Marenbon, John. 2008. "Was Abelard a Trope Theorist?" In Compléments de Substance. Études sur les propriétés accidentelles offertes à Alain de Libera, edited by Erismann, Christophe and Schniewind, Alexandrine, 85–101. Paris: Vrin.

"It was Christopher Martin who, in 1992, first made the link between Abelard's views on accidents and differentiae and what are usually called, in contemporary analytical ontology, `tropes'. Myself apart, Alain de Libera is the only writer I know who has taken serious notice of this idea, discussing it both on its own, and in the wider context of truth-makers and empty reference.(1) De Libera does not think that Abelard can illuminatingly be described as a trope-theorist. I still disagree, and although our disagreement is based on matters of detail, it may illustrate, as I suggest in the conclusion, a wider difference in approach." (p. 85)

(1) I. C. Martin, 'The Logic of the Nominales, or, The Rise and Fall of Impossible Positio', Vivarium 30 (1992), 110-26; J. Marenbon, The Philosophy of Peter Abelard, Cambridge; CUP, 1997, 119-30; A. de Libera, 'Des accidents aux tropes. Pierre Abélard', Revue de métaphysique et de morale 4 (2002) 509-30; La Référence vide. Théories de la proposition, Paris; PUF, 2002, 122-6, 269-97.
———. 2008. "Abelard on «Differentiae»: How Consistent is His Nominalism?" Documenti e Studi sulla Tradizione Filosofica Medievale no. 19:179–190.

"Abelard develops this nominalist theory in his discussions of Porphyry’s Questions in the Logica Ingredientibus (LI) commentary on the Isagoge (c.1119) and in his later Logica Nostrorum Petitioni Sociorum or Glossulae (LNPS) to the Isagoge (c. 1125-6)(1). In both places he establishes his theory elaborately, both by reducing to absurdity the various versions of the realist position, and by explaining how the semantics of universal terms can be very satisfactorily explained without positing the existence of any universal things. But does he stick to it? There is a passage a little later on in the LNPS in the section on differentiae, an excursus at the end of the section, which has been interpreted — by myself(2) — to show that he did not. I argue that at least on one, plausible reading of the passage, Abelard will « have abandoned the

nominalist position he always explicitly holds on universals » and substituted for it a sophisticated realism, reminiscent of Duns Scotus.

Both the Excursus itself, and my interpretation of it, have been generally ignored(3) . This is a pity, for two reasons. First, the Excursus, though horribly obscure in some places, is a fascinating example of Abelard’s thinking and, especially, of the analytical tools he had developed by the mid-1120s. Second, my interpretation is wrong and needs to be corrected — and putting it right offers a quite important general lesson about interpreting Abelard." (pp. 179-180)

(1) References are to the pages and lines of Peter Abaelards philosophische Schriften, ed. B. GEYER, Aschendorff, Münster 1919-33 (Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalter 21) for LI, LNPS and the Glossae secundum uocales, and PETRI ABAELARDI Opera Theologica II, ed. E. BUYTAERT, Brepols, Turnhout 1969 (Corpus Christianorum continuatio mediaeualis, 12) for Theologia Christiana and to PETRI ABAELARDI Opera Theologica III, edd. E. BUYTAERT and C. J. MEWS, Breplos, Turnhout 1987 for Theologia Summi Boni and Theologia Scholarium.

(2) Cf. J. MARENBON, The Philosophy of Peter Abelard, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1997, pp. 195-201.

(3) To my knowledge, apart from the criticism of it by de Rijk (see below) this bit of my book has neither been discussed, nor followed, although my point is noted in A. ARLIG, A Study in Early Medieval Mereology : Boethius, Abelard and Pseudo-Joscelin, Ohio State University PhD, p.142, n. 117.

References

L. M. DE RIJK, Abelard: een wijsgerige interpretatie en methodologische stellingname, « Tijdschrift voor Filosofie », 60, 1998, pp. 348-355.
———. 2008. "Logic at the Turn of the Twelfth Century " In Handbook of the History of Logic. Vol. 2. Mediaeval and Renaissance Logic, edited by Gabbay, Dov M. and Woods, John, 65–81. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

"This chapter is not, like the others in the book, a survey of the logical doctrines of a period, because I at least (and perhaps other scholars too) am not yet in a position to write such a survey. It is simply a guide to the material, to the technical problems it presents and some of the theories historians have elaborated about it, along with an indication of a few of the philosophical themes which are waiting to be explored. ‘The turn of the twelfth century’ is a deliberately vague title, designed to indicate the hole between where the previous chapter finished and Abelard’s work, the subject of the following chapter. But plugging this gap—even as here, with a sponge and a nailbrush — is not a straightforwardly chronological matter. Abelard’s Dialectica, the main subject of the next chapter, may have been being written as early as 1110: a good deal of what is discussed here was probably written no earlier, and some of the texts may in fact date from the 1120s or 1130s.

But the writings and writers discussed here have at least traditionally been seen as providing the prelude to Abelard’s work. They form a separate group in their methods and concerns from the writings of Abelard’s contemporaries and the later twelfth-century schools considered in the final section of the next chapter." (p. 65, a note omitted)
———. 2011. "Logic at the Turn of the Twelfth Century: a synthesis(1)." In Arts du langage et théologie aux confins des XIe et XIIe siècles: textes, maîtres, débats, edited by Rosier-Catach, Irène, 181–218. Turnhout: Brepols.

"«Progress report» might be a more appropriate title. Despite the magnificent work of, in particular, one scholar, Yukio Iwakuma, who ha devoted a still continuing career to discovering, transcribing and editing twelfth-century logical texts, the material is still too sparsely published, too little read, too poorly understood for any proper synthesis to be possible. Yet the whiggish overtones of «progress report» may also deceive. There has been progress in the field: new material has been found and errors have been put right. But it has altogether been progress of a meandering sort; what with great learning one study constructs, the next as eruditely dismantles.

Moreover there is as I shall suggest, a danger of remaining trapped in an old historiographical framework and so moving in circles within a narrow compass, rather than reaching a broader and more exact understanding of logic in this period. That will be at the very end of the following pages (VI). Before then, I shall begin with what is uncontroversial: the settings in which logic was studied, the logical curriculum of the time, and the forms of writing on logic (I). Then I shall set ot the views about the development of logic c. 1100 as they have beeb developed over the last decades (II), and the important recent critiques of the them (some in this very volume) (III). In the following sections I re-examine the evidence and the critical arguments, and I attempt to state what we can believe with reasonable certainty (IV-V)." (p. 181)

(1) This chapter bears only a slight resemblance to the « Synthesis » which I wrote for the conference website. Catach very kindly allowed me to use material from that for a chapter I was rerqured Io submit al the last moment to the Handbook of the History of Logic (Marenbon 2008b), That chapter now complements this one.

References

Marenbon 2008b. Logic at the Turn of the Twelfth Century
———. 2013. Abelard in Four Dimensions: A Twelfth-Century Philosopher in His Context and Ours. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.

"Abelard in Four Dimensions can be read from various different perspectives and addresses itself to at least three different sorts of readers.

Although it is not a general book on Abelard and his thought (I have written one already), it is written so as to be comprehensible to readers who are approaching him for the first time. Chapter 1 begins with a brief account of his life and writings which, along with the detailed list of editions of Abelard’s works in the bibliography, provides an introductory framework. The body of the book discusses some of Abelard’s most striking and characteristic ideas, through a wide range of his thought: his sophisticated semantics (chapter 5), his theories about the metaphysical structure of concrete things and about identity and difference (chapter 6), the place of intention in his moral psychology (chapter 3) and his conception of God and divine omnipotence (chapters 2 and 4)." (pp. 3-4)
———. 2015. "Abelard’s Theory of Universals." In Nominalism about Properties: New Essays, edited by Guigon, Ghislain and Rodriguez-Pereyra, Gonzalo, 39–62. New York: Routledge.

"These pages began as an attempt to look at Abelard’s theory of universals in connection with contemporary discussions. But it soon became apparent that there is little consensus about what this theory is and, despite the extensive literature on the subject, no place where readers, including those without any prior knowledge of the medieval background, can find a straightforward account of what Abelard said, what are the main questions of interpretation and how, or whether, they can be answered. (1) This chapter is intended to fill that gap. The first section presents the main lines of Abelard’s theory, and the second looks in more detail at some of its problematic areas." (p. 38)

(1) The most important extended, general recent discussions of Abelard’s own theory of universals are: Jolivet (1975); Tweedale (1976); de Rijk (1980); King (1982); Jolivet (1992, 128–41); Shimizu (1995); de Libera (1999, 281–498).

I discuss the topic in Marenbon (1997a, 174–201), but I have approached thesubject afresh here; I note where I reject my earlier interpretations.

References

Jolivet, J. 1975. “Notes de lexicographie abélardienne”, in Pierre Abélard. Pierre le Vérable. Les courants philosophiques, littéraires et artistiques en occident au milieu du XIIe siècle (Colloques internationaux du Centre de la recherche scientifique 546), 531–43. Paris: Éditions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique.

