Abelard, Pierre (c.1079-1142)

Pierre Abelard & Heliose

Pierre Abélard (c.1079-1142) was a French philosopher born in the village of Palet near Nantes. He received his instruction in dialectic from Roscelin of Compiegne and William of Champeaux, and later developed into a brilliant and highly influential teacher in his own right, chiefly at Paris.

After a tragic love affair with Héliose, neice of a canon of Notre Dame, he embraced the monastic life. His subsequent career was filled with turmoila and controversy. His theological writings encountered the determined opposition of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, founder of the abbey there. Abélard also met with ecclesiastical condemnation at Soissons (1121) and Sens (1141). He was laid under ban of excommunication by the pope and, submitting to the judgment of the Church, retired to the Abbey of Cluny, where he shortly died.

As a dialectician, Abélard criticised and rejected all forms of realism maintained during his time, especially that of his teacher, William of Champeaux, whom he forced, by his attacks, first to modify and then altogether to abandon his original position. Influenced by the nominalism of Roscelin, he insisted that if we define a universal as "what can be predicated of many," genera and species and the rest cannot be things (res), but only words (voces).

His more matrue position is that universals are not voces, which are vocally uttered sounds and are, after all, things, which cannot be predicated, but that universals are sermones, words in the sense of sounds to which a signification has been assigned by human institution. But Abélard's doctrine considered as a whole is no mere nominalism. He substantially reappropriated for the first time in the Middle Ages the moderate realism of Boethius and anticipated that of Thomas Aquinas.

Abélard's ethics emphasised the central importance for moral judgment of the intention of the agent. His best known works are the theological treatise, Scito te ipsum and his autobiography, Historia Calamitatum, both of which would count as rare texts.

See Philosophers