When1: 1120
When2: 1140
Who: Pierre Abelard [Abelard, Pierre] or Peter Abelard [Abelard, Peter]
What: priest/scholar
Where: Cluny, France
works\ Aye and Nay [1120]; Dialectics [1121 to 1125: logic]; Story of My Misfortunes [1132: including Letter of Heloise and Abelard]; Introduction to Theology [1136 to 1140]
Detail: He lived 1079 to 1142, was nominalist Scholastic, founded University of Paris, and loved Héloïse. He studied under Roscelin and William of Champeaux.
Epistemology
Antecedent and consequent can logically relate {relevance logic, Abelard} by sharing word or variable or by being dependent.
Ideal forms {universal, Abelard} have basis in particulars, as features shared by many things, but they exist only in thought and speech. Use in thought or judgment defines universal. Universal acquires meaning from perception and sense experience and is not just convention. Universals are real insofar as they express similarities or essential object characteristics to which people respond to make concepts or dispositions {conceptualism, Abelard}.
Body sense qualities are confused ideas, held in imagination or perception. Reason uses sense qualities to build intuitions {full perception} of objects and then concepts and judgments. Then reason can form opinions, have faith, have knowledge, and know universals.
Necessity about things {de re}, as used in sentences, differs from necessity about words {de dicto}, as used in predicates.
Revelation does not give truth or knowledge.
Ethics
Goodness and perfection are separate from reality and being.
Thoughts, feelings, and desires do not cause evil. Good and evil are not actions in themselves but decisions of will. Consent to do bad thing is evil, not act itself, because will is action cause. If will has decided to do evil, it is evil, even if no act happens. Conscience allows will to know God's will, so if will goes against conscience, it has done evil.
Moral natural law {God's will} is the same for all people, but sin obscures it. Some people know it better than others.
Law
Human convention makes some laws {positive law, Abelard} {jus positivum}.
Metaphysics
Higher than universals are God's ideas, which create world. Universals can exist before world as God's ideas, in world as quality similarities and after world as mental concepts, ideas derived from Avicenna.
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Date Modified: 2022.0224