This article aims to demonstrate the interdependence of semantics and noetics against the referentialist trend in Abelard studies conceiving semantics as confined to the truth/falsity function. The article takes as a turning point of the argument Abelard’s question “can a true proposition generate a false understanding?” which secondary literature does not take into account. Starting from the analysis of this question, the article aims to show the development of an enhanced notion of understanding compared to the Boethian one. The core (...) of this enhanced notion of understanding is the action of attentio, which is the condition for the elaboration of a coherent and global definition of signification. The analysis of the mental action of attentio entails the description of other kinds of mental actions, leading one to conceive understanding as a multi-layered complex of actions. (shrink)

This thesis focuses on Abelard’s solution to the problem of understanding universals as presented in the Tractatus de Intellectibus. He examines this issue by asking what is understood when we consider the term ‘man’, a problem I call the ‘homo intelligitur [man is understood]’ problem. This is an important question, since earlier in the Treatise, Abelard states that understandings paying attention [attendens] to things otherwise than they are are empty, and thus, cannot be true. The challenge is therefore to explain (...) how understandings about universals, such as genera and species, can be sound, given that Abelard is a nominalist and, as such, does not believe in the existence of universal entities. His own answer to the problem is that such understandings attend to natures. However, since natures are, on his view, nothing more than the individuals they belong to, it is unclear how his solution is intended to work. I propose two ways to understand Abelard’s solution to the ‘homo intelligitur’ problem, identifying their respective merits and drawbacks. The first one is to treat ‘nature’ as meaning ‘status’. I explore this solution in Chapters 2 and 3, and conclude that while it has the advantage of establishing links between De Intellectibus and previous logical works by Abelard, it has some significant drawbacks, most notably that it is unclear how we can have epistemic access to status given that status are not things, which renders unclear how the criteria for the soundness of understandings can be met. The second one involves treating natures as referring to behaviors typical of members of a given genus or species. These behaviors come from the particular essential forms possessed by individuals, i.e. their differentiae understood as analogous to nuclear tropes in Peter Simons’ trope theory. I conclude that this solution is more intuitive than the first one and has the advantage of not depending on a specific interpretation of the evolution of Abelard’s thought. However, it is unclear how to treat behaviors and regularities in his ontology. (shrink)

Spoken sentences have parts. Therefore they take time to speak. For instance, when you say, ‘Socrates is running’, you begin by uttering the subject term Socrates, before carrying on to the predicate. But are the corresponding thoughts also composite? And are such thoughts extended across time, like their spoken counterparts? Peter Abelard gave an affirmative response to both questions. Alberic of Paris denied the first and, as a corollary, denied the second. Here, I first set out Abelard’s account. I then (...) present a series of arguments against Abelard, reconstructed from (sometimes fragmentary) manuscripts associated with Alberic’s school. I conclude with an observation about present philosophy of language: this twelfth-century debate points to some undefended (and largely unstated) assumptions common to more recent thinking about propositions. (shrink)

This special issue grew out of a small conference The Known & the Unknown: Exploring Twelfth-Century Philosophy, which was funded by the Carlsberg Foundation, hosted by the Saxo Institute, and held at the University of Copenhagen in April 2018. Its central topic was the many, mostly unexplored, commentaries on Aristotle, Boethius, and Porphyry that constitute the key textual evidence for a fascinating phenomenon that, although it played a pivotal role in the philosophical revival of Western Europe, remains frustratingly underexplored to (...) this day: the logical schools of the twelfth century. The present introduction has two parts. In the first part, John Marenbon lays out the background to this special issue of Vivarium as a whole, explaining both what the philosophical project pursued by twelfth-century logicians was and how, and how far, the historical project of understanding it has progressed over the last two hundred years. In the second part, Heine Hansen briefly presents the issue and its contents. (shrink)