Accueil
"Abelard's writings do not [...] form a single, coherent system. Abelard's interests and achievements fall into two roughly chronological phases. As a logician, he worked within the structure provided by the ancient texts which made up the logical curriculum. He provided cogent and often original answers to the philosophical questions which this study raised, but he did not pursue them systematically. He developed a sophisticated account of the semantics of universal words, but he did not resolve an underlying tension which runs through his ontology. As a writer on Christian doctrine, by contrast, Abelard strove to create his own theological system. Although he used methods and concepts he had developed within his logic, they were incidental to his main suppositions and aims. The bearing of Abelard's theological system was predominantly ethical: in the course of developing it, he elaborated a coherent, systematic and wide-ranging moral theory.
This book considers Abelard primarily not as a theologian or a logician, but as a philosopher. Since, however, his ethics is intimately bound up with the doctrinal questions he explored, Abelard's theology cannot be ignored, although his views on the various controversial questions about the faith are not its central concern." (pp.2-3)
[Part I]
[Part II]
"Historians have long recognized that, in his logical works, Abelard does much more than merely explore the conditions for the validity of arguments. His frequently analysed passages on universals discuss the relations between language, thought and things in the world. Elsewhere too he considers problems of signification, and also questions about the nature of possibility and necessity, facts and statements, future contingents and free will. These parts of Abelard's writing have all received close attention from modern scholars. But they have regarded them as aspects of his work as a logician. Even the one recent writer to have looked in some detail at Abelard's ontology does so merely as a prelude to examining his theory of entailment.
In one sense, these scholars are right. The form of Abelard's surviving work as a logician follows the pattern of the authoritative ancient set texts, and his philosophical discussions occur only when occasioned by his task as a logical exegete and instructor. None the less, in the course of expounding the logic of Porphyry and Aristotle, Abelard provides tentative explorations of some of the deepest philosophical questions: what are the ultimate constituents of the world, and how do they relate to each other and to human thought and language ? Abelard did not provide systematic answers to them ; some of his ideas are not fully worked, and on some questions Abelard advances different views which do not cohere with each other. He remained too closely bound to the views he took from Aristotle's Categories and Porphyry's Isagoge fully to develop his often bold insights. Yet Abelard's ontology is far more complex, wide-ranging and subtle than most historians have allowed." (p.99)
[Chapter 4. Logic, philosophy and exegesis]
"From about the first century BC, the Categories has been placed as the first text of Aristotle's Organon and regarded as a work of logic: an examination of the terms which make up statements, treated in De interpretation, which, in turn, make up arguments, treated in the Analytics. Yet, as modern scholars have begun to recognize, Aristotle probably had no such narrowly logical intention in mind when he composed the material which became the Categories. The Categories should be seen as a treatise covering some of the same fundamental questions about what sorts of things exist as Aristotle would later raise, and answer differently, in his Metaphysics." (p.101)
"The ontology of the Categories begins from a distinction Aristotle has noticed between two types of predication (predication is here of things, not words). One type is described by sentences such as 'Socrates is a man'. Such a predicate is 'said of a subject' (dicitur de subiecto). What is said of a subject, Aristotle explains, is not 'individual and numerically one' [...] moreover, when A is said of a subject B, then not only is the statement 'B is A' true, but it will remain true if for 'A' is substituted the definition of the item A introduces.
The other type of predication is described by sentences such as 'Socrates is white'. Such a predicate is 'in a subject' (in subiecto). Something is in a subject, according to Aristotle [...] when 'it is in something not as a part, and it is impossible that it is without that in which it is'. The second condition (inseparability) is -as will emerge- open to various interpretations. Using these two technical terms Aristotle makes [...] a fourfold division of 'those things which are' (eorum quae sunt)." (p.102)
-John Marenbon, The philosophy of Peter Abelard, Cambridge University Press, 1997, 373 pages.
