, Abelard has gone down in the history of philosophy as abrilliant, daring but unconstructive thinker: powerful as a logician but,otherwise, to be blamed or praised for merely applying the tools oflogic to theology. This judgement is unjust, but it does reflect animportant difference between Abelard, the most wide-ranging andinventive Western philosopher of the twelfth century, and the greatthinkers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Unlike Aquinas,Duns Scotus and Ockham, Abelard did not combine his developmentsin different areas of philosophy into a single, coherent and distinctivepattern. Rather, his work falls into two separate parts, correspondingroughly to the division in his career. In his logical works he not onlymakes startling discoveries of a technical nature; he also reconsidersthe metaphysical questions raised by Porphyry and Aristotle in thelight of his nominalism, trying to arrive at an account of the basicstructure of things and tackling the various aspects, semantic andmetaphysical, of the problem of universals with great sophistication.In his theological writing he concentrates on developing a philosophicalethics which, where necessary, shapes the understanding of Christiandoctrine to suit its requirements.The following pages can give only an impression of some of themost philosophically interesting aspects of a thinker whose originalityand breadth of vision would entitle him to much more space in a
Historyof Philosophy had it not been his misfortune to live in the MiddleAges. First, his ideas on two areas connected with the more formalside of logic will be sketched: his treatment of conditionals, and hisanalysis of modal statements. (Many other of his more formaldevelopments are also of great interest: for instance, his treatment of‘impersonal statements’, such as ‘It is good that you are here’, and hisdiscussion of die copula.)
9 Second, after a glance at his basicmetaphysics, Abelard’s approach to the problem of universals will beexamined. Third, his account of a central area in ethics, the ethical act,will be discussed and set in context.Abelard developed his ideas about conditionals (‘if…then…’statements) mainly in considering the theory of ‘topical arguments’put forward by Boethius in
On Topical ‘differentiae’.
10 He did not,however, believe that what Boethius said there about inferences couldbe applied directly to conditionals, partly because many of Boethius’maxims were concerned to provide probable, rhetorically convincingarguments rather than irrefragable ones, partly because—unusually fora medieval thinker—Abelard clearly distinguished between the validityof an argument and the truth of a conditional. For the truth of aconditional, his requirement was more stringent even than the modernnotion of strict implication (it is impossible for the antecedent to betrue and the consequent false): he also insisted on a strict criterion ofrelevance. For Abelard, ‘if
p then
q’ is true if and only if
p ‘of itselfrequires’
q, by which Abelard means that the sense of
q must becontained in that of
p (Abelard [7.19] 284:l–4). One of Abelard’sreasons for imposing this criterion was that, from conditionals whichfail this criterion (for instance, ‘If it’s a man, it’s not a stone’, based onthe topic ‘from opposites’), Abelard was able to infer a conclusion ofthe form ‘if
p, then not-
p’, and he looked on this as a
reductio (althoughmost modern logicians would certainly not).
11 Unfortunately forAbelard, his great rival and critic in the 1130s, Alberic, was able toshow that, even observing Abelard’s criterion, arguments could beconstructed which led to ‘if
p, then not-
p’. Abelard appears to havehad no answer to this problem, which would exercise the nextgeneration of logicians (see below, pp. 175–6).Abelard also thought deeply about the semantics of conditionals.
12On what does the truth of ‘if
p, then
q’ depend? He rules out twoapparently promising answers: that the truth of a conditional is basedon a relation between thoughts, or that it is based on the things towhich the conditional refers. Thoughts cannot provide the basis,Abelard considers, since one can think of a true statement withoutthinking of all the numberless statements it entails. Nor can thingsprovide the basis, because (for instance) the conditional ‘If it is a rose,it is a flower’ would remain true even if there were no roses or flowersof any kind. Abelard concludes that the truth of conditionals is basedon
dicta: on ‘what is said’ by statements. ‘It is a rose’ says of somethingthat it is a rose. ‘It is a flower’ says of something that it is a flower. ‘Ifit’s a rose, it’s a flower’ is true because
that something is a rose notonly cannot be true unless it is also true
that it is a flower, but also itrequires
that it is a flower. What, then, are
dicta? Often, Abelard treatsthem rather as some modern philosophers treat propositions. They arenon-linguistic bearers of truth and falsity. At other times Abelard seemsto regard them more as states of affairs, truth-makers rather than truthbearers.At all times, however, he insists that
dicta are not things. Thisposition, too, is far from clear, since it suggests that statements about
dicta must be analysed into statements using some other terms, but itis hard to see what these terms could be.Abelard discussed modal logic in the
Dialectica and, in greater detail,in his
Logica commentary on the
On Interpretation.
13 He was the firstmedieval logician clearly to distinguish between the
de dicto (or
‘desensu’) and
de re readings of modal statements such as ‘It is possiblethat the sitting man stands’.
De dicto this is read as a false statement:‘Possibly the man is sitting and standing.’
De re it is read as a statementwhich (provided the man actually
is sitting) is true: ‘The man is sittingand possibly he is standing.’ But the exact interpretation of the
de rereading gave Abelard difficulties.To a considerable extent, he shared an ancient view of modalitywhich did not allow for synchronous alternative possible states ofaffairs. According to this view,1 The man is sitting at t and possibly he is standing at t’(where t’ is any time other than t) is, under the right circumstances,true, but2 The man is sitting at t and possibly he is standing at tmust be false. The
de re modal statement ‘The man is sitting and possiblyhe is standing’ must therefore be interpreted as (1). Yet Abelard alsobelieves that anything, according to its nature (the sort of thing it is),always has various potencies: a man, for instance, can sit or stand atany time. This view, it might seem, should have led him to acknowledgesynchronous possible states of affairs. Instead, Abelard prefers to thinkabout possibility just in terms of what is possible
for some thing,according to its nature, without thinking about the possibility orimpossibility of states of affairs involving the thing. For instance, beingable to walk is part of human nature. Therefore, Abelard believes, it ispossible for a man who has had his legs amputated to walk; but hedoes not think that this commits him to holding that the man mightactually walk at some time in the future, nor does he explicitly recognizeany possible state of affairs in which the man has not lost his legs,synchronous with the actual state of affairs in which the man is withoutthem ([7.20] 229:34–6, 273:39–274:18). Such an approach may berather unsatisfactory, but it had its advantages when Abelard came tothe theological problem of predestination. Is it possible for God tosave a man who is predestined to damnation? Abelard thought not.God would predestine to damnation only those fitting to be damned,and it is not possible for God not to damn someone fit for damnation.Yet, Abelard insisted, it is possible for the man to be saved, since this isa possibility open to any man ([7.18] 521:669–79).Abelard approached the question of what things there are with thepresumption of nominalism already firmly in mind. Everything, hebelieved, is a particular. He thought he had strong arguments forrejecting any of the positions according to which his contemporariesheld that there are some things which are not particulars but universals.
14As a consequence, Abelard had to make a radical adaptation of whatmight be called the ‘traditional’ metaphysics of his time, taken overfrom Aristotle’s
Categories and Porphyry’s
Isagoge. Here is a sketchof this traditional metaphysics. It is not intended to give an accurateaccount of Aristotle’s or Porphyry’s intentions, but rather an impressionof how their textbooks tended to be read by early twelfth-centuryscholars. According to the traditional ontology, things are of four basicsorts (see Figure 1). There are particular substances: the particularmembers of natural kinds (such as this man, or Socrates, to take thestandard twelfth-century example of a particular substance). Naturalkinds like water which do not obviously divide into particular memberstend to be ignored. There are universal substances, the natural kindsthemselves such as Man and Animal. Then there are what were called‘accidents’: non-essential properties, and relations, of substances. Likesubstances, accidents were considered to be universal or particular; so,for instance, Socrates would be white by his own particular whiteness.In practice, however, particular accidents were rarely mentioned. These,then, are the four basic sorts of things: particular substances, universalsubstances, particular accidents and universal accidents. Man-madeobjects (houses, ships and so on) were considered to be composites ofnatural substances.This picture derives mainly from the
Categories. The
Isagoge addedto it Porphyry’s famous ‘tree’ (see Figure 2). Universal substances arearranged into a hierarchy of genera and species. ‘Genus’ and ‘species’
Figure 1SUBSTANCE ACCIDENTUNIVERSAL Animal, Man colour, whitenessPARTICULAR Socrates, this man this whitenessare relative terms: Man is a species of Animal, and so Animal is thegenus of Man, but Animal is itself a species of Living Thing. Eachspecies is distinguished from its genus by a specifying characteristic or,as it was called,
differentia: having-sense-perception is, for instance,what differentiates Animal from Living Thing.As a nominalist, Abelard had to make some drastic changes to thistraditional scheme.
15 Holding that every thing is a particular, he simplycancels out the first line in Figure 1. For him, things are of just twosorts: particular substances and particular accidents (and
differentiae).And Abelard stresses that although particular accidents cannot existexcept in dependence on a particular substance, they are each separatethings, which might have been attached to different substances fromthose to which in fact they are attached.
16 Since there are no universalsubstances, there cannot be a hierarchy of genera and species. ButAbelard translates Porphyry’s tree into the structure of particular things.He regards
differentiae as particular, non-substance things, exactly likeaccidents (he had a convenient word which meant either an accidentor a
differentia: a ‘form’), except that each substance of a given kindmust have attaching to it certain given sorts of
differentiae, as indicatedby Porphyry’s tree: for instance, a man cannot be without rationality,mortality, having-sense-perceptions and so on.This scheme is not without problems. It might seem to imply that aparticular substance of a given kind is not really one thing at all, butrather a bundle of
differentiae. Some of Abelard’s discussions do appearto favour a bundle theory, in which these bundles would be attachedto body, which would be regarded as fundamental rather than as justone type of substance. But elsewhere Abelard explicitly recognizes thatparticular substances exist in a way which, in theory, is independentfrom the
differentiae which must attach to them (see esp. [7.19] 420:30–421:8, and cf. [7.68] 128–30). Another difficulty concerns accidents.Aristotle had given nine classes of accidents, which included, for
Figure 2instance, relations, time and posture. Abelard initially accepted thateven accidents in these categories are particular things. In the mid-1120s—after he had done his most important work as a logician—hecame to think it implausible that a relation such as fatherhood is athing of any sort. He therefore revised his treatment of accidents andaccepted the existence of particular accidental forms only in somecategories; but he was left (at least to judge by surviving texts) withoutan account of accidents in the remaining categories.
