Peripateticus Palatinus (3)
Abelard now fell ill and was obliged to some time in his native Brittany;
he tells us that he was sorely missed by those eager for instruction in
dialectic. On his return to Paris, some years later, he found that William
had founded a house of Augustinian Canons at the Abbey of St Victor. He
returned to William to hear his lectures on rhetoric, and again clashed with
him over his theory of universals. He had maintained, says Abelard, that in
the common existence of universals, the whole species was essentially the
same in each of its individuals, and among these there was no essential
difference, but only variety due to multiplicity of accidents. Thus, if we
consider the universal 'man', this, according to William, denoted a species
whose individual members - Tom and Dick and Harry - shared a common essence,
being distinguished only by accidents - height and weight and colour and so
on. This is realism, the belief that universals signify something real, as
opposed to nominalism, the belief that they are merely nouns, names, words.
Either position if pushed to its logical conclusion produces difficulties,
even absurdities. Abelard himself says, 'This has always been the
dialectician's chief problem concerning universals, so much so that even
Porphyry did not venture to settle it when he deals with universals in his
Isagoge, but only mentioned it as a very serious difficulty.' Extreme
realism would deny any reality to individuals - we are all as it were facets
of our common humanity, without any individual being of our own; extreme
nominalism would deny any real existence to the concept of humanity, so that
each of us is an individual without any common bond uniting us, just as
Roscelin denied that the concept of divinity had any real existence with
relation to the three individual persons of the godhead. Realism tends
towards collectivism, nominalism to individualism. One might seek a
relationship between the individualism, even egotism, of Abelard, and his
nominalist philosophical position; but which came first, which was the
chicken and which the egg, is itself an interesting philosophical question.
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Oriens
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