———. 1992. “Trois variations médiévales sur l’universel et l’individu: Roscelin, Abélard, Gilbert de la Porrée”, Revue de la métaphysique et morale 97: 115–55.

King, P. 1982. “Peter Abailard and the Problem of Universals.” Unpublished PhD dissertation, Princeton University (available from University Microfilms International (8220415)).

Libera, A. de. 1996. La querelle des universaux. De Platon à la fin du Moyen Âge. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

Marenbon, J. 1997a. The Philosophy of Peter Abelard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rijk, L. M. de. 1980. “The Semantical Impact of Abailard’s Solution of the Problem of Universals”, in Petrus Abaelardus (1079–1142): Person, Werk und Wirkung, Rudolf Thomas (ed.) (Trier theologische Studien 38), 173–214. Trier: Paulinus.

Shimizu, T. 1995. “From Vocalism to Nominalism. Progression in Abaelard’s Theory of Signification”, Didascalia 1: 15–46.

Tweedale, M. M. 1976. Abailard on Universals. Amsterdam, New York and Oxford: North Holland.
———. 2018. "Relations in Earlier Medieval Latin Philosophy: Against the Standard Account." Enrahonar. An International Journal of Theoretical and Practical Reason no. 61:41–58.

Abstract: "Medieval philosophers before Ockham are usually said to have treated relations as real, monadic accidents. This “Standard Account” does not, however, fit in with most discussions of relations in the Latin tradition from Augustine to the end of the 12th century.

Early medieval thinkers minimized or denied the ontological standing of relations, and some, such as John Scottus Eriugena, recognized them as polyadic. They were especially influenced by Boethius’s discussion in his De trinitate, where relations are treated as prime examples of accidents that do not affect their substances. This paper examines non-standard accounts in the period up to c. 1100."

"There is a Standard Account of relations in medieval philosophy, which is the basis for most work on the area in the Anglophone tradition. It is presented in its clearest form in Jeffrey Brower’s article on the topic in the authoritative Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Brower, 2015). Its main features are, however, already found in the earliest survey of the field by a historian of philosophy with analytic training, Julius Weinberg’s 1965 essay on the history of relation (Weinberg, 1965). It informs Henninger’s important monograph on Relations. Medieval Theories 1250-1325 (Henninger, 1989), and it shapes even the writing of the occasional historians who search for exceptions (for example, Ebbesen, 1995; Hansen, 2013)."

References

Brower, Jeffrey (2015). “Medieval Theories of Relations”. In: Edward Zalta (ed.). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2015 Edition).

Ebbesen, Sten (1995). “Tantum Unum Est. 13th-century sophismatic discussions around the Parmenidean thesis”. The Modern Schoolman, 72, 175-199.

Hansen, Heine (2013). “Strange Finds, or Nicholas of Paris on Relations”. In: Jakob Fink, Heine Hansen and Ana María Mora-Márquez (eds.). Logic and Language in the Middle Ages. A volume in honour of Sten Ebbesen

(Investigating Medieval Philosophy 4). Leiden and Boston: Brill, 139-154.

Henninger, Mark (1989). Relations. Medieval theories 1250-1325. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Weinberg, Julius (1965). Abstraction, Relation, and Induction. Three essays in the history of thought. Madison and Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin Press.
———. 2021. "«Nec res ita sicut vocabula diversas esse contingit». Abelard on Real Relations – and Real Universals." In Ad placitum. Pour Irène Rosier-Catach, edited by Cesalli, Laurent, Grondeux, Anne, Robert, Aurélien and Valente, Luisa, 465–470. Roma: Aracne editrice.
Marenbon, John, and Tarlazzi, Caterina. 2018. "Logic." In The European Book in the Twelfth Century, edited by Kwakkel, Erik and Thomson, Rodney, 215–239. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

"Among twelfth-century books, logical manuscripts constitute a coherent field of investigation.(1), (2) Logic was studied in the schools attached to cathedrals and, especially, in the many schools that grew up in Paris after about 1120.(3) The course in logic was fairly narrowly set, based on a small number of logical texts and commentaries from the ancient world.

Twelfth-century authors wrote their own commentaries on these texts and independent logical works; in both will be found some of the most important philosophical thinking of the century.

The first section of this chapter sets out the ancient and late antique texts used by logicians. There follow studies of the twelfth-century manuscripts containing this material (Section 2), of commentaries by twelfth-century logicians (Section 3), and of independent logical treatises from the period (Section 4)." (p. 115)

(1) John Marenbon is the author of Sections 1, 2, 4, and the Appendix, Caterina Tarlazzi of Section 3.

(2) Often twelfth-century authors call the subject dialectica, but sometimes this word is used to refer specifically to topical inferences. For this reason, and because of the various contemporary connotations of ‘dialectic’, ‘logic’ is a better term to use.

(3) For a basic introduction with bibliography (to which should be added Rosier-Catach 2011), see Marenbon 2007, 131–66.

References

Marenbon, John 2007, Medieval Philosophy: An Historical and Philosophical Introduction (London and New York).

Rosier-Catach, I. (éd.), 2011, Arts du langage et théologie aux confins des XIe–XIIe siècles: Textes, maîtres, débats (Turnhout).
Martin, Christopher John. 1986. "William's Machine." Journal of Philosophy no. 83:564–572.

William of Soissons and Abelard's theories of Entailment.

"John of Salisbury's Metalogicon is well known as a source for the discussion of universals in the twelfth century, but has rarely been considered for what it can tell us about the developmrnt of theories of entailment. This is unfortunate because John has many interesting things to say." (pp. 564-565)

(...)

"According to William and Martha Kneale, it has been thought that William's invention was a physical device perhaps anticipating Stanley Jevon's logical machine.(2) Ther Kneales propose, however, that

it was an argument to the effect that any impossibility may be derived from a single impossibility, but offer no suggestion as to what that argument might be. I will show here that most probably the machine was a version of what we know as C. I. Lewis's proof that anything follows from a contradiction."

(...)

"Such an argument has long been known from the fourteenth century, but its appearance in the twelfth has gone unnoticed. By show ing how the argument came about I want to reveal a turning point in the history of logic and lay to rest the claim that there is no history to the demand that relevance is required for entailment.(3) Many twelfth-century discussions are very sophisticated and, as accounts of argument and of the conditional in natural language, have much to offer to contemporary theorists. They have been neglected and mis understood by historians of philosophy.

With their recovery should come a better understanding of the treatment of philosophical and theological problems in the Middle Ages. I will concentrate on Abaelard's work, but what follows is only a very simplified account of a very complex theory.(4)" (p. 565)

(2) The Development of Logie, corrected edition, (New York: Oxford, 1984) p. 201

(4) • For more details and textual support for the clairns made here, see rny paper: "Ernbanassing Argurnents and Surprising Conclusions in the Developrnent of Theories of the Conditional," to appear in The Proceedings of the Seventh European Symposium on Mediaeval Logic (Paris: Vrin, 1986). I will here concentrate on the theory of the conditional developed in Treatise III of Abaelard's Dialectica. References are to Peter Abaelard: Dialectica, L. M. de Rijk, ed. (Assen: van Gorcum, 1956); Super Topica Glossae in M. Dal Pra, ed., Pietro Abelardo, Scritti Filosofici (Rome-Milan: Fratelli Bocca, 1954).
———. 1987. "Something Amazing about the Peripatetic of Pallet: Abelard's Development of Boethius' Account of Conditional Propositions." Argumentation no. 1:419–436.

Abstract: "Mediaeval logicians inherited from Boethius an account of conditional propositions and the syllogisms which may be constructed using them. In the following paper it is shown that there are considerable difficulties with Boethius' account which arise from his failure to understand the nature of compound propositions and in particular to provide for their negation. Boethius suggests that there are two different conditions which may be imposed for the truth of a conditional proposition but he really gives no adequate account of how such propositions may be obtained. The true greatness of Peter Abaelard as a philosophical logician is revealed in what he is able to do with the material which he found in Boethius. It is shown that he developed a precise theory of conditionals giving an account of how true conditionals may be obtained and principles which may be used to reject others as false. Unlike Boethius Abaelard properly appreciates that conjunctions must be treated as logical units. Even he, however, falls victim to difficulties which arise when this connective is brought into contact with negation and the conditions which he lays down for the truth of a conditional."
———. 1987. "Embarrassing Arguments and Surprising Conclusions in the Development of Theories of the Conditional in the Twelfth Century." In Gilbert de Poitiers et ses contemporains: aux origines de la Logica Modernorum, edited by Jolivet, Jean and Libera, Alain de, 377–400. Napoli: Bibliopolis.
———. 1992. "The Logic of the "Nominales", or the Rise and Fall of Impossible Positio." Vivarium no. 30:110–126.