17Abelard’s basic metaphysics set the problem which his treatment ofuniversals had to answer.
18 As a nominalist, his explicit answer to thequestion which his contemporaries usually posed—‘Are there universalthings or just universal words?’—was unequivocal: only words couldbe universals. How then, he had to explain, could universal words beused meaningfully? His theory of the semantics of universals is designedto answer this question, and does so with remarkable success. But therestill remained a metaphysical question for Abelard to tackle: if speciesand genera are not things, what is the real basis for the system of naturalkinds, which Abelard recognized as a feature of reality, not a mind orlanguage-imposed construct? Abelard’s answer to this question, lesssatisfactory than his treatment of the semantic one, ends by taking anunexpected turn.To begin, however, with the semantic problem. It is not, as a modernphilosopher might expect, a problem about deciding the
reference ofpredicates. For Abelard (along with most of his contemporaries), in astatement ‘S is P’, the reference of ‘S’ and ‘P’ is the same. Latin grammarmakes this position plausible: there are no articles, and an adjective ‘_’always includes the meaning of _-man/woman/thing, according to itsgender. So in
‘Socrates est homo’, ‘Socrates’ and
‘homo’ (‘a/the man’)are thought to refer to the same thing: Socrates; and similarly in
‘Socratesest albus’, ‘albus’ (‘a/the white man’) is taken to refer to Socrates. Thereis no difficulty about any of this for a nominalist, since Socrates is aparticular thing, a perfectly acceptable referent for words. Thenominalist’s problem concerns, rather, the
signification of universalwords. To signify
x to someone is to cause there to be a thought of
x inhis mind. Twelfth-century logicians were primarily concerned withsignification in their semantic analyses. It is through the significationof the predicate, they held, that the speaker conveys his meaning: thatSocrates is a man (not a donkey), that he is white (not turquoise orindigo). And, whilst Socrates is a man on account of particular
differentiae of rationality and mortality, and white by a particularaccident of whiteness, in the statement ‘Socrates is white’ thesignification of ‘white’ is universal: it produces a thought of whitenessin general, not of the particular whiteness by which Socrates happensto be white. But, according to Abelard, there is nothing which iswhiteness in general (or man-ness in general): there are just particularaccidents of whiteness, just particular men. So there seems to be no
xof which universals can produce a thought when they signify.Abelard’s earlier way of tackling this problem, in the
Logica ([7.20]20:15–22:24), is to posit an
x which is not a thing. When universalwords are heard, they produce a thought (which is a thing—a particularaccident—Abelard holds). They also cause a mental image which,Abelard says, is not a thing at all, but a figment. (Abelard’s explanationof why it is not a thing shows that he thinks of the image solely interms of its content: my mental image of a castle cannot be a thingbecause it is not really made of stone, and so on.) In the case of universalwords, the mental image is a common, undifferentiated one, of manrather than of Socrates. It is these common mental images or conceptionswhich, he says, are the objects of the thoughts produced by universalwords. Abelard can therefore claim both that universal words signify—there is an
x of which they produce a thought—and that there is no
thing which they signify. In the
Glossulae ([7.20] 530:24–531:29)Abelard simplifies this picture. There he argues that a word signifies solong as it produces in its hearers thoughts with content. The content ofthe thoughts produced by universal words is (or, at least, can be)universal, derived from particulars by a process of abstraction. And souniversal words signify, but it does not follow from this that there areany universal things which they signify.Although any account of signification must involve the mind, inboth Abelard’s earlier and his later theories universal words have theirsignification as a result of how things really are. We form a commonconception of man—or, in the later theory, abstract a universal thoughtcontent for man—because men are really alike. But, although thesignification of universal words is based on how things really are, it isnot always based on a complete understanding of how they really are.Abelard takes it for granted that we unproblematically group thingscorrectly according to their natural kinds, but he considers that only insome cases do we know the structure of
differentiae characteristic of agiven natural kind. There is another semantic relationship, however,which does link universal words to this very structure in all cases:Abelard calls it ‘imposition’. He envisages the first user of a word‘imposing’ a certain group of sounds on a particular substance andevery substance of the same kind. The impositor may well not knowwhat is the structure of
differentiae that characterizes the substance inquestion, but when he imposes the word he does so according to thestructure the substance really has, whatever that may be. He thus createsa link—though an open, unspecified one—between the universal wordand the real structure of the objects to which it can be used to refer andon which its signification is based.
19The metaphysical side of the problem of universals for Abelard is toexplain in what the real resemblance between members of a kindconsists, given that there are no real universals. He tackles it with hisnotion of
status ([7.20] 19:21–20:14). Men, for instance, are alike insharing the
status of man; and this, he explains, means just that theyare alike in being men or in that they are men. And the
status of man(being a man), he insists, is not a thing of any sort.There is nothing wrong with this explanation, but it raises anotherquestion in its turn. On what in reality is the
status of man founded?What is involved in being a man? Abelard has all along made it clearthat what characterizes men is a certain structure of particular
differentiae. No one is a man who does not have (his own particular)
differentiae of mortality, rationality and so on. Abelard might, at thisstage, have proposed a variety of resemblance nominalism, which wouldhold that particular
differentiae of a given sort are exactly similar andthis similarity is unanalysable. Each
status would be defined as havinga certain structure of such particular
differentiae; x would share the
status of
y if and only if his particular
differentiae were exactly similarto
y’s. Surprisingly, in the only discussion ([7.20] 569:32–573:5) wherehe directly answers the question of what makes different particular
differentiae of the same sort similar, Abelard opts for a different solution.He suggests that, whilst a man may have been rational by any one ofinfinitely many actual or hypothetical particular rationalities, there isa
universal differentia of rationality, which no man can lack. He goeson to say that, in a sense, this universal
differentia is the same as aparticular
differentia, since it differs from it not as one thing fromanother, but merely by ‘definition’—a type of difference Abelard hadintroduced in discussing the Trinity and never entirely clarified.
20Although this discussion therefore remains obscure, it suggests that,pressed to give the metaphysical basis of his theory of universals,Abelard has sacrificed much of the nominalist ground he so strenuouslydefends at every other stage.Abelard developed his ethical theory on three different levels. Heattempted (especially in the
Collationes) to answer the most generalquestions about the nature of good and evil and their relation to God(see [7.65] and [7.68] 233–50). Whereas Abelard’s contemporaries andmedieval and patristic predecessors tended to argue, in Neoplatonicfashion, that evil is a privation not a thing, Abelard was ready to admitthat there are evil things—particular accidents of, for instance, pain orsorrow—although not evil substances. He reconciled this position withGod’s goodness and omnipotence by explaining that, when we assertthe goodness of God’s providence, we are predicating ‘good’ not ofthings but of
dicta: ‘it is good that there are evil things’ (‘good’ ispredicated of the
dictum that-there-are-evil-things) and does not entail‘evil things are good’. In some of his sermons and poetry, the Rule hewrote for Heloise and her nuns and a long poem of advice to his son(the technocratically-named Astralabius), Abelard developed thepractical implications of his ethics and examined the tensions betweenmoral standards and the thoughts and feelings of individuals in difficult,ethically problematic circumstances.
21At the centre of Abelard’s moral theory, however, is his discussionof the ethical act; and, although his treatment of virtues and merit isalso interesting and innovative, it is Abelard’s treatment of sin which,rightly, has attracted the interest of historians of philosophy.
22 Yet ithas often been misconstrued. Historians have frequently described itas ‘intentionalist’ and contrasted it with a crude, externalist approachto ethical judgement, where a person’s guilt is judged solely accordingto the sort of acts he performs, as assessed by an outside observer. Amoralist can be an ‘intentionalist’ in one or both of two ways. Theintentionalism may concern
what is judged ethically (objectintentionalism). The object non-intentionalist considers that externalacts alone are to be judged, whereas the object intentionalist considersthat agents’ intentions must be judged as well as, or instead of, theiracts. Or the intentionalism may concern the basis for ethical judgement(subject intentionalism). The subject intentionalist will hold that anagent’s own beliefs about what is right and wrong are an importantelement to be taken into account in reaching a judgement; the antiintentionalistwill minimize their role or exclude them. Abelard iscertainly both an object and a subject intentionalist. But his objectintentionalism needs to be set alongside the different objectintentionalism of his contemporaries, not contrasted with an imaginaryexternalism, and his subject intentionalism does not have the extremeconsequences which it might at first seem to threaten.In their treatments of sin, Abelard’s contemporaries put great weighton the intentions accompanying a sinful act. The most popular theoryenvisaged them as mental acts preceding the external sinful act itself.Its exponents analysed the psychological stages of committing a sin,from contemplating the action, being tempted, indulging the temptationto performing the act. Although these theorists held that the performanceof the external act added to the gravity of the sin, they considered that,already at an early stage of contemplating the sinful action with pleasure,the agent would be sinning to some degree, even if he went on successfullyto resist the temptation. They held, then, that it is worse actually tosleep with a married woman than to be ready and about to do so butprevented by the unexpected arrival of the husband. But they wouldalso consider that a man would have sinned to some degree if he merelythought with pleasure about sleeping with her, even if he would neverhave considered making any practical move to do so.By contrast, Abelard held that neither the performance of the externalact itself, nor any of the thoughts or feelings preceding it but not directlylinked to its real or planned performance need be considered in judgingsin. Before we perform an action, he believed, we perform a mental actof willing it or (in the terminology he finally used, in
Scito teipsum)‘consenting’ to it. Consenting to an act means being entirely ready toperform it, and so I can consent to an act which I do not performbecause it is thwarted. For Abelard, it is acts of consent—not any othertype of mental events, and not external actions—which alone can besins. The thwarted adulterer sins no less, having consented to adultery,than the successful one; whilst, if he is inflamed with passion for amarried woman and incessantly imagines with pleasure the idea ofsleeping with her, but he resists the temptation to do so, then not onlydoes he not sin, he wins merit in the sight of God for his successfulstruggle.
