Abstract
Peter Abelard is the most important philosopher of the twelfth century in the Latin West, and probably the finest logician between the ancient Stoics and the early twentieth century. His interest in logic forced his attention to linguistic meaning, since the meanings of propositions are built up from significant terms. Abelard (re-)introduced the notion of propositional content, which he called the ‘dictum,’ which is the significant correlate of sentences. Abelard’s anti-realism led him to concede that the dictum has only quasi-real existence, and corresponds to the way things are in reality. He called these ways ‘status,’ i.e., the natures of things.
The selections from Peter Abelard’s Commentary on On Interpretation and Commentary on Porphyry’s Isagoge are translated from the Latin by M. Tweedale of the University of Alberta and appear here for the first time.
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Notes
- 1.
What Abelard refers to here is his refutation of “realist” theories of universals. His own view is that universals are all linguistic expressions.
- 2.
The “subject thing” for an idea is that thing which the idea is an idea of, in other words, the content of the idea.
- 3.
For Abelard the term ‘essence’ just means any real thing.
- 4.
‘Ideate’ is used here to translate the various forms of the verb ‘intelligere,’ from which ‘intellectus,’ translated as ‘idea,’ is derived. The reader is requested to take ‘ideate’ to mean intransitively ‘have an idea,’ and transitively ‘have an idea whose content is’.
- 5.
The plural nominative of ‘status’ is the same in form as the singular.
- 6.
This archaic verb is used in place of the longer and sometimes awkward expression ‘form an idea of’.
- 7.
He means what we would call phrases.
- 8.
Here he means what we would call sentences.
- 9.
In Abelard’s terminology, an essence is any sort of real thing.
- 10.
I.e. implication.
- 11.
Abelard conceives of an idea as a real psychological action of the mind whereby the mind grasps something; he does not think of it as the content, i.e. what the mind grasps.
- 12.
I.e. what is said by the proposition.
- 13.
The text is corrupt here, and the translation is conjectural at this point.
- 14.
I.e. are logical contradictories.
- 15.
Reading iniungitur for coniungitur.
- 16.
In Latin the expression translated as ‘feed on’ takes an object in the ablative case, while the word translated as ‘eat’ takes the accusative.
- 17.
I.e. to the noun and the verb.
- 18.
Latin expresses these without any subject noun by using simply the verbs ‘ventum est’ and ‘placet,’ whereas English uses the referentless ‘it’.
- 19.
This sentence is used by Quintillian to begin a discussion of the church and in that place could be translated as “Now we turn to the church.”
- 20.
The pronoun he means is ‘me,’ not ‘it,’ for in the Latin there is no separate word corresponding to ‘it’.
- 21.
He means grammatical persons and numbers; for example, first person plural.
- 22.
I.e., the verb ‘to be’ used as a copula .
- 23.
In Latin this is expressed by the single word ‘curritur.’
- 24.
The text has ‘is run’ [curritur], but the reference is almost certainly to Abelard’s view that the simple verb ‘runs’ [currit] implicitly contains the copula and amounts to ‘is a runner.’
- 25.
In ancient and medieval grammar the category of noun included adjectives as well as what we would call nouns.
- 26.
An apparent slip; Abelard has given us four.
- 27.
I.e., the copula .
- 28.
A broad category of mistakes in reasoning due to some hidden ambiguity.
- 29.
I.e., the direct object.
- 30.
The text has ‘impersonal,’ but this would contradict Abelard’s point.
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Tweedale, M. (2017). Peter Abelard. In: Cameron, M., Hill, B., Stainton, R. (eds) Sourcebook in the History of Philosophy of Language. Springer Graduate Texts in Philosophy, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26908-5_11
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