"The twelfth century Nominales were without doubt the followers of Peter Abaelard and they were probably so called on account of their theory of universals." (p. 110)

(...)

"Just like today's anti-realists Abaelard derived conclusions about entailment and argument from ontology and philosophical semantics. Where today's anti-realists are intuitionists, however, Abaelard and the Nominales were connexivists. Connexive logic has as its leading idea that 'no proposition should imply or be implied by its own negation'. Since half of this principle is found in the Prior Analytics and is reported in de Syllogismo Hypothetico, it was bound to be acknowledged in some form by all dialecticians. Abaelard held that the most peculiarly proper principle of Nominalist logic followed from the basic connexive principle. This is the claim that conditionals whose antecedent and consequent differ in quality are false. To understand the character of Nominalist logic it is thus necessary to understand the nature of Abaelard' s support for connexivism and in particular why he advocates this account of the conditional. Abaelard' s connexivism ultimately rests upon an ontology of individual forms and I so will begin with a very brief survey of this and its relationship to his theory of language. The main part of the paper explores Abaelard' s theory of logical relations and its application by the Nominales. In particular I propose that they were probably the inventors of positio and that they rediscovered the Liar. I conclude with a discussion of two paradoxical claims made by his followers but not by Abaelard and some suggestions about the later history of the logic of the Nominales." (p. 111)
———. 1999. Theories of Inference and Entailment in the Middle Ages (Boethius, Philoponus, Peter Abelard, John Duns Scotus, William of Ockham), Princeton University.

Available at ProQuest Dissertation Express. Order number: 9948627.

Abstract: "The origins of mediaeval theories of inference and entailment are shown first to lie in the work of Boethius and an account is proposed of the theory of the hypothetical syllogism that he offers in de Hypotheticis Syllogismis. Boethius is also shown to have provided some hints which led twelfth century philosophers to develop the theory of positio impossibilis for the construction of thought experiments with hypotheses acknowledged to be impossible. The ancient sources of Boethius's ideas on such hypotheses are investigated and in particular the use of them by Philoponus in arguing against Aristotle's rejection of the notion of space as three dimensional extension. Peter Abaelard is shown to be the crucial figure in the development of theories of the truth of the conditional and the validity of argument in the twelfth century and this aspect of his philosophy is explored in some detail.

Abaelard's followers the Nominales were characterised especially by their acceptance of his connexive principles for the logic of the conditional and by their application of them in developing a theory of impossible hypotheses. It is argued here the Nominales' commitment to Abaelardian logic helps to explain their advocacy of the striking thesis that nothing grows and perhaps also reveals them to be discoverers of the Liar paradox in the middle ages. Finally it is argued that the distinctions made by Abaelard between two kinds of conditional, and the different logical principles governing them, are employed at least up to the time of William of Ockham and especially in the work of John Duns Scotus. Ockham's theory of the conditional is shown to make a fundamental break with the hyperintensional logical theory employed by Scotus in arguing for the central importance of the formal distinction in metaphysics."
———. 2001. "Abaelard on Modality: Some Possibilities and Some Puzzles." In Potentialität und Possibilität. Modalaussagen in der Geschichte der Metaphysik, edited by Buchheim, Thomas, Kneepkens, Corneille Henri and Lorenz, Kuno, 97–125. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog.

"In his monumental study of William of Sherwood's modal theory Klaus Jacobi (2) surveys the treatment of modality by philosophers in the preceding century and shows that their concern was for the most part to calculate the logical relations between the various forms of modal proposition which they recognised. Although theology demanded that they take an interest in the nature of divine power, without the Physics and Metaphysics, to prompt them, twelfth century philosophers generally had little to say on the relationship of modal propositions and their structures to the various sources of modal claims, to claims, for example, about the nature of potentiality, physical causation, or action.(3) Some progress was made, however, and in the present paper I will consider the contribution of Peter Abaelard to the development of theories of modality and the curious attitude of one of his followers to his work on modal logic.

Although Abaelard had no access to the Physics or Metaphysics and precious little, if any, to the Prior Analytics,(4) he did find in the Categories and De Interpretatione texts which posed interpretive problems whose solution demanded that he discuss the nature of possibility and necessity. What follows is for the most part an examination of certain points made by Abaelard in his discussion of these problems. It is divided into two parts.

In the first part of the paper I propose an account of Abaelard's theory of possibility and its application both to creatures and to God.(5) Abaelard's claims about divine power are rather well known and I mention them only very briefly at the end. His treatment of creaturely potentiality in commenting on various claims made by Aristotle in the Categories has, on the other hand, barely been noticed and my concern in the first part of the paper is to thus set them out in some detail.

The failure to take into account the full range of Abaelard's thinking about potentiality has led to some very misleading claims about his views on possibility. What my investigation shows is that Abaelard employs three different but related notions of potentiality. The first is the potentiality that an individual has for future action and it is constrained by its species nature, its particular constitution, and its present circumstances. The second and third are both introduced to explain how we may legitimately say, as authority requires, that an amputee is bipedal. They are different but both reduce all unqualified possibility to potentiality and all potentiality to compatibility with species nature. The unqualified possibilities open for an individual creature of a given natural kind are thus for anything which is not incompatible with its species nature.

In the second part of the paper I first examine the account of modal propositions that Abaelard insists upon in discussing chapter 12 of De Interpretatione. I show that this account of the semantics of such propositions is completely in agreement with his treatment of the source of modal properties in natures. In his treatment of modal propositions Abaelard famously distinguishes between two different interpretations of propositions such as 'S is possibly P'. A personal, or 'de re' reading, in which S is said to possess a power to be P, and an impersonal, or 'de sensu' reading in which 'S's being P' is claimed to be possible where the nominal phrase is held to refer to a proposition, propositional content, or some other kind of entity. Abaelard argues that only the de re reading yields a modal claim and that nominal modes are to be resolved into the corresponding adverbial modes. The truth conditions of modal propositions are thus always, according to Abaelard, ultimately to be given in terms of what is compatible and what is not with the specific nature of the subject of the de re reading of them.

Information about the fate of Abaelard's theories and the views of his followers is unfortunately very limited and it is pleasant to be able to add here to our knowledge. The texts that we have on divine and creaturely power agree with Abaelard's teaching in reducing unqualified potentiality to compatibility with species nature. In the concluding part of my paper, however, I show that the author of the Summa Dialectice Artis attributed to William of Lucca, otherwise an extremely devoted follower of Abaelard in logic, explicitly rejects his master's de re account of modality in favour of the alternative de sensu reading which Abaelard had gone to great lengths to refute. The Summa thus leaves us with a considerable puzzle about the commitment of Abaelard's followers in logic to his theory of modality. As compensation for this, we will see that the Summa also provides us with a solution to a small puzzle raised by Jacobi and Knuuttila concerning Abaelard's views on the logical relations between quantified modal propositions." (pp. 97-99)

(2) Klaus Jacobi, Die Modalbegriffe in den logischen Schriften des Wilhelm von Shyreswood, Leiden 1980.

(3) The outstanding exception is St. Anselm's discussion of the logic of action sentences in the Lambeth Fragments printed in R. W. Southern and F. S. Schmitt, Memorials of St. Anselm, London 1969, 333-354.

(4) Cf. Dialectica, Introduction,XIII-XIX. The evidence that Abaelard had direct access to the Prior Analytics is extremely slight. The Dialectica contains what appear to be two quotations from the Prior Analytics, the definition of the syllogism from An. Pr. I 1, 24b 18-22 at Dialectica, 232.5-8 and the distinction between perfect and imperfect syllogisms from An. Pr. I 1, 24b 22-25 at Dialectica, 233.36-234.3. In the discussion following the definition of the syllogism, however, Abaelard refers not to the definition which he apparently quotes from Aristotle but rather to the definition given by Boethius in De Syllogismo Categorico II (PL 64, 821A 7 - 822C 12).

(5) Hermann Weidemann, 'Zur Semantik der Modalbegriffe bei Peter Abaelard', in: Medioevo 7 (1981), 1-40, argues that Abaelard thinks of possibility in this way but he does so very much the hard way by attempting to show that Abaelard's remarks on temporally determined modal sentences commit him to it. Here I take the very much easier course of pointing out Abaelard's explicit statement of the theory of synchronous possibility in terms of alternative world histories.
———. 2003. "An Amputee is Bipedal! The Categories and the Development of Abaelard's Theory of Possibility." In La tradition médiévale des catégories, XIIe - XVe siècles: Actes de XIII Symposium européen de logique et de sémantique médiévales, Avignon, 6 - 10 juin 2000, edited by Biard, Joël and Rosier-Catach, Irène, 225–242. Louvain: Peeters.