23The contrast made above between external acts and mental eventspreceding them omits what many philosophers now would considerthe most important element in any theory of action: the idea that weact under a description, which is linked to various of our mental andexternal acts, both before and after the act in question. To some extentAbelard seems to have grasped this idea. He is very concerned todistinguish between consent and what he calls ‘willing’. When a manconsents to adultery, he does not will to commit adultery if he wouldprefer it were the woman in question unmarried. When a man murdershis feudal overlord in self-defence, knowing that his supporters willcertainly try to take their revenge on him, he certainly does not will tocommit murder, although he consents to it and, for Abelard, he wouldtherefore be guilty of murder, just as, in the first example, he would beguilty of adultery ([7.21] 6:24–8:20, 16:16–32). What does Abelardmean by this notion of reluctant action, in which I do not will to performwhat I do in fact perform? Although he does not develop the ideaexplicitly, he seems to have in mind that most acts fit a number ofdescriptions. The adulterer does not will to commit adultery since hewould not choose to perform the act just under the description of‘sleeping with a married woman’ (or ‘committing adultery’), nor themurderer his act just under the description of ‘killing one’s overlord’.In each case the agent consents to the act on account of other relevantdescriptions of it such as sleeping with the woman one desires, or savingone’s life.What determines for Abelard which acts of consent are sinful andwhich not? We sin, Abelard believes, by showing contempt for God(e.g. [7.21] 4:31–2). He explains what it is to show contempt for Godin two different ways: either as (a) doing what is not fitting (e.g.[7.21] 4:27–8) or as (b) not doing what we believe we should do forGod (e.g. [7.21] 6:3–6). The juxtaposition of two so different accountsmay seem puzzling. In any case, it seems that only (b) fits the equationof sin with contempt of God. If I do what is unfitting but believe thatit
is what I should do for God, I cannot be showing contempt for him(unless my contempt consists in not having found out what really isfitting and unfitting). The puzzle is solved, however, by Abelard’sbeliefs about natural law.
24 Abelard considered that all mentallycompetent adults (who alone he held capable of sinning) at all periodsof history naturally know the general moral precepts laid down byGod, such as the prohibitions of murder, adultery and theft. He alsobelieved that they all have the power of conscience, which he saw asan ability to see how particular actions fall under the generalcommands and prohibitions of moral law. There is then, for Abelard,no gap between what is fitting for moral agents to do and what theybelieve they should do for God. Although he is a subject intentionalist,he thus avoids the danger of having to allow that someone might notsin whatever action he performed simply by virtue of not believingthat the action is sinful.There are, of course, difficulties about his view. Although, in hisdiscussions of ethics in practice, Abelard is acutely aware of thepossibility of moral conflict—where one and the same action is bothenjoined and forbidden by divine law—for theoretical purposes heignores such dilemmas. Moreover, Abelard has to account not just fornatural law, but for the revealed laws of the Old and the New Testament.The Old Law raises a special difficulty for him. He considers, as inconsistency he must, that a Jew who accepts the Old Law and breaksone of its special precepts, not contained in natural law, such as thedietary laws, commits a sin because he is showing contempt for Godby his action ([7.16] 306:311–25). This, he grants, applies to a twelfthcenturyJew as much as to a biblical one. But Abelard also considersthat the twelfth-century Jew is mistaken to believe that God now enjoinsthe dietary laws on him or on anyone. In practice, the point is of littleimportance. But in principle the gap which Abelard has allowed betweenmoral belief and the truth about divine precepts upsets his whole theory,for it is hard to see what limit he could place on the beliefs whichpeople or groups of people might sincerely hold about what are God’sspecial laws for them.
GILBERT OF POITIERSNext to Abelard, the most profound and adventurous thinker of thetwelfth century was Gilbert of Poitiers (1085/90–1154). Gilbert enjoyedthe successful and comparatively undramatic career for which Abelardmight have hoped. A native of Poitiers, he was taught at Chartres byBernard and at Laon by Anselm. He became a canon and then chancellorof Chartres, and taught both there and in Paris. In 1142 he was madebishop of Poitiers. Like Abelard, Gilbert was the object of Bernard ofClairvaux’s suspicion and hostility. Gilbert was forced to defend hisviews on the Trinity and the Incarnation, first in front of Pope EugeneIII (April 1147) and then at a consistory after the Council of Rheims(March 1148). As he had done with Abelard, Bernard used underhandtactics to try to ensure Gilbert would be condemned. But this time hewas unsuccessful and Gilbert was allowed to return to his diocesewithout harm to his reputation.
25Gilbert did not write prolifically. He produced biblical commentaries(on the Psalms and the Pauline Letters), where he kept close to thespecifically Christian doctrinal themes, eschewing the opportunitiesfor ethical speculation so eagerly followed by Abelard. A set oftheological
Sententie survives (in two versions). But they do not seemto offer a close account of his lectures, and certainly incorporate theviews of other masters. Gilbert was an accomplished logician as wellas a theologian, and he gave rise to a distinctively Porretan school oflogic; but no logical work of his own is known. Gilbert’s contributionto philosophy emerges only from his long and intricate commentaryon Boethius’
Theological Treatises (Opuscula sacra), probably writtenearly in the 1140s. Since Gilbert’s technique as a commentator is togloss every word of the original text, the character of Boethius’ treatiseshas a deep influence on his work, but in ways that are unexpected.Gilbert does
not take over many of Boethius’ views or argumentsdirectly, even though he is supposedly explaining them. Rather, he strainsto fit Boethius’ words into his own often very different arguments, atthe cost of an unwieldily profuse terminology and frequent obliquenessor obscurity in exposition. In his
Opuscula, Boethius had beenconcerned in the main to use logical and metaphysical ideas ratherstraightforwardly as ways of elucidating and confirming orthodoxChristian doctrine about the Trinity and Christology. Gilbert, however,insists that different principles of argument and ways of arguing mustbe used in different disciplines. He claims that arguments devised inconnection with natural things (natural science), or in the course ofanalysing them into their in reality inseparable constituents (whatGilbert calls ‘mathematics’), cannot be used directly in talking aboutGod (theology). But these arguments can be used indirectly, by‘proportionate transumption’, a process in which some of what a naturalor mathematical argument establishes is accepted as applicable to God,but not all.
26 This framework gives Gilbert the chance to develop hisphilosophical account of the natural world more fully than Boethiushad done. But, in developing his natural and mathematical arguments,Gilbert is always at least in part concerned with how to ‘transume’them proportionately so as to serve his, and Boethius’, ultimatetheological aims. Gilbert’s main philosophical discussions—of topicssuch as predication, parts and wholes, individuation and the relationbetween body and soul—are all coloured in this way, and sometimestheir rationale becomes clear only in the light of his doctrinal objectives.Yet it would be wrong to see Gilbert merely as a theologian propoundingquasi-philosophical arguments to illustrate Christian doctrine. Partsof his thinking take up the type of philosophical questions which hadbeen stimulated by the ancient logical texts and which had fascinatedAbelard; and nowhere more clearly than in his complex and originaltreatment of the metaphysical structure of things.
27Gilbert makes a fundamental distinction between what he calls
quoest (‘from which it is’) and
quod est (‘what it is’) [7.10] 91:51–8,116:47–9).
28 (Driven by the requirements of exegesis, he also uses abewildering variety of other terms to describe this distinction.)Examples of what Gilbert considers
quod ests are Socrates, this man,that dog, this white thing. What he has in mind, it seems, are concretewholes made of substances along with their accidents. Although adenominative word such as ‘white thing’
(album) is the word for a
quod est, Gilbert assumes that in any given case when it is used itsreference will be the same as that of a substance word and, often, ofa proper name. So, for instance, the
quod est in question might be thiswhite thing, this labrador, Fido. (Gilbert does not envisage instanceswhere a denominative might sort things differently for purposes ofreference, for instance, ‘this white thing’ referring to Fido and thewhite ball in his mouth taken together; nor does he indicate how hethinks about man-made objects.)
