Abelard Peter, in French, Pierre Abailard or Abélard (1079–1144), French theologian whose writings, particularly Theologia Christiana, constitute one of the more impressive attempts of the medieval period to use logical techniques to explicate Christian dogmas. He was born of a minor noble family in Brittany and studied logic and theology under some of the most notable teachers of the early twelfth century, including Roscelin, William of Champeaux, and Anselm of Laon. He rapidly eclipsed his teachers in logic and attracted students from all over Europe. His forays into theology were less enthusiastically received. Twice his views on the Trinity were condemned as heretical. Abelard led a dramatic life punctuated by bitter disputes with his opponents and a dangerous and celebrated love affair with Héloïse (c.1117). Much of this story is told in his autobiographical work, Historia calamitatum. Abelard’s two most important works in logic are his Logica ingredientibus and his Dialectica. In these treatises and others he is the first medieval Scholastic to make full use of Aristotle’s On Interpretation and Boethius’s commentaries on it to produce a sophisticated theory of the signification of words and sentences. The theory distinguishes the signification of an expression both from what the expression names and the idea in the mind of the speaker associated with the expression. Abelard allows a role for mental images in thinking, but he carefully avoids claiming that these are what words signify. In this he is very much aware of the pitfalls of subjectivist theories of meaning. His positive doctrines on what words signify tie in closely with his views on the signification of propositions and universals. For Abelard propositions are sentences that are either true or false; what they say (their dicta) is what they signify and these dicta are the primary bearers of truth and falsity. Abelard developed a genuinely propositional logic, the first since the Stoics. A universal, on the other hand, is a common noun or adjective, and what it means is what the verb phrase part of a proposition signifies. This is a sort of truncated dictum, which Abelard variously called a status, nature, or property. Neither status nor dicta are things, Abelard said, but they are mind-independent objects of thought. Abelard was particularly devastating in his attacks on realist theories of universals, but his view that universals are words was not meant to deny the objectivity of our knowledge of the world.
Abelard’s theories in logic and ontology went far beyond the traditional ideas that had been handed down from Aristotle through the mediation of the late ancient commentators, Boethius in particular. They could have formed the basis of a fundamentally new synthesis in Western logic, but when more of the Aristotelian corpus became available in Western Europe during the twelfth century, concentration shifted to assimilating this already fully elaborated system of ideas. Consequently, Abelard’s influence on later Scholastic thought, though noticeable, is not nearly as great as one might expect, given the acuteness and originality of his insights.
See also BOETHIUS , ROSCELIN , SCHOLASTI — CIS. M.M.T.