"The task of explicating scriptural authority required twelfth century philosophers to take an interest in the nature of divine power and the task of explicating the De interpretatione required them to discuss the the logic of modal claims. Without Aristotle to prompt them, however, these philosophers generally had little to say on the relationship of modal propositions and their structures to the various sources of modal claims, to claims, for example, about the nature of potentiality, physical causation, or action. Nevertheless, some progress was made and in the present paper I will consider the contribution of Peter Abaelard to the development of theories of possibility. Abaelard had no access to the Physics or Metaphysics and precious little, if any, to the Prior Analytics, but he did find in the Categories and Porphyry's lsagoge texts posing interpretative problems whose solution demanded that he discuss the nature of possibility and necessity.

Abaelard's claims about divine power are rather well known and I will mention them only very briefly at the end of my paper. His treatment of creaturely potentiality in commenting on various claims made by Aristotle in the Categories has, on the other hand, barely been noticed and my task here will be to examine it in some detail.

The failure to take into account the full range of Abaelard's thinking about potentiality has led to some very misleading claims about his views on possibility. What my investigation shows is that Abaelard employs three different but related notions of potentiality. The first is the potentiality that an individual has for future action and it is constrained by its species nature, its particular constitution, and its present circumstances.

The second and third are both introduced to explain how we may legitimately say, as authority requires, that an amputee is bipedal.

They are different but both reduce all unqualified possibility to potentiality and all potentiality to compatibility with species nature. The unqualified possibilities open for an individual creature of a given natural kind are thus for anything which is not incompatible with its species nature." (pp. 225-226, notes omitted)
———. 2004. "Logic." In The Cambridge Companion to Abelard, edited by Brower, Jeffrey E. and Guilfoy, Kevin, 158–199. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

"A great deal of Peter Abelard's writing is concerned with what he regarded as logic, but which we would now classify as ontology or philosophical semantics. Following Cicero and Boethius, Abelard holds that properly speaking the study of logic has to do with the discovery and evaluation of arguments (LI Isag. 3.10). A necessary preliminary for this is an examination of the issues dealt with by Porphyry in the Isagoge and by Aristotle in the Categories, and De interpretatione (LI Cat. 113.26-114.30). In the present chapter, however, I will ignore most of this material and concentrate on the central issue of logical theory both for Abelard and for us, that is, on the nature of the relation of consequence, or following. Even with this limitation there is a great deal of ground to cover. Abelard sets out his theory of entailment and argument in two very extended and dense discussions both of which have suffered considerable textual corruption. The treatment of topics and hypothetical syllogisms in the Dialectica, is apparently the earlier. The other is the surviving fragment of Abelard's commentary on Boethius's De topicis differentiis, Glossae super De topicis differentiis, which seems to belong with his other commentaries on the works of the logica vetus published as the Logica "ingredientibus." The two expositions disagree on some crucial questions, but here I will restrict myself almost entirely to the discussion in the Dialectica.". (p. 158)
———. 2007. "Denying Conditionals: Abaelard and the Failure of Boethius’ Account of the Hypothetical Syllogism." In The Many Roots of Medieval Logic: The Aristotelian and the Non-Aristotelian Traditions, edited by Marenbon, John, 153–168. Leiden: Brill.

Abstract: "Boethius’ treatise De Hypotheticis Syllogismis provided twelfth-century philosophers with an introduction to the logic of conditional and disjunctive sentences but this work is the only part of the logica vetus which is no longer studied in the twelfth century. In this paper I investigate why interest in Boethius acount of hypothetical syllogisms fell off so quickly. I argue that Boethius’ account of compound sentences is not an account of propositions and once a proper notion of propositionality is available the argument forms accepted by Boethius are seen to be incoherent. It was Peter Abaelard who first understood the nature of propositionality and propositional connectives and used this to criticise Boethius’ claims in De Hypothetics Syllogismis. In place Boethius’ confusion Abaelard offered a simple and correct account of the hypothetical syllogism."
———. 2009. "Imposition and Essence: What's New in Abaelard' Theory of Meaning?" In The Word in Medieval Logic, Theology and Psychology. Acts of the XIIIth International Colloquium of the Société Internationale pour l'Étude de la Philosophie Médiévale, Kyoto, 27 September - 1 October 2005, edited by Shimizu, Tetsuro and Burnett, Charles, 173–212. Turnhout: Brepols.

"The proponents of the “New” or “Causal” theory of reference, and most famously Kripke, Putnam, Donellan and Kaplan,(4) argue that the Description Theory of names is manifestly false. They insist in particular that the reference of a term is semantically entirely unrelated to the ideas which happen to be present in the minds of the speaker and listeners when it is uttered." (pp. 173-174)

(...)

"According to Putnam ancient and mediaeval philosophers thus maintained versions of the mistaken theory that the sense of a word is a mental description. Against this he famously remarked that “Cut the pie anyway you like, ‘meanings’ just ain’t in the head.”(10)

In the face of the enormous success of the New Theory, it is not surprising that contemporary students of mediaeval philosophy trained in the analytic tradition should have tried to show that Putnam is wrong by finding anticipations of it in their favourite authors and in particular in the work of Peter Abaelard.

In this essay I shall investigate this question further and show that it is certainly a mistake to characterise Abaelard as a twelfth-century Putnam, just as much a mistake as dismissing him as a twelfth-century description theorist. Abaelard’s views on meaning are implacably psychologistic. He is an “essentialist,” of course, and his essentialism explains the apparent anticipation of the New Theory. The order of explanation connecting metaphysics to semantics is, however, quite the opposite in Abaelard to that on which the New Theory relies. For Abaelard “essentialism” does not follow from rigidity but rather guarantees it." (pp. 175-176)

(4) See, e.g., K. Donnellan, “Reference and Definite Descriptions”, in Philosophical Review 75 (1966), 281-304; S. Kripke, “Naming and Necessity”, in Semantics of Natural Language, ed. D. Davidson and G. Harman, Dordrecht 1972, 253-355; D. Kaplan, “Demonstratives”, in Themes from Kaplan, ed. J. Almog, J. Perry and H. Wettstein, Oxford 1989, 481-563; H. Putnam, “Meaning and Reference”, in Journal of Philosophy 70

(1973), 699-711, at 700.

(10 Putnam, “Meaning and Reference”, 704.
———. 2009. "The Development of Abaelard’s Theory of Topical Inference." In Les lieux de l'argumentation. Histoire du syllogisme topique d'Aristotle à Leibniz, edited by Biard, Joël and Mariani Zini, Fosca, 249–270. Turnhout: Brepols.

"What I will try to do here is to locate the relevant differences between Abaelard’s two works on the topics and show how the theory of the maximal proposition which he presents in his Glosses marks a significant development in his thinking about logic in comparison with that which he proposes in the Dialectica.

There is no doubt at all that both of the works are by Abaelard and no doubt either that the Glosses on De differentiis topicis are later than the Treatise on Topics in the Dialectica. What I think there should be considerable doubt about is just how much later they are. Mew’s proposed dating ol Abaelard’s works has the Dialectica, Glosses, and indeed the great bulk ol Abaelard’s logical writings, all produced within the four or five year, immediately following his castration in about 1117 (1). This seems to me rather difficult to accept, not least because of the significant theoretical development that we find in these works. My own view is that the Dialectica could and probably does, date from the beginning of the second decade ol the eleventh century and might well contain the novelties which we are told Abaelard propounded on Mont-Ste-Genevieve around 1110, or perhaps even earlier, and which led to the confrontation with Goswin recorded in the life of the Saint (2). Such a dating would then allow ten years for Abaelard to develop the new theory of propositionality which seems to account for the major differences between the Dialectica and the Glosses." (pp. 249-250)

(...)

"Conclusion

In the Glosses Abaelard offers an account of topical inference which, it seems to me, marks a very considerable advance over that presented in the Dialectica. It is rather odd that he does not acknowledge that the theory he is rejecting is one which he himself once held since he is not in general shy of saying « meminimus ». What is clear, however, is that in Abaelard’s work reflection on the nature of topical inference achieved a degree of sophistication which is not found at any other time in the history of the subject. We can only hope that it will not be another fifty years before this is fully recognised." (p. 270)
———. 2010. "The Development of Logic in the Twelfth Century." In The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy. Vol I, edited by Pasnau, Robert and Dyke, Christina van, 129–145. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

"The twelfth century was one of the most important and exciting periods in the history of logic. At the start of the century, the production of elementary glosses on ancient texts gave way to a sophisticated commentary literature in which writers developed and debated their own theories concerning what we would now classify as ontology and philosophical logic. Most famous today are the disputes over the status of universals; the present chapter, however, focuses on the less well-known – but, I believe, more important – work done on theories of meaning, modality, and the relation of logical consequence. Many of the works that have survived from the twelfth century are anonymous, but fortunately at least some of those by Peter Abaelard do bear his name: in particular his survey of logic, the Dialectica (probably written around 1112) and a set of commentaries on the books of the logica vetus known as the Logica “Ingredientibus” (probably written between 1115 and 1120). Abaelard is the outstanding logician of this period and is, indeed, one of the greatest of all logicians.(1) His work in these areas fundamentally shaped later development in logic; what follows is essentially an account of his views and of the problems to which they gave rise." (p. 129)

(1) For a more extensive discussion of Abaelard’s revolution in logic, see Christopher J. Martin, “Logic,” in J. Brower and K. Guilfoy (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Abelard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 158–99.
———. 2011. "“What An Ugly Child”: Abelard on Translation, Figurative Language, and Logic." Vivarium no. 49:26–49.