Quo ests are, for instance, whiteness,bodiliness, rationality, humanity, Socrateity. They are not, however,universal forms. Every
quo est is singular (or one in number: Gilbertuses the two notions interchangeably), and every
quod est is what itis from its own singular
quo ests ([7.10] 144:58–60, 145:95–100).So, for instance, I am rational (supposing I am) and six-foot tall froma singular rationality and a singular being-six-foot-tall which are each
quo ests numerically distinct from Socrates’ rationality and being-sixfoot-tall.As this account suggests, by
‘quo ests’ Gilbert means somethingvery close to what Abelard and others had in mind when they spokeof particular forms (accidents or
differentiae). So, for example,Abelard would talk of the particular being-six-foot-tall and theparticular rationality attaching to Socrates by which he is six-foot talland rational. Yet there are important differences between the twophilosophers’ schemes. Abelard thinks of particular forms attachingto substances and, although one element of his discussion (the ‘bundletheory’) points in a different direction, he accepts that, were asubstance
per impossibile stripped of all forms, it would still retain anidentity. For Gilbert, however, the relationship between
quo ests and
quod ests is causal and correlative. A
quod est is made what it is byits
quo ests and there can be no
quo ests apart from a
quod est ([7.10]278:8–279:12). The notion of bare substance may be problematic,but that of a bare
quod est would be simply ungrammatical, becausea
quod est must be a ‘what’ (a white thing, a rational thing, Socrates),made what it is by a
quo est (whiteness, rationality, Socrateity).Gilbert’s scheme thus avoids some of Abelard’s problems (but at aprice, since the notion of making or causing involved is thoroughlyobscure: what the
quo est makes into the
quod est cannot be the
quodest itself—so what is it?).Another important development in Gilbert’s scheme has alreadybeen indicated by mentioning the
quo ests humanity and Socrateity.As well as all his simple
quo ests, such as rationality, mortality andbeing-six-foot-tall, which make Socrates something which is mortal,rational and six-foot tall, there are also his complex
quo ests,composed of two or more of the simple
quo ests; so, for instance, hishumanity—that by which he is a man—would be composed of the
differentiae of the species man and of the
differentiae of all the generaof that species (rationality, mortality, having senses, being alive, beingbodily). The most complex of all these composite
quo ests is called byGilbert the ‘collected property’ or ‘whole form’ of Socrates(‘Socrateity’, for short). It is composed of all the
quo ests ‘which bothin actuality and by nature have been, are and will be’ those of Socrates([7.10] 144:73–8, 274:75–95).Gilbert uses this idea of whole forms to make one of his mostcharacteristic distinctions. As already mentioned, Gilbert holds thatevery
quo est is singular; even composite
quo ests, such as thishumanity or Socrateity, are singular ([7.10] 167:7–19, 301:86–95).So too is every
quod est singular. It is singular, Gilbert says, becausethe
quo est which makes it into a
quod est is itself singular ([7.10]144:58–62). To be singular is not, however, for Gilbert to beindividual. In his view everything which is individual is singular. Butonly those singulars which are not ‘dividuals’ are individual. Whateveris exactly similar
(conformis) to something else, or could possibly beexactly similar to something else, is a dividual. Although the
quo estsby which Socrates is rational and six-foot-tall are singular and distinctfrom the singular
quo ests by which Plato is rational and six-foot-tall,each
quo est of rationality and each
quo est of being-six-foot-tall isexactly similar to every other such
quo est. The same is true of almostevery
quo est, whether simple (mortality, whiteness) or complex(animality, humanity). Even if it should happen that as a matter offact there is not, never has been nor ever will be a
quo est exactlysimilar to a simple or complex
quo est, then in almost every case it ispossible that there might be one exactly similar ([7.10] 143:52–144:78,270:73–271:82). No one, suppose, has ever had or will ever have anose quite the same shape as mine; but ‘by nature’—hypothetically—there might be such a person. Or consider the complex
quo est sunnesswhich makes something into a sun. Gilbert thought (wrongly, ofcourse) that there was and would be only one thing like this: sun is aspecies which contains only one member, the Sun. But by nature, hebelieved, there is nothing to prevent there being infinitely many suns,all made into what they are by
quo ests of sun-ness, each singular butexactly similar to each other. The (as a matter of fact unique)
quo estof sun-ness is therefore dividual just as the very many
quo ests ofhumanity are dividual ([7.10] 273:53–71).There is just one type of
quo est which, Gilbert claims, is not dividualbecause it is not actually or possibly exactly similar to any other
quoest: the whole form of a
quod est (for instance, Socrateity). Wholeforms, then, are individuals, and so are their
quod ests, that is to say,every
quod est, since every
quod est has a whole form. Where, then,for Abelard (who makes no distinction between particularity, singularityand individuality) a form such as this whiteness or that rationality isno less a particular thing than Socrates himself, Gilbert is able todiscriminate more finely: this whiteness, that rationality and Socratesare each singular, but only Socrates (and his whole form, Socrateity) isindividual.Gilbert’s idea of individuality also provides him with his approachto the problem of universals. Complex dividual
quo ests fall into groups,the members of each of which, although themselves all singular, arecompletely similar to every other member of the group. In virtue ofthis complete similarity all the members can be regarded as oneuniversal, a species: for example, humanity. Again, many complexdividual
quo ests are completely similar not just to some other
quo estsin every respect, but also to some in some respects; for instance, every
quo est of humanity and every
quo est of horse-ness are completelysimilar in respect of being bodily, being alive and having senses. Theycan therefore be further grouped into what is also regarded as oneuniversal, the genus animality ([7.10] 269:34–50, 312:95–113). Trueto the emphasis of the discussion at the time, Gilbert considers justuniversals in the category of substance; presumably, though, he wouldalso consider that groups of exactly similar simple
quo ests (such aswhitenesses or rationalities) are universals in other categories. Gilbert,therefore, is a realist over universals, but his real universals are all
quoests which cannot exist except in conjunction with
quod ests which,because they are individual, cannot be universal. To the objection thathis real universals must, like any real universal, be contradictorily bothone and many, Gilbert could reply that, whereas it would be acontradiction to assert of many individuals that they are one, it ispermissible to say of many singulars that they are one because of theircomplete similarity to each other.
29All this rests on the presumption that whole forms are indeedindividual: there is nothing else to which any of them is, or couldpossibly be, exactly similar. What entitles Gilbert to make thispresumption? Gilbert gives no explicit answer, but it is worth lookingcarefully to see what, if anything, he had in mind. It seems obvious torelate the individuality of whole forms to the principle that no twobodily objects can be in the same place at the same time: they cannottherefore have exactly similar accidents in these respects. Gilbert’scomments in a different context ([7.10] 77:5–78:13, 148:88–92) showthat he was highly aware of this point. Yet, at first sight, such anexplanation seems not to fit Gilbert’s view (see above, p. 169) that thewhole form of Socrates is composed, not only of all the
quo ests thathave, do and will make him what he is, but also of all those that he has‘by nature’. The spatio-temporal dissimilarity principle does not ruleout Plato having by nature the very same space-time accidents asSocrates actually has. Indeed, if Socrates’ complex
quo est is composedof all the
quo ests he has ‘by nature’, it seems that it must include everysort of
quo est that can attach to a man, and that therefore the wholeform of each member of a species is exactly similar to that of everyother member of that species—and therefore, contrary to what Gilbertmaintains, is dividual.What must be implicit, it seems, in Gilbert’s view is a distinctionbetween
quo ests which apply to alternative, different ways things mightbe (or, at least, a distinction between those
quo ests which somethinghas in actuality, and those which it has only by nature). This wouldaccord with Simo Knuuttila’s view that Gilbert was one of the earliestthinkers who, influenced by the doctrine of divine omnipotence, waswilling to admit synchronous alternative possible state of affairs, eachbelonging to different providential programmes, any of which Godcould put into effect although only one is the actual programme hechooses.
30 Gilbert would, then, be able to insist that, in any givenprovidential scheme—and so in whatever scheme is the actual one—Socrates does not share his spatio-temporal
quo ests with anyone else,and that therefore his whole form is not the same as anyone else’s.None the less, Gilbert did not in fact think out his views on modalitythis far; had he done so, he might not have wished to accept the manydifficulties this view brings with it.
31THE PLATONIC CURRENTMost of the main twelfth-century thinkers owed something to Plato.Abelard, for instance, argued that the description of the World Soul inthe
Timaeus was an allegory of the Holy Spirit, and he used this surmiseas evidence that the pagan philosophers knew of the Trinity before thecoming of Christ. He also took the few comments about the
Republicat the beginning of the
Timaeus and used them as the basis for his ownpolitical ideal of cities where everything is done for the common good([7.68] 304–7). Abelard’s Platonism, however, is opportunistic. He takesthemes from Plato and transforms them for his own purposes, usingthem within a structure of thought which itself owes remarkably littleto Plato. Some scholars have argued that there is an important Platonicelement in Abelard’s treatment of universals and
dicta (see [7.61] 149and [7.56]). The interpretation offered here does not support that view.Similarly, historians have often held, contrary to the reading advancedhere, that Gilbert rests his metaphysics on a notion of Platonic Ideas.There is, at any rate, room for dispute about the Platonism of Abelardand Gilbert, but neither continues the tradition of Bernard of Chartresin the direct way that was done, as John of Salisbury recognized, byWilliam of Conches.William of Conches was already teaching and writing in the early1120s and appears to have remained active until the 1150s; he taughtperhaps at Paris or, so some have argued, at Chartres, and later taughtat the court of the Duke of Normandy. Like Bernard, he was a grammarteacher. He wrote a commentary on Priscian’s
Institutiones grammaticae(Principles of grammar), drawing extensively on the anonymouseleventh-century
Glosule to Priscian; and he made detailedcommentaries on a series of classical texts. These include poetry (he isknown to have glossed Iuvenal) but he concentrated on Platonic writers:Boethius’
Consolation of Philosophy, Macrobius’ commentary onCicero’s
Dream of Scipio and, most important, the
Timaeus itself. Ininterpreting these texts, William drew on the already well-establishedmedieval tradition of reading pagan texts as allegories of Christiantruth. He went beyond his predecessors in the thoroughness with whichhe applied this method. He would admit, if necessary, that, being pagans,the ancient authors could not be trusted in everything they said. Usually,however, he discovered a satisfactory reading. He shared with Abelard(and may have taken from him—but the chronology is not clear) theidentification of Plato’s World Soul with the Holy Spirit. But unlikeAbelard, for whom it carried important implications about theknowability of God, he was willing to drop the identification. ForWilliam, it was merely a convenient reading of an ancient text, whichcould if necessary be sacrificed.The ideas in his texts which William took most were scientific, ratherthan philosophical or theological ones.
32 The
Timaeus and Macrobiuswere regarded as important sources for natural science, and Williamdeveloped this interest independently, in his
Philosophia (
c. 1125) andhis later dialogue (part extension, part more cautious revision of the
Philosophia), the
Dragmaticon (between 1144 and 1149). In theseworks he also made use of, and sometimes combined or developed inan original way, medical and scientific sources translated from theArabic and Greek. In the
Philosophia and the
Dragmaticon, and in thecommentary to the
Timaeus, William tried to show how all thingscame into being through the natural interaction of the four elements(fire, air, water and earth). Only the creation of the human soul requireda separate intervention by God. William was firmly committed to thissearch for naturalistic explanations: he accused of pride and ignorancethose who wished to explain everything by divine intervention, andclaimed that he illustrated God’s power by his explanations of howGod worked through nature ([7.31] 39–40).The other leading Platonist of the mid-twelfth century (he wasdescribed by a pupil, Hermann of Carinthia, as ‘the soul of Plato restoredto mankind from heaven’) was Thierry ‘the Breton’, known also asThierry of Chartres, where he was chancellor in the 1140s; previouslyhe had taught both there and almost certainly at Paris. As well as aninterest in rhetoric, logic and the various branches of mathematics, Thierryshared William of Conches’s penchant for naturalistic explanation ofwhat many of their contemporaries would have described in terms ofdirect divine intervention. But Thierry gave his most distinctivephilosophical teaching—and that which shows his Platonism mostclearly—in the course of commenting on Boethius’
TheologicalTreatises.
