Peter Abelard: the nature of universals

How do you know that a horse is a horse?

Background

Peter Abelard (1079 - 1142) was born in Le Pallet, near Nantes, in France. He was a very influential philosopher, logician, theologian, poet, and musician in the 12th century. He challenged the established views on universals, ethics, and theology with his innovative use of dialectics and language analysis. He is also famous for his tragic love affair with Héloïse d'Argenteuil, whom he married in secret. Unhappy with the affair, Héloïse's uncle castrated Abelard and ensured that they would never see eachother again. Despite being separated, Héloïse and Abelard maintained their relationship through letters and they were eventually buried together.

Universals: nominalism and realism

A universal is a word like ‘man’, in the sentences, ‘Socrates is a man’ and ‘Adam is a man’. The question is, how do we know what a man is? What do Socrates and Adam have in common? What do we recognise in each?

Abelard’s first teacher, Roscelin, said that all Adam and Socrates have in common is the name, the noun used to describe them. They need not be anymore similar than two people called ‘Dave’. – Later philosophers called this nominalism. (A nominal is anything that functions as a noun.)

Abelard’s second teacher, William of Champeaux, said that Adam and Socrates had a thing in common – the human species. This was more than just a name, there was some real thing that the word man pointed to, some ethereal but real quality of manliness. This came to be called realism. (From the latin res, meaning 'thing'.)

Abelard's rejection of nominalism and realism

Firstly, Abelard rejected nominalism:

Adam and Socrates have only the noun in common (Nominalism), only if there is no resemblance between them
BUT there is a resemblance.
∴ Adam and Socrates have more than the noun in common.

Secondly, he rejected realism:

Adam and Socrates have a thing in common (Realism), only if a resemblance is a thing.
A resemblance is not a thing.
∴ Adam and Socrates do not have a thing in common

Abelard argued that a word stands for something real (is a label for a thing) only if it is the subject and not the predicate of a sentence, and we can ask which x? (e.g. ‘The old man was a boy’ – the word boy here doesn’t stand for any particular boy, but 'the old man' does.)

Some of the confusion here, Abelard thought, was with the word 'is'. We assume that it always signifies existence, but often it is merely a copula. i.e. it merely connects the description with the thing.

‘When we maintain that the likeness between things is not a thing, we must void it seeming as if we were treating them as having nothing in common; since what in fact we say is that the one and the other resemble each other in their being human, that is, in that they are both human beings. We mean nothing more than that they are human beings and do not differ at all in this regard.’

Can you workout where Abelard's argument is going?

So Abelard has these conclusions:

There is resemblance between things described by the same universal (e.g. there is a resemblance between all men).
But that resemblance is not a thing.

So now the question is what is a resemblance? It cannot be anything physical, so what is it?

His conclusion is that there is no universal thing that the universal noun stands for, but the sound ‘man’ is turned into a universal noun by our understanding – the universal nature of universals is conceptual. (Like a lump of stone is turned into a statute by a sculptor.)

This position became known as the beginnings of conceptualism.

Tasks

Explain the meaning of nominalism and realism and explain Abelard's rejection of each.
Explain Abelard's idea of conceptualism.
Evaluate Abelard's position. Are you convinced by what he says?

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