Abstract: "An examination the development of Peter Abaelard’s views on translation and figurative meaning. Mediaeval philosophers curiously do not connect the theory of translation implied by Aristotelian semantics with the multiplicity of tongues consequent upon the fall of Babel and do not seem to have much to offer to help in solving the problems of scriptural interpretation noted by Augustine. Indeed, on the Aristotelian account of meaning such problems do not arise. This paper shows that Abaelard is like others in this respect in not in general finding translation problematic. Two particular cases, oppositio in adiecto and accidental predication, however, present problems for him and the paper examines and tries to explain the differences between the account given in the Dialectica and that given in the Logica 'Ingredientibus'."
———. 2011. "A Note on the Attribution of the Literal Glosses in Paris, BnF, lat. 13368 to Peter Abaelard." In Arts du langage et théologie aux confins des XIe et XIIe siècles: textes, maîtres, débats, edited by Rosier-Catach, Irène. Turnhout: Brepols.

"I could go on to give more examples of the way in with the Literal Glosses fail to agree and fail to offer any trace of the phllosophical positions set out by Abaelard in his Dialectic and his Logics but at this point I think that have shown enough to at least raise considerable doubt about the authorship of these texts. I was convinced as soon as I began to read the Literal Glosses that they are not the work of the great Peripatetic of Pallet. He was the greatest star of his day and, as Geyer surely saw, they are the product of much lesser light." (p. 646)
———. 2011. "De Interpretatione 5-8: Aristotle, Boethius, and Abelard on Propositionality." In Methods and Methodologies. Aristotelian Logic East and West, 500-1500, edited by Cameron, Margaret and Marenbon, John, 207–228. Leiden: Brill.

"Boethius’ commentaries on de Interpretatione provided the Middle Ages with their introduction to the theory of meaning. Boethian semantics is developed on the basis of the distinction made by Aristotle in De Interpretatione 1, between the signification of terms and that of affirmations and negations – defined, remember, as the species of simple assertions. On this account of them affirmations signify mental states in which the mental items signified by their component significant terms are combined and negations signify mental states in which they are separated. Missing in the theory is an account of compound propositions showing how their meanings are obtained from the meanings of their components. Such an account requires a notion of unasserted propositional content. With it we may also locate what is common to different speech acts and explain how it is that they differ. The relevant differences are the differences in what we now call their force." (p. 211)
———. 2012. "Logical Consequence." In The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Philosophy, edited by Marenbon, John, 289–311. New York Oxford University Press.

"In the present chapter, I will give an outline of this history with each section corresponding to what I take to be an important phase in it. In the first I consider the material transmitted to the Early Middle Ages from Antiquity in order to show how thinking about consequence and, in particular, about the conditional proposition became the central project of early-twelfth-century logic. In the second I try to summarise the extraordinary development by Abelard of a unified relevantistic theory of the conditional and argument on the basis of Boethius’s confused accounts of the hypothetical syllogism and topical inference. This phase of my history ends with the collapse of Abelard’s project when it was discovered that his proposed logic was inconsistent. It is followed by a period of crisis, discussed in the third section, and its resolution late in the twelft h century in favour of the medieval version of the classical account of logical consequence, which became the standard one for the following century. This account is supplemented, however, with a relevantistic version of the consequence relation for use in special circumstances. The third phase ends, as does the chapter, with William of Ockham’s rejection of this pair of consequence relations in favour of a contrast between what he calls material and formal consequences in which relevance as a semantical requirement no longer has a place." (pp. 289-290)
———. 2016. "Abaelard on Logical Truth." In Formal Approaches and Natural Language in Medieval Logic: Proceedings of the Xixth European Symposium of Medieval Logic and Semantics, Geneva, 12-16 June 2012, edited by Cesalli, Laurent, Goubier, Frédéric and Libera, Alain de, 59–76. Turnhout: Brepols.

"Abaelard insists in his Dialectica and other works that the dividing opposite of any given proposition is formed by negating it as a whole and that this truth-functional opposite should be represented by preposing the negative particle to the proposition. He distinguishes the operation of propositional negation, iterable without limit, which he calls destructive negation, from the application of the negative particle to the predicate of an affirmation, forming what he calls its separative negation, to signify the separation of the predicate from the subject, a proposition which is a contrary of the original rather than its

contradictory. Separative negation is not iterable and if their subject term is empty both an affirmation and its separative negation are false. Abaelard also insists, explicitly contradicting Boethius, that the copulative conjunction «et» combines two propostions to form a single proposition which may be negated with destructive negation(39)." (pp. 68-69)

(...)

"Nowhere, as far as I know, does Abaelard classify the principles of conditional simplification. Given what he says about repetition and his remarks on propositional loci, it is hard, however, to suppose that he

would not classify it too as imperfect and local even though holds for all substitution of terms. But again it doesn’t really matter since he clearly supposes that it is logically true in just the same way as «si est homo, est animal’ is logically true as are all instances of contraposition and transitivity. Because he thinks this, however, he has left himself with no room for escape from the arguments which would be directed at his logic during his last decade in Paris(66)." (p. 76)

(39) See C. J. Martin, «Logic», in J. Brower – K. Gulfoy (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Abelard, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2004, pp. 158-199.

(66) See Martin, «Logic».
———. 2016. "Modality without the Prior Analytics: Early Twelfth Century Accounts of Modal Propositions." In Logical Modalities from Aristotle to Carnap, edited by Cresswell, Max, Mares, Edwin and Rini, Adriane, 113–132. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Abstract: "Peter Abaelard’s birth around 1079 coincided with the promulgation by Pope Gregory VII of a decree instructing his bishops to ensure that all clerics were trained in the liberal arts, and Abaelard’s life was shaped by the consequent increase in the number and importance of teaching masters. These early twelfth century teachers commented on the works of what would later be called the logica vetus , including from Aristotle only the Categories and De Interpretatione . Abaelard also had some access to the Sophistical Refutations and, indeed, seems to have known a little about the Prior Analytics. The latter work, however, played no role in the development of thinking about modal propositions in the period to be considered here. Rather it was Aristotle’s remarks on the proper placing of the negative particle in forming the contradictory of a given modal proposition in de Interpretatione 12, and 13, and a distinction made by Boethius between different forms of modality in his De Syllogismis Hypotheticis that prompted early twelfth century philosophers to investigate the nature of modal propositions."
———. 2016. "The Invention of Relations: Early Twelfth-Century Discussions of Aristotle's Account of Relatives." British Journal for the History of Philosophy no. 24:447–467.

Abstract: "Aristotle's discussion of relatives in the Categories presented its eleventh- and twelfth-century readers with many puzzles. Their attempt to solve these puzzles and to develop a coherent account of the category led around the beginning of the twelfth century to the invention of relations as items which stand to relatives as qualities stand to qualified substances. In this paper, I first discuss the details of Aristotle's accounts of relatives and the related category of ‘situation’ and Boethius' commentary on them. I then examine some of the earliest mediaeval commentaries on the Categories showing how the notion of relation, and in particular of individual relations, was developed. I conclude by showing how Peter Abaelard's treatment of relations in his Dialectica was part of an ongoing and sophisticated debate over the nature of relations."
———. 2018. "The Theory of Natural Consequence." Vivarium no. 56:340–366.

Abstract: "The history of thinking about consequences in the Middle Ages divides into three periods. During the first of these, from the eleventh to the middle of the twelfth century, and the second, from then until the beginning of the fourteenth century, the notion of natural consequence played a crucial role in logic, metaphysics, and theology. The first part of this paper traces the development of the theory of natural consequence in Abaelard’s work as the conditional of a connexive logic with an equivalent connexive disjunction and the crisis precipitated by the discovery of inconsistency in this system.

The second part considers the accounts of natural consequence given in the thirteenth century as a special case of the standard modal definition of consequence, one for which the principle ex impossibili quodlibet does not hold, in logics in which disjunction is understood extensionally."
———. 2019. "Only God Can Make a Tree: Abaelard on Wholes and Parts and Some Evidence of His Later Thinking about Them." Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy no. 7:44–66.