33 A commentary known as
Librum hunc (written late 1140s;incipit ‘Inchoantibus librum hunc’) can be shown to be fairly closelybased on this teaching. Together with two other commentaries on thework from the same period (Incipit ‘Intentio auctoris’ and ‘Aggrediturpropositum’), which contain close parallels to it and each other butalso differ sharply in some of their doctrines,
Librum hunc shows howPlato’s Theory of Ideas was adopted and transformed.The first stage in the transformation was Boethius’ doubling of theforms: ‘From those forms which are beyond matter’, writes Boethius,‘come those forms which are in matter and make the body’—formswhich therefore, more properly, should be called ‘images’. All threecommentaries go on to argue that only the images which come intocontact with matter are many, and that the forms from which theyderive are really one form, God, the form of forms. The argument isdeveloped in two main ways.
Librum hunc asserts that the forms of allthings ‘emanate’
(emanare) from the one, simple divine form. Theseforms have it in common with the one true form that they are an‘equality of being’. By this he apparently means that a particularsubstance
s is what it is (an
s) from its form
f, so that
f can be called‘the equality of being an
s’. God’s form, ‘the wholeness and perfectionof all things’, stands in the same relation to God as
f to
s. None theless, the commentator insists that all forms besides that of God are notreally forms, but simply the images of form. Plurality, he goes on toexplain, arises solely through the coming together of form, which isone, and matter, which is also in itself one.
34 In the two othercommentaries, the talk is not of emanation but rather of God’sthinking.
35 When an artificer wishes to produce a mental exemplar ofwhat he will make, he must think of the material of which it will bemade: the exemplar is not itself enmattered, but it must be conceivedin relation to matter. Similarly, God, who is himself the form of forms,conceives the forms of all things in relation to their matter. He thenunites them with matter, at which point they cease to be forms andbecome images.In the second half of the century, the Platonic current (no longerclosely connected with exegesis of the
Timaeus or with natural science)intermingles often curiously with other influences. For example, theresurvives a fragment (itself book-length) of a very lengthy commentaryon a work by the fifth-century Greek Neoplatonist known as ‘pseudo-Dionysius’ (because he issued his works under attribution to Dionysius,the Areopagite converted by St Paul). The commentary was writtenbetween 1169 and 1177 by William of Lucca. William was probablythe author of a logical textbook based on Abelard’s teaching (see below,p. 175); he was certainly deeply influenced in his theology by Gilbertof Poitiers; and, like Thierry of Chartres, he formulated his thoughtsabout Platonic Ideas (which, in what remains of his commentary, arefar from clear) with Boethius’
Theological Treatises in mind.
36 Alan ofLille (see below, pp. 177–8) provides another example of late twelfthcenturysyncretic Platonism.
THE LOGICAL SCHOOLS OF THE LATER TWELFTH CENTURYIn the second half of the twelfth century, logicians divided themselvesinto a number of self-consciously distinct schools, all probably basedin Paris.
37 Each of these schools derived from one of the leading logicalmasters of the preceding period. The Porretani (or Gilebertini) werethe followers of Gilbert of Poitiers (who was called GilbertPorretanus). Abelard’s followers were called the Nominales.
38 TheParvipontani (or Adamitae) were the followers of another influentiallogical, Adam of Balsham (d. 1159), called Parvipontanus because hisschool was at the Petit-Pont, whose
Ars disserendi (
c. 1132) offers ahighly innovative approach to logic, both in its terminology andarrangement of material. The Meludinenses or Robertini were almostcertainly the followers of Robert of Melun, although at present onlyRobert’s work as a theologian, not as a logician is known. Anotherimportant logician of the 1130s and 1140s was Alberic, a determinedopponent of Abelard’s. Although no surviving text can be definitelyassigned to him, his views are frequently and respectfully cited in thelogical commentaries of the 1140s, some of which can be closelylinked to him.
39 The logicians who called themselves the Albricaniwere certainly his followers; whether they can be identified with theMontani (from the Mont Ste Geneviève, where Alberic, but alsoAbelard and others taught) is unclear.The later twelfth-century masters who ran these schools remainanonymous, but a number of texts survive which show theirsophistication and ingenuity. From the Porretans there is a substantialtextbook of logic (called by its editors the
Compendium logicaePorretanum), probably written between 1155 and 1170. William ofLucca’s
Summa dialetice artis (where Abelard is throughout the supremeauthority, called the Philosophus) illustrates the thinking of thenominalists; the
Introductions montane maiores that of the Montani;the
Ars meliduna—the longest and most sophisticated of all—the workof the Melidunenses.
40The division of these logicians into schools is not a mere convenienceof the historian: it reflects how the scholars thought of themselves. Foreach school there was a set of basic theses to which all those whobelonged had to subscribe. The Porretan
Compendium takes the formof a commentary of each of the Porretani’s theses, and there survivesimilar lists of theses with discussion for the Melidunenses and theNominales.
41 Most of the theses concern controversies which arose inconnection with the
Isagoge, Categories and
On Interpretation overtopics such as universals, predication, parts and wholes and entailment.Often they are stated in a deliberately paradoxical fashion; for instance,according to the Melidunenses, ‘Socrates and Plato are not Socratesand Plato’; according to the Nominales, ‘Nothing grows’. The divisionsbetween the schools emerge very clearly in the differing solutions eachproposed to the objection Alberic had raised to Abelard’s theory ofconditionals (see above, pp. 157–8). Alberic’s argument begins fromthe principle that, if
p implies
q, then
p and
r implies
q, and it choosesas an exemplification of this argument-pattern one in which theconjunction of
p and
r is an impossibility. The Porretani rejected thisargument-pattern, because it leaves one of the conjuncts without arole in the implication, whilst the Montani refused to accept conditionalswhere the antecedent is impossible. The Nominales, Abelard’s ownfollowers, seem (not surprisingly) to have been left in some confusion;the Melidunenses argued that nothing follows from a false statement;whilst the Parvipontani alone did not treat Alberic’s argument as a
reductio, but accepted it along with its conclusion and therefore theparadoxes of strict implication: from an impossibility anything follows,and a necessity follows from anything.
42It would be very wrong, however, to imagine that the logicians ofthe later twelfth century did no more than react to and systematize theideas of their founders. First, even on the most closely discussedquestions of the previous decades, the new masters had their ownthoughts. So, for example, the
Ars meliduna proposes a sophisticatedPlatonic theory. Universals are all ‘intelligible things’. What the mindgrasps when it considers a universal is not, though, a relation ofsimilarity, but the ‘coming together’
(communio) of things which—inthe case of genera and species (Animal, Man), but not that of otheruniversals (white, rational)—brings it about that what participates init is something.
43Second, the later twelfth century was a time when previouslyunknown Aristotelian logical texts (the
logica nova) first becameknown: the
Prior Analytics, the
Topics and
On Sophistical Refutations.All three, for instance, are used in the
Ars meliduna. This developmentis less important, however, than it might seem. It was only the third ofthese texts, Aristotle’s treatise on sophisms (arguments which areincorrect but superficially plausible) that was studied enthusiastically.
On Sophistical Refutations was known before the others, by the 1120s;Alberic and his followers were greatly impressed by it; and it continuedto fascinate logicians for the rest of the century. Although its value indetecting logical fallacies in theological arguments may have initiallyrecommended the treatise, it came to fuel a growing interest in theprinciples of deductive argument.
44The third and most important development of the years 1150–1200may help to explain the generally slight impression made by the
logicanova. It was in this period that medieval logicians broke away fromthe framework of study set by the ancient authorities. For instance,whereas Abelard’s
Dialectica had mainly followed the pattern of thetextbooks by Aristotle, Porphyry and Boethius, both the Porretan
Compendium and the
Ars meliduna reorganize the whole subject-matterof logic into four parts: terms, statements
(propositiones), what termssignify, what statements signify (see [7.77] II, 1, 539). The new approachwent beyond matters of organization. Almost all the branches of whatwould be called the
logica modernorum—those parts of logic notcovered in the ancient texts—began to be developed at this time: besidesthe theory of conditionals (which Abelard had already begun todevelop), the theory of the (semantic) properties of terms; the study ofsophisms and of words such as ‘only’, ‘except’, ‘begins’, ‘ceases’; thetreatment of semantic paradoxes and the special sort of logicaldisputation called ‘obligations’.
45PHILOSOPHICAL THEMES IN LATER TWELFTH-CENTURY THEOLOGYThe divisions between schools were less clear-cut among the theologiansthan the logicians. There were, certainly, those who followed Gilbertof Poitiers either very closely or with more freedom. Abelard, too, washighly influential; but his more controversial theological doctrines wereusually rejected and his distinctive ethics adopted piecemeal, if at all.Although there are a number of references to Nominales in theologicalcontexts, they seem not to be to any distinctively nominalist
theology,but rather to nominalist logical positions which were used in atheological discussion.There was, by contrast, far more variety in the manner of pursuingtheology than was the case for logic, even leaving aside the monastictheologians such as William of St Thierry, Ailred of Rievaulx andBernard of Clairvaux himself, who distanced themselves from theschools. At the Abbey of St Victor in Paris, where William ofChampeaux had founded a theological tradition, which was carriedon in the 1130s and 1140s especially by Hugh (of St Victor), Richard(of St Victor) wrote, sometime after about 1150, a long and carefullyworked
De trinitate. Its aim is to show (rather as Anselm had tried inthe
Monologion) that there are strong rational grounds for holding,not merely that God exists, but that he is triune. Richard, however,writes to illuminate the faithful, not to convince non-believers. If hefigures less in the history of philosophy than some of his contemporaries,it is not because his arguments lack sophistication but rather becausehis views are not easily detached from their theological context.In the theology of the schools—mainly the schools of Paris—therewere two main approaches to method. Gilbert of Poitiers’ idea thateach branch of knowledge, including theology, has its own fundamentalrules, combined with the axiomatic method used in the third ofBoethius’
Theological Treatises (and Gilbert’s own use of it in hiscommentary on that treatise), led to the attempt to produce an axiomatictheology. Peter of Vienna (or of Poitiers) places near to the beginningof his
Summa (
c. 1150) a set of rules which apply to created things(many of them read like the theses of the logical schools) but accordingto some of which we may also gain knowledge about God. In his
Regulae caelestis iuris (
c. 1170–80) Alan of Lille sets out no fewerthan 134 special theological rules, which he expounds and attempts tojustify in the work, sometimes deriving one from another.
46 Axiomatictheology turned out, however, to be a passing fashion. The mostinfluential of all twelfth-century theological works turned out to bethe
Sentences written by Peter the Lombard in about 1155–7. Glossesbegan to be written on the Lombard’s
Sentences in the later twelfthcentury and, from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, commentaryon what were simply called ‘the
Sentences’ was the vehicle for much ofthe most important theological and philosophical work (see pp. 194–5). The Lombard probably based his
Sentences on the discussion ofdoctrinal difficulties which took place in his lectures on the Bible, buthe drew together his material in a systematic way, to provide an orderlyconsideration, problem by problem, of the whole area of theologicaldebate.The Lombard’s
Sentences were valued, above all, for theirorthodoxy—although many passages show a powerful logical mind,fully abreast of the subtleties of an Abelard or a Gilbert of Poitiers.Some of those who followed his methods were far more openlyenthusiastic for logical analysis; few more so than his pupil, Peter ofPoitiers (not to be confused with the Porretan Peter, also fromPoitiers). Peter’s discussion of divine omnipotence ([7.23] 48–68) inhis
Sentences (
c. 1176) provides a good example of this logicallyintricate approach to doctrinal problems, since Peter borrows some ofthe best ideas of theologians from the past two decades and also addshis own.
47Like Abelard, he argues that ‘God is omnipotent’ does not meanthat he can do all things, since he cannot walk or eat or sin, but rather(following Augustine) that God can do whatever he wills. Peter addsto this the requirement, mentioned by Peter the Lombard, that ‘nothingwhatsoever can be done to God’ (which would seem to entail that hecan not do whatever he does not will to do). Peter does not explainwhy, but this extra requirement would overcome the objection thatAugustine’s definition is too weak since it makes omnipotent whoeverlimits his wishes to his capabilities. He goes on to consider the position(Abelard’s, but he is not named) that God can do only what he does,which is supposedly entailed by a variety of considerations of the form:God does only and all what is good (what is fitting, what his justicerequires). Peter’s solution is to distinguish between ‘good’ predicatedof men and of God. Men are good because what they do is good, butwhat God does is good because it is done by God. He can then—making a similar distinction to that used by Abelard between
de dictoand
de re modalities—distinguish two senses of ‘God can do only whatit is good to be done by him’. They are a composite
(de dicto) sense:‘God can do only that-which-if-done-by-him-is-good’; and a divided
(de re) sense: ‘God can do only that which is good: i.e. he cannot dothat which is now bad.’ Only the composite sense yields a true statement,and the composite sense does not limit what God can do, but merelyaffirms that whatever he in fact does is good (because he does it). Peterthen works through a number of more purely logical fallacies whichseem to limit God’s power. Peter finishes the section with a longdiscussion of God’s power to alter natural necessities. God, he argues,can bring about what is impossible according to natural causality, forinstance, that a man is an ass. But ‘the man is an ass’ is true only if it isinterpreted as saying that, according to natural causes, he is man, butaccording to a higher cause, he is an ass.
CONCLUSION: OLD SOURCES, NEW SOURCES AND THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF TWELFTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHYThe preceding sections will have given the impression that, in mostimportant respects, twelfth-century thinkers used only a narrow rangeof ancient and late antique texts, most which had been available sincethe ninth century: the
logica vetus, Plato’s
Timaeus, Boethius’
On theConsolation of Philosophy and
Theological Treatises, complementedby Latin philosophical and scientific texts by Cicero, Macrobius andMartianus Capella; the only exception seems to be Aristotle’s
OnSophistical Refutations, the one work of the
logica nova which wastaken up with enthusiasm in this period. The twelfth century thusappears to present a stark contrast to the thirteenth, when philosophyin the Latin West was transformed by contact with the whole range ofAristotle’s writings, and with work by the great medieval Arab andJewish thinkers, such as Avicenna, Averroes and Maimonides.In one way, this impression is misleading. A number of thetranslations which would be influential during the thirteenth centurywere made in the years from 1150, especially in Toledo (see pp. 226–7). One of the most important of these translators, DominicusGundissalinus (d. after 1181), wrote a number of independent workswhich combine the influence of Avicenna and Latin authors such asBoethius.
48 There were writers such as Adelard of Bath (writing between
c. 1110 and 1145) and Hermann of Carinthia (fl. 1138–43) who learnedArabic and exploited Arabic sources—though their interests were morescientific than philosophical.
49 The
Liber de causis (Book about Causes),a translation of an Arabic adaptation of the late Neoplatonist Proclus’
Elements of Theology, was known to Alan of Lille. Some of Aristotle’snon-logical works were being used in Salerno late in the century; around1200 or shortly afterwards, David of Dinant, who had travelled inGreece, translated and used passages from Aristotle’s scientific writings,and John Blund wrote a
De anima (On the Soul) using Aristotle and,especially, Avicenna.
50Despite these reservations, it would still be right to conclude thatthe main achievement of twelfth-century philosophy was not relatedto newly available ancient or Arabic material. Nor, indeed, despitemany of these scholars’ great reverence for the ancients, should it beseen in terms of a deeper assimilation of the ancient texts previouslyknown, or even of a new approach to them. The great writers of thefirst half of the century—Abelard, Gilbert of Poitiers (and some wouldwish to add William of Conches and Thierry of Chartres)—posed andtackled philosophical questions with an originality which makes themodel of assimilation inappropriate. The second half of the centurydid not produce any philosophers of the same stature, but it saw twoimportant developments, largely unrelated to ancient sources: thedevelopment of a systematic, argumentative method of theology, andthe elaboration of sophisticated logical techniques for semantic analysisand the study of argument. It would be these, along with the effects ofthe new Aristotelian and Arabic material, that would provide theframework for the impressive philosophical developments in thirteenthandfourteenth-century Paris and Oxford.
NOTES1 For a fuller sketch of the historiography of twelfth-century philosophy, seeMarenbon [7.66] 101–6.2 See Chapter 1, pp. 14–15 for fuller discussion.3 See Marenbon [7.42] 80–4; for a wider study of the themes in early medievalcommentaries and glosses on Aristotle and Porphyry, see Marenbon [7.67].4 For the identification of Garlandus and material on
in voce exegesis, seeIwakuma [7.52] 47–54; for this interpretation, see Marenbon [7.68] 108–16.5 See Jolivet [7.57] where the material is collected and this interpretation advanced;cf. de Libera ([7.61] 142–5) and M.Tweedale, ‘Logic: to the time of Abelard’ inDronke [7.49] 204–5.6 John of Salisbury [7.13] III, 2, pp. 124–5; trans. in [7.34] 151–2.7 The arguments for attributing the
Glosae to Bernard, along with a full account ofBernard’s life and the testimony (mainly from John of Salisbury) to his teaching,are given by Dutton, in his edition of the
Glosae [7.7] 21–45, 239–49.8 The dating of the
Dialectica is controversial: see Mews [7.70] 74–104 andMarenbon [7.68] 41–3.9 On impersonal statements, see Jacobi [7.53]; on the copula, see de Rijk [7.76](acute discussion and full bibliography on the question).10 Christopher Martin (see especially [7.69]) has been the first modern scholar toexplain Abelard’s theory of entailment. He also brings out the parallels betweenAbelard’s approach and that in modern ‘relevant’ logics. The following paragraphdepends entirely on his work. On the theory of topics, see above, Chapter 1, pp.14–15.11 On the close connection between the principle observed by Boethius (see above,Chapter 1, p. 14) that it is not possible that
p implies
q and
p implies not-
q, andthe principle that it is not possible that
p implies not
-p (arguably the two principlesare equivalent), see Martin [7.69] 381.12 See esp. Abelard [7.19] 153:33–160:36 and [7.20] 365:13–370:3 and cf. de Libera,‘Abélard et le dictisme’ in [7.44] 59–92; Martin, ‘The logic of the
Nominales’, inCourtenay [7.48] 110–26; de Rijk, ‘La signification de la proposition (dictumpropositionis) chez Abélard’, in [7.74] 547–55; Marenbon [7.68] 222–9.13 See Abelard [7.19] 199–210 and Abelard [7.14] (entirely on modality). On thissubject, see Knuuttila [7.59] 82–96 and Marenbon [7.68] 221–5.14 He presents these at Abelard [7.20] 10:17–16:18, 513:15–522:9; cf. Tweedale[7.81] 89–132.15 Abelard develops this ontology in the
Dialectica and the
Logica: for a full discussionand references, see Marenbon [7.68] 117–37.16 See Abelard [7.20] 129:33–6 and (on