Abstract: "Problems about the nature of integral parts and wholes werecentral to twelfth-century discussions of the individuationand persistence over time of both substances and artifacts.This paper examines in detail Abaelard’s contribution tothese discussions arguing that Abaelard proposes a solutionto these problems which preserves our common senseintuitions about identity over time. In Abaelard’s work wefi nd an explicit solution to the problem of the identity overtime of living things which appeals to the persistence of thevegetative soul through the loss or addition of corporealmatter. In work from the school of the Montani weapparently also have an account of Abaelard’s solution to theproblem of the identity over time of artifacts which distinguishes between the role of a part in an integral whole and the material which plays that role such that the rolepersists when the matter is replaced."
McLaughlin, Mary Martin. 1969. "Abelard's Conceptions of the Liberal Arts and Philosophy." In Arts libéraux et philosophie au Moyen Age, 523–530. Paris: Vrin.
Mesaroş, Claudiu. 2005. "From Porphyry to Abelard: How Many Questions on Universals?" Chôra no. 3:253–262.

Abstract: "From the panoply of authors that tried to offer their solutions on the well known problem of the universals in the present paper there are selected three of them: Porphyry, Boethius and Abelard. The first, Porphyry is the one that can be considered the parent of the problem and in his Isagoge we can find its first formulation and for this we can have two alternative readings: a dialectical and a neo-platonic one. In the case of the second, Boethius, we also find two ways of interpreting the problem: a dialectical one and the latter from a theological point of view. The last of these authors, Abelard, we can observe an account of the problem from the perspective of his status theory which can be said to resemble the theological reading from Boethius."
Mews, Constant J. 1984. "A Neglected Gloss on the Isagoge by Peter Abelard." Freiburger Zeitschrift fur Philosophie und Theologie no. 31:35–55.

Reprinted as Essay II in: Constant J. Mews, Abelard and his Legacy, Aldershot: Ashgate 2001.

"Conclusion

This study has been concerned with the close relationships, both textual and thematic, between the anonymous Glossae secundum vocales, found in the Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana MS. M. 63 sup., ff. 73ra-81vb, and various known writings of Abelard on logic and theology.

These anonymous glosses seem to represent a revision made by Abelard of his Logica ’Ingredientibus’, while they appear to have been themselves revised in the Logica ’Nostrorum petitioni sociorum’. Geyer’s argument that they were compiled by a disciple of Abelard from various genuine glosses of his master is unnecessarily complicated and does not fit with the evidence. The text of the Glossae as found in the Ambrosian library manuscript may not be free from a number of scribal errors incurred in copying of the work, but this does not mean that the glosses themselves cannot be genuine. Detailed comparison of the work with other writings of Peter Abelard confirms Ottaviano’s opinion that the Glossae secundum vocales were written by Abelard himself." (p. 55)
———. 1987. "Aspects of the Evolution of Peter Abaelard's Thought on Signification and Predication." In Gilbert de Poitiers et ses Contemporains. Aux Origines de la 'Logica Modernorum', edited by Jolivet, Jean and Libera, Alain de, 15–41. Napoli: Biblioplis.

Reprinted as Essay VIII in: Constant J. Mews, Abelard and his Legacy, Aldershot: Ashgate 2001.

"In another study, I have advanced the hypothesis that some arguments of the Dialectica may not only be less sophisticated than those of the glosses on Porphyry, Aristotle and Boethius, but may predate those of the Logica ‘Ingredientibus’. The intention of this paper is to look in a little more detail at the evolution of Abaelard’s thought on signification and predication through comparison of arguments in the Theologia

‘Summi boni’ and Theologia Christiana with those in the Dialectica and glosses. We shall also examine references Abaelard makes in TChr [Theologia Christiana] to his Grammatica (either no longer extant or not yet identified),

enigmatically described as a retractatio predicamentorum, and suggest that this work contained some important new ideas of the peripatetic philosopher." (p. 16, a note omitted)
———. 1994. "Philosophy and Theology 1100-1150: The Search for Harmony." In Le XIIe siècle: Mutations et renoveau en France dans la première moité du XIIe siècle, edited by Gasparri, Françoise, 159–203. Paris: Léopard d'Or.

Reprinted as Essay II in: C. J. Mews, Reason and Belief in the Age of Roscelin and Abelard.

"In the Historia calamitatum, Peter Abelard passed over in silence his long period of study under Roscelin of Compiègne. Over a decade earlier, he had been chastised by Roscelin for not recognizing the debt which he owed to his former master, with whom he studied at Loches ‘from being a boy to being a young man’, perhaps from around 1093 to 1100. (66)" (p. 168, a note omitted)

(...)

"Sometime around 1100, Abelard came to Paris to study under William of Champeaux, then teaching dialectic as well as theology at the cathedral school of Notre-Dame. After attending William’s lectures on dialectic, he established himself as a teacher in his own right at schools attached to the royal castles of Melun and Corbeil." (p. 168)

(...)

"William left St-Victor in 1113 to become bishop of Châlons-sur-Marne, a position he held until his death in 1121. Abelard was invited to teach at the cathedral school of Notre-Dame. Probably sometime before 1120, Abelard began work on his Dialectica. In the first of its five tractates, dealing with various parts of speech, there are frequent discussions with the opinions of ‘our teacher’ or ‘our teacher V.’, once identified as ‘our teacher W.’, undoubtedly William of Champeaux. The section which might have dealt with universal categories is missing from the manuscript. The criticisms of ‘our teacher’ relate not to universal categories as such, but to the question of whether or not a noun signified everything on which it was imposed. This is the debate he presents as between Garmundus, who held ‘rationally’ that an utterance signified only what was in sententia vocis, and his teacher who held that it signified whatever that on which the vox was imposed, supposedly on the authority of Priscian’s definition that a noun signified a substance with a quality. (79) Abelard’s insistence here that album principally signified a quality, only secondarily a substance, restated the Aristotelian argument emphasised by the Glosule on Priscian. He was contradicting William’s definition in the Introductiones that an utterance like ‘animal’ signified a thing. Abelard also rejected William’s idea that a thing like ‘race’ inhered in a verb, like ‘he runs’, which meant no more than ‘he is running’. (81) The verb ‘is’ did not carry any substantive significance itself in ‘Socrates is white’ (as distinct from its meaning in ‘Socrates is')." (p. 169, some note omitted)

(66) Epist. ad Abaelardum, ed. Reiners, p. 63. (...)

(79) Dial, pp. 112-3.

(81) Dial, p. 123.
———. 2001. "Hugh Metel, Heloise, and Peter Abelard. The Letters of an Augustinian Canon and the Challenge of Innovation in Twelfth-Century Lorraine." Viator. Medieval and Renaissance Studies no. 32:59–91.

Abstract: "The fifty-five letters of Hugh Metel (ca. 1080-1150), an Augustinian canon of Toul, were edited by C. L. Hugo in 1731, but have attracted little scholarly attention, even though some of them are addressed to such famous personalities as Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter Abelard, and Heloise. This paper questions simplistic attempts to describe Hugh as a traditionalist by showing that although he admired Bernard of Clairvaux, he was much more interested than Bernard in combining classical poetic allusions with scriptural imagery. Hugh was interested in innovative educational trends in the twelfth century, but became critical of negative tendencies, such as those embodied in Peter Abelard. At the same time his two letters to Heloise provide valuable evidence into the extent of her reputation as an innovative writer. Hugh's prose is compared to other contemporary letter collections, in particular the Epistolae duorum amantium, which, this article argues, records the early letters of Abelard and Heloise."
———. 2003. "Peter Abelard on Dialectic, Rhetoric, and the Principles of Argument." In Rhetoric and Renewal in the Latin West 1100-1540. Essays in Honour of John O. Ward, edited by Mews, Constant J., Nederman, Cary J. and Thomson, Rodney M., 37–53. Turnhout: Brepols.

"Analysis of Abelard’s dialectic has often concentrated on his teaching about universals as an issue in ontology. The topic of the meaning of a universal term (a term predicated of different individuals) was only a preliminary issue, however, leading up to analysis of the principles of argument. By far the largest part of the Dialectica is taken up with discussion of topics, the principles on which all argument is based. Abelard both summarizes and revises what Boethius has to say in his De differentiis topicis and In Topica Ciceronis. As Jean Jolivet argued in his 1969 study Arts du langage et théologie chez Abelard, Abelard’s discussion of universals was part of a much broader analysis of signification in general.(16) He argued that whether Abelard was writing about language as a whole, or more specifically as theological discourse in particular, he introduced a consistent questioning of the notion that language ever signifies things, an approach that he suggested could be called non-réalisme.

Jolivet was principally concerned with Abelard’s critique of traditional semantics. More recently, John Marenbon has questioned the assumption that Abelard never moved beyond being a critical thinker, by arguing that after an early phase in his teaching, dominated by logical concerns, he transferred his attention to an ethically based theology, directed at nothing less than ‘moral reformation’.(17)" (p. 40)

(16) Jean Jolivet, Arts du langage et théologie chez Abélard (Paris: Vrin, 1969).