differentiae: see below) 84:14–21, 92:22–9; cf. Marenbon [7.68] 119–22.17 See esp. Abelard [7.17] 342:2434–344:2532; the whole question is discussed andother texts are given in Marenbon [7.68] 138–61.18 There is a large literature on Abelard’s theory of universals. Among the importantmodern discussions are Tweedale [7.81], de Rijk, ‘The semantical impact ofAbailard’s solution of the problem of universals’, in Thomas [7.80] 139–50 andJolivet [7.57]. The following paragraphs summarize the rather different viewproposed in Marenbon [7.68] 174–201.19 On imposition, see Abelard [7.19] 595:11–31.20 The fullest treatment of various types of difference is in the
Theologia Christiana,Abelard [7.17], 247:1677–255:1936; cf. Marenbon [7.68] 150–5.21 In Marenbon [7.68] 213–331, the three levels of Abelard’s ethical theory areexamined. The following section draws especially on chapters 11 and 12 (pp.251–81).22 Valuable discussions are given by Blomme [7.46] and M.de Gandillac, ‘Intentionet loi dans l’éthique d’Abélard’ in [7.74] 585–608.23 Abelard [7.21] 10:28–14:25. Abelard puts forward his analysis of the ethical actin a number of works, including the commentary on Romans and the
Sententie.References here are made, wherever possible, to
Scito teipsum, both because itcontains Abelard’s latest formulation of his ideas and it is easily accessible ingood translation.24 See esp. Marenbon [7.64]; Abelard develops his ideas about natural law especiallyin Book II of the
Theologia Christiana and in the
Collationes.25 On Gilbert’s life, see Nielsen [7.73] 25–39.26 For Gilbert’s distinction between the different disciplines, see esp. [7.10] 79:43–88:69; on proportional transumption, see e.g. 143:42–7, 170:87–93. On the wholequestion of Gilbert’s method, see Marenbon, ‘Gilbert of Poitiers’, in Dronke [7.49]330–6.27 In my piece on Gilbert (cited in the previous note—esp. 329–30, 351–2) I laystrong (in retrospect too strong) emphasis on the extent to which Gilbert’s doctrinalaims shaped his arguments, without bringing out how Gilbert was also contributingto the philosophical debate of his times. De Rijk’s criticism [7.75] 34–5, thoughmistaken in attributing to me a hostile intention towards Gilbert, is in this wayvery just.28 Valuable analyses of Gilbert’s theory of
quo est and
quod est are provided in deRijk [7.75] and Gracia [7.50] 155–77.29 Many scholars consider (on the basis, especially, of [7.10] 195:100–7) that, forGilbert,
quo ests are images of disembodied Platonic Ideas. In ‘Gilbert of Poitiers’,in Dronke [7.49] 349–51, I argue that this is a misinterpretation: Gilbert introducesdisembodied forms merely in his account of the creation of the elements, not asthe archetypes of
quo ests. For a different view again, see de Libera [7.58] 170–5.30 See Knuuttila [7.59], esp. 211–17; Knuuttila discusses the passage in question atpp. 216–17.31 On this view, ‘Socrates’ would have to be a rigid designator, picking out theindividual Socrates in every possible world where he exists, however different heis from one world to another. But Gilbert’s statement about the whole formcomprising every
quo est that belongs to the thing by nature seems to leave theroom for variation disturbingly wide. There seems, for instance, no guaranteethat Socrates must have the same parents from one possible world to another,and it becomes unclear how at all we should identify Socrates.32 See esp. Elford, ‘William of Conches’, in Dronke [7.49] 308–27; more generallyon William, see Gregory [7.51].33 For reconstructions of Thierry’s underlying ideas, see Dronke, ‘Thierry ofChartres’, in Dronke [7.49] 358–85 and Gersh, ‘Platonism-Neoplatonism-Aristotelianism: a twelfth-century metaphysical system and its sources’, in Bensonand Constable [7.45] 512–34.34 [7.27] 81:1–7, 82:25–33; this passage is analysed and its sources discussed byGersh in the article cited in the previous note, pp. 517–24.35 ‘Aggreditur propositum…’ (printed as Thierry’s
Glosa), [7.27] 275:11–276:39and ‘Intentio auctoris…’ (printed as Thierry’s
Lectiones), [7.27] 168:76–170:33,176:45–50, which in this discussion puts forward, somewhat less clearly, almostexactly the same view as ‘Aggreditur propositum…’.36 See William of Lucca, commentary on ps–Dionysius, ed. F.Gastaldelli, Florence,1984, xcii–xciii for dating, and xxi–xxvii for the authorship of the
Summa dialeticeartis. For Platonic Ideas, see especially pp. 100–2. For further discussion of thisand a related, unpublished text, see Marenbon [7.66] 114–17.37 The various articles in Courtenay [7.48] provide the best guide to what is knownabout these schools. See especially Iwakuma and Ebbesen, ‘Logico-theologicalschools from the second half of the twelfth century: a list of sources’ (pp. 173–210), which I follow closely here. A very intelligent discussion of the material isgiven by de Libera [7.61] 132–7. A wealth of material is collected in de Rijk[7.77] II, 2. For a survey, see Jacobi, ‘Logic: the later twelfth century’, in Dronke[7.49] 227–51.38 This has been disputed, but two contributions to Courtenay [7.48]: Normore(‘Abelard and the school of the Nominales’, pp. 80–96) and Iwakuma (‘TwelfthcenturyNominales: the posthumous school of Peter Abelard’, pp. 97–109), putthe identification beyond reasonable doubt.39 See de Rijk [7.78] and Marenbon, ‘Vocalism, nominalism and commentaries onthe
Categories from the earlier twelfth century’, in Courtenay [7.48] 51–61, at54–5.40 Both the
Introductiones montane maiores and the
Ars meliduna remainunpublished; de Rijk discusses and prints extracts from them in [7.78] 12–22 and[7.77] II, 1, 264–390. For the
Summa dialetice artis, see [7.32].41 For the
Melidunenses, the so-called
Secta Meliduna (see de Rijk [7.77] II, 1, 282–6, where the list of these is printed); for the
Nominales, the so-called
Positio‘nominalium’, ed. Ebbesen [7.4] 430–2.42 These observations are taken from Martin [7.69] 394–400, where much fullerdetails are given.43 The most important parts of the discussion are printed by de Rijk [7.77] II, 1,306–9; I am grateful to Dr Yukio Iwakuma for supplying me with a transcript offurther material from the
Ars. De Libera ([7.61] 158–67) discusses the treatmentof universals in the
Ars at length. He suggests that the theory had a furtherrefinement, in that universals are
complex intelligible structures, which areexpressed not by common names but by complex expressions.44 The reception of
On Sophistical Refutations is examined in detail in de Rijk[7.77] I.45 See below, Chapter 17, where most of these areas are discussed.46 For a brief guide to the extensive bibliography on Porretan theologians, see my‘A note on the Porretani’, in Dronke [7.49] 353–7. There is no space here to dojustice to the varied work of Alan of Lille (
c. 1120–1203), which includesphilosophical allegories, sermons and two more straightforward theologicaltextbooks; the best guide is in the introduction to Alan of Lille [7.3].47 There is a fine analysis of discussions of this subject (and of Peter of Poitiers) inBoh [7.47] ; I follow Boh in some of my discussion in the next paragraph.48 See Jolivet, ‘The Arabic inheritance’, in Dronke [7.49] 134–45 for a detaileddiscussion and full bibliography.49 See Burnett, ‘Hermann of Carinthia’, in Dronke [7.49] 386–404.50 On David of Dinant, see Maccagnolo, ‘David of Dinant and the beginnings ofAristotelianism in Paris’, in Dronke [7.49] 429–42; on John Blund, see Jolivet,‘The Arabic inheritance’, in Dronke [7.49] 146–7.
BIBLIOGRAPHYOriginal Language Editions7.1 Adam of Balsham
Ars disserendi, in L.Minio-Paluello (ed.)
Twelfth-centuryLogic, Texts and Studies I, Rome, 1956.7.2 Alan of Lille
Regulae caelestis iuris, ed. N.Häring,
Archives d’histoire doctrinaleet littéraire du moyen âge 48 (1981): 97–226.7.3 Alan of Lille
Textes inédits, ed. M.-T. d’Alverny (Etudes de philosophie médiévale52), Paris, 1965.7.4 Anonymous ‘Two nominalist texts’, ed. S.Ebbesen,
CIMAGL 61 (1991):429–40.7.5 Anonymous
Compendium Logicae Porretanum, ed. S.Ebbesen, K.Fredborg,L. Nielsen,
CIMAGL (1983): 46.7.6 Anonymous, twelfth-century logical works on sophisms and on properties ofterms, in de Rijk [7.77], vol. I and vol. II, 2 respectively.7.7 Bernard of Chartres (?)
Glose super Platonem, ed. P.E.Dutton (PIMSST 107),Toronto, 1991.7.8 David of Dinant
Quaternuli (fragments), ed. M.Kurzialek (Studi mediewistyczne3), Warsaw, 1963.7.9 Garlandus (of Besançon)
Dialectica, ed. L.M.de Rijk, Assen, 1959.7.10 Gilbert of Poitiers
Commentaries on Boethius, ed. N.Häring (PIMSST 13),Toronto, 1966.7.11 Hermann of Carinthia
De essentiis, ed. C.Burnett, Leiden and Cologne, 1982.7.12 John Blund
Tractatus de anima, ed. D.A.Callus and R.W.Hunt (AuctoresBritanni Medii Aevi 2), London, 1970.7.13 John of Salisbury
Metalogicon, ed. J.B.Hall (CC c.m. 98), Turnhout, 1991.7.14 Peter Abelard, authentic ending of
De interpretation commentary, in L. Minio-Paluello (ed.)
Twelfth-century Logic II: Abaelardiana inedita, Rome, 1958.7.15 ——
Collationes, ed. R.Thomas, Stuttgart and Bad Cannstatt, 1970.7.16, 7.17, 7.18 published in
Petri Abaelardi opera theologica (CC c.m. 11–13),Turnhout, 1969–1987:7.16 Peter Abelard
Commentary on Romans, ed. E.Buytaert (11).7.17 ——
Theologia Christiana, ed. E.Buytaert (12).7.18 ——
Theologia summi boni, Theologia scholarium, ed. E.Buytaert and C.Mews(13).7.19 ——
Dialectica, ed. L.M.de Rijk, 2nd edn, Assen, 1970.7.20 ——
Logica and
Glossulae in B.Geyer (ed.)