(17) Marenbon, The Philosophy of Peter Abelard, p. 213.
———. 2004. "Logic, Rhetoric and the Topics in the Middle Ages. Peter Abelard and Aristotelian Tradition." In Die Lektüre der Welt: zur Theorie, Geschichte und Soziologie kultureller Praxis. Festschrift für Walter Veit = Worlds of Reading: on the Theory, History, and Sociology of Cultural Practice, edited by Heinze, Helmut and Wlller, Christiane, 25–35. Bern: Peter Lang.
Mews, Constant J., and Flint, V. I. J. 1995. Peter Abelard: Authors of the Middle Ages: Volume II, Nos. 5-6. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Contents: 5. Constant J. Mews: Peter Abelard 1-88; 6. V. I. J. Flint: Honorius Augustodunensis 89-183.

"Only with the researches of Cousin, first published in 1836, has Abelard's significance as a thinker begun to be appreciated.

Abelard's earliest known writings on dialectic are relatively brief, so-called 'literal' glosses on key texts then being used in the teaching of logic: Porphyry's Isagoge or Introduction, Aristotle's Categories and Periermeneias or On Interpretation of Aristotle and Boethius' On Divisions. These texts, along with Boethius' On Categorical Syllogisms, On Hypothetical Syllogisms and On Different Topics, had begun to supplant more derivative treatises on the subject since the late tenth century.(80) Abelard would never gain more than a passing knowledge of other Aristotelian works, like the Sophistical Refutations and Prior Analytics, which only became known in Paris in the 1130s(.81).

In the 'literal' glosses on the Isagoge, Abelard examined classes in general (like genus, species, and so on) as voces or vocal utterances of human imposition in a manner already developed by Roscelin of Compiegne. Roscelin himself may have been influenced by the ideas of the anonymous Glosule on Priscian's Grammatical Institutes, an influential commentary from the late eleventh century which applied Aristotelian principles to understanding the 'causes' of the voces discussed by Priscian.(82) In particular it refined Priscian's rather crude definition that a noun signified 'a substance with a quality', by defining a noun such as homo as an utterance originally imposed to name or denote an individual person, but signifying the quality of manhood.(83)" (p. 27)

(81) De Rijk 1970², xvi-xviii.

82 On the Glosule, see M. Gibson, The Early Scholastic «Glosule» to Priscian, «Institutiones Grammaticae»: The Text and its Influence', Studi Medievali 3a ser. 20, 1 (1979), 235-54. Mews 1992 suggests that its author is the John who taught that dialectic was an ars vocalis, according to the Historia Francica, ed. Bouquet, 12, 3, and numbered Roscelin, Robert of Paris and Arnulf of Laon among his disciples.

(83) Ed. De Rijk, Logica Modernorum 2.1, 228 n.1.

References

De Rijk, L.M., ed. Petrus Abaelardus. Dialectica, Wijsgerige Teksten en Studies 1 (Assen 1956, 1970²).

De Rijk, L.M. de, Logica Modernorum: a Contribution to the History of Early Terminist Logic, 1 (Assen 1962, 1967).

Mews, C. J. 'Nominalism and Theology before Peter Abaelard: New Light on Roscelin of Compiegne', Vivarium 30 (1992), 5-37.
Moonan, Lawrence. 1989. "Abelard's Use the "Timaeus"." Archives d'histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Age no. 56:7–90.

"In part I this study presents, in the order in which they occur in the Timaeus, the texts which Abelard uses. I distinguish 1) verbatim quotations of sentence length or more, 2) texts where he is plainly paraphrasing the Timaeus, and 3) texts to which arguably purposeful allusions are to be found in Abelard. I draw attention to interesting peculiarities of Abelard's text, to the varying extent to which the critical state of the texts we now have for Abelard permits comparison with what is available in either the text or the apparatus of the modern edition of Calcidius.(3) And I note potentially

significant features of the doctrinal and literary contexts in Abelard where the Timaeus texts are being used. In particular I note which of four discernible genres, arguably to be distinguished in Abelard, are in question in the various uses of the texts. Towards the end of part I, Abelard's poetical uses of the Timaeus, which have hitherto had less specific attention than they merit, are isolated and examined.

In part II I go on to consider just how Abelard handled themes or issues in which texts from the Timaeus appeared (in pt I) to have been playing a noteworthy part.

(...)

In part III, I offer some conclusions and some fresh starting-points. Besides conclusions of a narrower sort, as on the number, distribution and nature of Abelard's textual debts to Plato and his translators, some wider ones are drawn, on the specific content of certain positions of Abelard which are not otherwise easy to appreciate justly, and on what specifically was at issue between him and his early critics, on certain matters of importance. Notably, the study permits us to argue that, on the notorious question of whether God could make a better, or any other, world than he did, the Timaeus was indeed of great importance, but only in a rather special way: not by providing grounds of substance for any serious condemnation alleging failure in orthodoxy, but by making it only too easy for some of his critics to organise opposition to Abelard's theological work more generally from defenders of orthodoxy." (pp. 8-9)

(3) J. H. Waszink, ed., in cooperation with P. J. Jensen, Timaeus a Calcidio translatus Commentarioque instructus, Leyden 1962, second edn 1975. This is vol. 4 of Plato Latinus, general editor R. Klibansky,
Noël, Roxane. 2021. "Abelard’s Homo Intelligitur Puzzle: On the Relation Between Universal Understandings and a World of Singulars." In Women’s Perspectives on Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, edited by Chouinard, Isabelle, McConaughey, Zoe, Ramos, Aline Medeiros and Noël, Roxane, 221–238. Cham (Switzerland): Springer.

Abstract: "What is understood when “man” is understood? This question proves troublesome for Peter Abelard’s nominalist account of universal understandings which, to be sound, must attend to things as they really are. If there are no universal things, how can universal understandings be sound? His answer, in the Treatise on Understandings, is that such understandings, far from being about nothing, are about natures. However, it is hard to see how this solves the problem, given how he states earlier in the treatise that natures are identical to individuals. In this paper, I present a reading of what he means by “nature” that allows us to make sense of his proposed solution to the problem. In addition, I contend that, for his solution to work, the relevant relation between the mind and the world is to be understood as attention (or “attending to”), instead of his previous view based on similitude."
Normore, Calvin G. 1987. "The Tradition of Mediaeval Nominalism." In Studies in Medieval Philosophy, edited by Wippel, John F., 201–217. Washington, D.C:: The Catholic University of America Press.

"When does nominalism begin? Most of our earliest sources are completely silent about this question, but there are two sentences by the twelfth-century historian Otto von Freising which just might suggest an answer. It is thought that Otto studied in Paris from about 1127 to 1133, so his testimony has some authority. In book I of his Gesta Frederici Imperatoris, Otto writes of Peter Abaelard that "he had for his teacher first one Roscelin, who first taught in our time the sententia vocum."(6) This gnomic remark could perhaps be glossed with the help of Otto's claim just a bit later in the passage that Abaelard, "holding in the faculty of natural studies the sententia vocum seu nominum, incautiously introduced it into theology." (7)" (p. 203)

(...)

"What, then, is mediaeval nominalism and with which of the two faces of twentieth-century nominalism does it connect? My argument here has been that mediaeval nominalism began in a series of worries about the relation of sentences and clauses to the world, worries made central by Abaelard, and that it is as much a problem in semantic theory as in metaphysics. I have argued that it has nothing to do with the problem of universals and that seeing it as focused on the problem of universals simply distorts our picture of what went on. I think it less distorting but still inaccurate to see it as a position about the ontological status of abstract entities. The impulse toward eliminating a layer of semantic entities for sentences to signify would support a parsimony about abstract entities but does not absolutely require it.

Nominalists resist multiplying things when they multiply terms, but there remains ample room for disagreement about how this economy is to be obtained. This disagreement about the methods by which language can describe the world without being in any way isomorphic with it is what underlies the debate between supporters of the complexe significabile and their opponents. It is a family quarrel and I suspect just one of the many which a thorough investigation of the tradition of mediaeval nominalism and the efforts to do physics and theology from a nominalist perspective will reveal." (pp. 16-217)
———. 1992. "Abelard and the School of the Nominales." Vivarium no. 30:80–96.

"What of the positive evidence that the Nominales were in any sense Abelard' s followers. Otto [of Freising] says that Abelard held the 'sententia vocum seu nominum' in natural philosophy and introduced it into theology, and Walter Map says that he was 'princeps' among the Nominales. We know that Abelard was a charismatic and popular teacher, and we have no evidence at all of his followers (who must have been many) being called by any other name. We must conclude, then, that either he did not found a distinctive school or that the Nominales are that school. On the other hand I know of no text which both identifies itself as from the Nominales and calls Abelard 'our master' and no text which attributes views identified in the text as Abelard' s to the Nominales. The identification of the Nominales as Abelard's followers would, then, have to rest squarely on finding them characterized by distinctive theses which we have independent reasons to think of as in some way peculiar to Abelard.(9)

(9) The need to find distinctive theses and not merely theses which Abelard and the Nominales both held is emphasized in Courtenay [1992a.

References

Courternay, W, J. 1992a, ' Nominales ' and Rules of Inference, in: theorie = Argumentations-theorie. Scholastische Forschungen zu den logischen und semantischen Regeln korrekten Folgens (Eighth European Symposium for Medieval Logic and Semantics, Freiburg i.B., May 24-27, 1988), ed. K. Jacobi. forthcoming [1993].

Map, Walter. De nugis curialium. Latin text edited, with a preface, by Montague Rhodes James. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1914. Anecdota Oxoniensia, Medieval and Modern Series, 6.

Otto of Freising, Gesta Frederici I, ed. G. Waitz and B. De Simson, Hannover-Leipzig 1912.
Novikoff, Alex J. 2014. "Peter Abelard and Disputation: A Reexamination." Rhetorica:323–347.

Abstract: "This paper examines Abelard’s engagement with disputation (disputatio) from the vantage point of twelfth-century scholasticism.

Eschewing the well-worn details of Abelard’s personal life and philosophical positions, analysis is instead focused on two parallel dimensions of his career: the manner in which he attempted to face-off with his adversaries through public debate and his underlying theory of disputation. It is argued that Abelard’s theory is to be found not in his theological or logical works, but in his polemical letters and his ethical dialogue, the Collationes, which together offer a coherent hermeneutical strategy for discerning truth.

Abelard’s contribution to the art of disputation needs to be assessed in light of his broader involvement in the scholastic method and contemporary Jewish-Christian relations."
Nuchelmans, Gabriel. 1973. Theories of the Proposition. Ancient and Medieval Conceptions of the Bearers of Truth and Falsity. Amsterdam: North-Holland.

Abelard: pp. 139-163.
Omelyantchyk, Valentin. 1999. "Abelard, a follower of Ammonius? Early medieval commentaries on Peri hermeneias 23 a 7 - 23 a 18." In Entwicklungslinien mittelalterlicher Philosophie: Vorträge des 5. Kongresses der Österreichischen Gesellschaft für Philosophie (Innsbruck, 1.-4. Februar 1998), edited by Leibold, Gerhard and Löffler, Winfried, 64–72. Wien: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky.
Panaccio, Claude. 2010. "Mental Language and Predication. Ockham and Abelard." Analytica, Rio de Janeiro no. 14:183–194.

Abstract: "One of the main tenets of my book Le discours intérieur. De Platon à Guillaume d’Ockham was that strictly speaking, the idea of mental language originated with William of Ockham in the late 1310s and early 1320s.

In a recent paper [*], however, Peter King claims that “Abelard was the author of the first full-fledged theory of mental language in the Middle Ages”. In this paper I would like to reply to King’s claim, and to point out the very significant differences that exist between Abelard and Ockham on mental language."

[*] King, P. 2007. “Abelard on Mental Language”. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 81, pp. 169-187.
———. 2012. "Universals." In The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Philosophy, edited by Marenbon, John, 385–402. New York Oxford University Press.

"Peter Abelard, at the same period [early-twelfth century], goes so far as to reformulate Porphyry’s questions in a straightforwardly semantical way (see King 2007, 263–68). ‘Are genera and species real or in bare thoughts alone?’ is reinterpreted as asking about genus and species terms like the words ‘animal’ and ‘man’ if they ‘signify any truly existing things’ (Peter Abelard 1994 , 51). ‘Are genus and species bodies or incorporeals?’ becomes: ‘Do they [genus and species terms] signify subsistents that are corporeal or that are incorporeal?’ (ibid.). And ‘Are they separated or in sensibles?’ is understood as a way of asking if these terms ‘signify an intrinsic substance existing in a sensible thing’ or something separate? (ibid., 53). These questions, Abelard adds, ‘rightly arose about universal words’ (ibid., 54), making it clear that Porphyry’s questionnaire, in his interpretation, is about the ‘modes of signifying’ of general terms." (p. 391)

References

King, Peter. 2007. Abelard’s Answers to Porphyry. Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale 18:249–70.

Peter Abelard. 1994. ‘From the “Glosses on Porphyry” in his Logica ingredientibus ’. In Spade 1994, 26–56.

Spade, Paul V. 1994. Five Texts on the Medieval Problem of Universals. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Pinzani, Roberto. 2003. The Logical Grammar of Abelard. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

"Having hopefully clarified what we are looking for and which notional tools we will utilize, it is perhaps worth saying where the subject of our study lays. The notion of logical grammar allows to unify, from a thematic point of view, doctrines and exegetic traditions not always originated from a single archetype text. The logical-linguistic works of Aristotle (first of all the De Interpretatione) and Priscian's Institutio, represent the main sources for Abelard's dialectic.

(...)

In addition to the comments on the Categoriae and Isagoge which put into practice the 'nominalism' (or, better, semanticism) of the author, we have comments or original treatises devoted to De Interpretatione and Boethius' logical works. In the Dialectica the part which precedes the treatise on syllogistic (Treatise 1 of Dialectica), is devoted to the grammatical analysis of terms and sentences, whereas the first books of the syllogistic deal with the different kinds of categorical propositions with particular attention to the issues of the predicative link, syncategorematic expressions and modal sentences. In the treatises on topics (in Introductiones Dialecticae and in Treatise 3 of Dialectica) as will be seen, Abelard considers the truth of hypothetical propositions, as well as the meaning of the predicative link. De Hypoteticis (Treatise 4 of Dialectica) contains the syntactic analysis of hypothetical forms (the semantic interpretation of which is postponed to the treatise on topics). The books on defmition and division (Treatise 5 of Dialectica), due to their close links with both categories and topics, offer the same occasions to debate about and study the syntax and semantics of declarative sentences. In conclusion we can say that Abelard enlarged the previous context of logical grammar (De Interpretatione) so as to include almost the whole logica vetus, by carrying out a sort of contamination of the logical authorities with the texts of the grammatical tradition." (p. 4)
———. 2018. The Problem of Universals from Boethius to John of Salisbury. Leiden: Brill.

Chapter 8: The Position of Abelard on Porphyry, pp. 198-234.

"I will focus on the writings devoted to the Porphyrian problem. My reconstruction of Abelard’s position on the problem of universals is essentially based on the commentaries on Porphyry in the Logica Ingredientibus and the Logica nostrorum petitioni sociorum. In these works Abelard does not abide by the genre rules of the literal glosses and provides lengthy and independent doctrinal developments. The reader is invited to reflect upon the fact that in addition to the problems raised by Porphyry, “there are other no less demanding issues, such as the common cause of imposition and the conceptual meaning.”

This observation seems on the one hand to indicate the urgency of certain important themes, and on the other a somewhat unconventional style.(2)

The general picture which emerges is that of a discussion taking place within a rigid framework: universals are the genera and species mentioned by Porphyry. However, there are ‘wormholes’ in the established framework that lead to hidden theoretical points. One of these has to do with a concept of property which is closer to contemporary sensibilities than one may expect. It was mentioned during our discussion of realism (see in particular the section on the ‘missing thesis’) and it will be further discussed here. The issue is linked to the theme of syntactic and semantic categorization, and it is of particular importance in Abelard’s works, since his dialectics arises from a combination of logic (in the Aristotelian tradition) and grammar (in the tradition of Priscian commentators).(3)" (pp. 198-199, a note omitted)

(2) Cf. Log. Ing., 8, 11–14. This point is duly noted by P. King, P. King, ‘Abelard’s answers to Porphyry,’ Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale, 18 (2009), 249–270.

(3) The first two chapters of our The Logical Grammar of Abelard are devoted to this contamination and the topic of categorization.
Piolata, Thomas. 2021. "The Significance of Supposition. Abelard and Bonaventure on the Question of God Begetting God." Collectanea Franciscana no. 91:27–49.

Summary: "This article treats the way in which Peter Abelard and Bonaventure deal with the logic of the phrase Deus genuit Deum, that is, how to understand logically the idea – rooted in the Creed – that God generates God (“God from God”). As Augustine had affirmed, essence cannot generate itself. Consequently, this aspect of the faith poses a potential problem. To handle it, the logical theory of supposition is key. This theory concerns the reference of a given term in a phrase, and not its signification. Abelard did not have the privilege of supposition. By the time of Bonaventure, however, it had become a standard tool of logical analysis. The goal of this study is thus to articulate the logical treatment of this phrase in Abelard and Bonaventure, and thereby to highlight the importance of the theory of supposition."
Potter, Joel M. 2009. "The Status of Status: Boethian Realism in Abelard." Carmina Philosophiae no. 18:127–135.

Abstract: "Peter Abelard's claim that universals are only words is well known, yet its metaphysical bearing for Abelard's philosophy is much disputed. Peter King has recently suggested that Abelard's nominalism is only an element of his larger irrealist metaphysic. Against this interpretation, I argue that Abelard's view is better understood as a form of moderate realism and a development of the solution attempted by Boethius in his Second Commentary on Porphyry's Isagoge. Both Abelard and Boethius clearly deny the independent existence of universals, yet they should not be called irrealists, since they agree that universal words or concepts have a firm basis in real, individual things."

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