Peter Abaelards philosophischeSchriften (BGPTMA 21), Münster, 1919–31.7.21 ——
Scito teipsum (Ethics), ed. D.Luscombe, Oxford, 1971.7.22 ——
Sententie, ed. S.Buzzetti, Florence, 1983.7.23 Peter of Poitiers
Sentences, I and II (only these two vols published), ed. P.S.Moore and M.Dulong, Notre Dame, Ind., 1943, 1950.7.24 Peter of Vienna (Poitiers)
Summa, ed. N.Häring, as
Die Zwettler Summe(BGPTMA n.f. 15), Münster, 1971.7.25 Peter the Lombard
Sentences, 2 vols (Spicilegium Bonaventurianum),Grottaferrata, 1971, 1981.7.26 Richard of St Victor
De trinitate, ed. G.Salet (Sources Chrétiennes 63), Paris,1959.7.27 Thierry of Chartres and others, Commentaries on Boethius, in N.M.Häring(ed.)
Commentaries on Boethius by Thierry of Chartres and his School(PIMSST 20), Toronto, 1971.7.28 William of Champeaux
Sententiae, in O.Lottin,
Psychologie et morale aux XIIeet XIIIe siècles, V, Gembloux, 1959, pp. 189–227.7.29 William of Conches, Commentary on
Timaeus (Glosae super Platonem), ed. E.Jeauneau, Paris, 1965.7.30 ——
Dragmaticon, ed. W.Gratarolus (as
Dialogus de substantiis physicis),Strasbourg, 1567; repr. Frankfurt, 1967.7.31 ——
Philosophia mundi, ed. G.Maurach, Pretoria, 1980.7.32 William of Lucca
Summa dialetice artis, ed. L.Pozzi (Testi e saggi 7), Padua,1975.
Translations7.33 Anonymous
Abbreviatio montana, in N.Kretzmann and E.Stump (eds)
Cambridge Translations of Medieval Philosophical Texts: Logic and thePhilosophy of Language, Cambridge, 1988, pp. 39–78.7.34 John of Salisbury
Metalogicon, trans. D.D.McGarry, Gloucester, Mass., 1971.7.35 Peter Abelard, discussion of universals from
Logica in P.Spade,
Five Texts onthe Mediaeval Problem of Universals, Indianapolis, Ind. and Cambridge, 1994,pp. 26–56.7.36 ——
Theologia Christiana (extracts), trans. J.R.McCallum, Oxford, 1948.7.37 ——
Collationes, trans. J.Payer (as
Dialogue between a Jew, a Christian and aPhilosopher) (Mediaeval Sources in Translation 20), Toronto, 1979.7.38 ——
Scito teipsum, in the edition by Luscombe [7.21].7.39 ——selections (in French) in J.Jolivet,
Abélard ou la philosophie dans le langage(Vestigia 14), Freiburg, Switzerland, 1994.7.40 ——Letters and
Historia calamitatum, trans. B.Radice, Harmondsworth, 1974.
Bibliographies, Catalogues and Biographies7.41 Barrow, J., Burnett, C. and Luscombe, D. ‘A checklist of the manuscriptscontaining the writings of Peter Abelard and Héloïse and other works closelyassociated with Abelard and his school’,
Revue d’histoire des textes 14–15(1984–5): 183–302.7.42 Marenbon, J. ‘Medieval Latin commentaries and glosses on Aristotelian logicaltexts before
c. 1150 AD’, in C.Burnett (ed.)
Glosses and Commentaries onAristotelian Logical Texts (Warburg Institute Surveys and Texts 23), London,1993, pp. 77–127.7.43 Mews, C. and Jolivet, J. ‘Peter Abelard and his influence’, in
ContemporaryPhilosophy: a New Survey, 6/1, Dordrecht, 1991, pp. 105–40.Rich bibliographical information will be found in Dronke [7.49], especially in thebio-bibliographies, pp. 443–57.For biographies, see the bio-bibliographies in Dronke [7.49] 443–557; for Abelard,see Marenbon [7.68] 7–35 and Mews [7.71].Studies7.44
Abélard: Le ‘Dialogus’, la philosophie de la logique (Cahiers de la revue dethéologie et de philosophie 6), Geneva, Lausanne and Neuchâtel, 1981.7.45 Benson, R.L. and G.Constable (eds)
Renaissance and Renewal in the TwelfthCentury, Oxford, 1980.7.46 Blomme, R.
La Doctrine du péché dans les écoles théologiques de la premièremoitié du XIIe siècle (Universitas catholica Lovaniensis. Dissertationes adgradum magistri…consequendum conscriptae, series III, 6), Louvain andGembloux, 1958.7.47 Boh, I. ‘Divine omnipotence in the early Sentences’, in T.Rudavsky (ed.)
DivineOmniscience and Omnipotence in Medieval Philosophy (Synthese historicallibrary 25), Dordrecht, 1985, pp. 185–211.7.48 Courtenay, W. (ed.) a collection of articles on twelfth-century nominalism,
Vivarium 30 (1992).7.49 Dronke, P. (ed.)
A History of Twelfth-Century Western Philosophy, Cambridge,1988.7.50 Gracia, J.
Introduction to the Problem of Individuation in Early MedievalPhilosophy, Munich and Vienna, 1984.7.51 Gregory, T.
Anima mundi: La filosofia di Guglielmo di Conches e la Scuola diChartres, Florence, 1955.7.52 Iwakuma, Y. ‘“Vocales”, or early nominalists’,
Traditio 47 (1992): 37–111.7.53 Jacobi, K. ‘Diskussionen über unpersönlichen Aussagen in Peter AbaelardsKommentar zu
Peri Hermeneias’, in E.P.Bos (ed.)
Mediaeval Semantics andMetaphysics (Artistarium supplements 2), Nijmegen, 1985, pp. 1–63.7.54 Jeauneau, E.
Lectio philosophorum, Amsterdam, 1973.7.55 Jolivet, J.
Arts du langage et théologie chez Abélard, 2nd edn (Etudes dephilosophie médiévale 57), Paris, 1982.7.56 ——‘Non-réalisme et platonisme chez Abélard: Essai d’interprétation’, in J. Jolivet(ed.)
Abélard en son temps, Paris 1981; repr. in Jolivet,
Aspects de la penséemédiévale: Abélard: doctrine du langage, Paris, 1987.7.57 ——‘Trois variations médiévales sur l’universel et l’individu: Roscelin, Abélard,Gilbert de la Porrée’,
Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 1 (1992): 111–55.7.58 Jolivet, J. and Libera, A. de
Gilbert de Poitiers et ses contemporains: aux originesde la ‘logica modernorum’ (History of Logic 5), Naples, 1987.7.59 Knuuttila, S.
Modalities in Medieval Philosophy, London and New York, 1993.7.60 Landgraf, A.
Introduction à l’histoire de la littérature théologique de lascolastique naissante, French edn prepared by A.-M.Landry (Publications del’institut d’études médiévales, Montreal 22), Montreal and Paris, 1973.7.61 Libera, A. de
La Querelle des universaux: De Platon à la fin du Moyen Âge,Paris, 1996.7.62 Lottin, O.
Psychologie et morale au XIIe et XIIIe siècles, V, Gembloux, 1959.7.63 Luscombe, D. ‘From Paris to the Paraclete: the correspondence of Abelard andHeloise’,
Proceedings of the British Academy 74 (1988): 247–83.7.64 Marenbon, J. ‘Abelard and natural law’, in A.Zimmermann (ed.)
MiscellaneaMediaevalia 21(2):
Mensch und Natur im Mittelalter, Berlin and New York,1992, pp. 609–21.7.65 ——‘Abelard’s ethical theory: two definitions from the
Collationes’, in H.J.Westra (ed.)
From Athens to Chartres, Leiden, New York and Cologne, 1992,pp. 301–14.7.66 ——‘Platonismus im 12. Jahrhundert: alte und neue Zugangsweisen’, in T.Kobusch and B.Mojsisch (eds)
Platon in der abendländischenGeistesgeschichte: neue Forschungen zum Platonsimus, Darmstadt, 1997, pp.101–19.7.67 ——‘Glosses and commentaries on the
Categories and
De interpretations beforeAbelard’, in J.Fried (ed.)
Dialektik und Rhetorik im früheren und hohenMittelalter, Munich, 1997, pp. 21–49.7.68 ——
The Philosophy of Peter Abelard, Cambridge, 1997.7.69 Martin, C.J. ‘Embarrassing arguments and surprising conclusions in thedevelopment of theories of the conditional in the twelfth century’, in J.Jolivetand A.de Libera (eds)
Gilbert de Poitiers et ses contemporains (History ofLogic 5), Naples, 1987, pp. 377–400.7.70 Mews, C. ‘On dating the works of Peter Abelard’,
Archives de l’histoiredoctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 52 (1985): 73–134.7.71 ——
Peter Abelard (Authors of the Middle Ages II, 5: Historical and religiouswriters of the Latin West), Aldershot, 1995.7.72 ——‘Nominalism and theology before Abelard: new light on Roscelin ofCompiègne’,
Vivarium 30 (1992): 4–33.7.73 Nielsen, L.O.
Theology and Philosophy in the Twelfth Century: A Study ofGilbert Porreta’s Thinking and the Theological Expositions of the Doctrineof the Incarnation during the Period 1130–1180 (Acta theologica danica 15),Leiden, 1982.7.74
Pierre Abélard, Pierre le Vénérable (Colloques internationaux du CentreNational de la Recherche Scientifique 546), Paris, 1975.7.75 Rijk, L.M. de ‘Semantics and metaphysics in Gilbert of Poitiers: A study intwelfth-century metaphysics’,
Vivarium 26 (1988): 73–112; 27 (1989): 1–35.7.76 ——‘Peter Abelard’s semantics and his doctrine of being’,
Vivarium 24 (1986):85–128.7.77 ——
Logica modernorum I and II, Assen, 1962, 1967.7.78 ——‘Some new evidence on twelfth-century logic: Alberic and the school ofMont Ste Geneviève’,
Vivarium 4 (1966): 1–57.7.79 Southern, R.W. ‘Humanism and the school of Chartres’, in
Medieval Humanismand Other Studies, Oxford, 1970, pp. 61–85.7.80 Thomas, R. (ed.)
Petrus Abaelardus (1079–1142): Person, Werk und Wirkung(Trier theologische Studien 38), Trier, 1980.7.81 Tweedale, M.
Abailard on Universals, Amsterdam, New York and Oxford,1976.