Abelard and Medieval Mereology

Abstract

It is a pity that the stock story of early medieval thought tends to concentrate on something called the ‘universals controversy’ and does so in a way which inappropriately subsumes the twists and turns of a highly complex situation under somewhat ill-fitting headings. Although a start has now been made on a saner account of the matter both in general¹ and insofar as it affects Abelard,² nevertheless the usual connotations of a term such as ‘realism’ when applied to the topic of universals render somewhat startling the realisation that one such theory attacked by Abelard was the polar opposite of any other-worldly Platonic-style theory, namely the ‘collectio’ theory. It is yet a greater pity that in his attack on this theory³ Abelard by no means does justice either to it or to his own wide-ranging account of part/ whole relations. At the time of his attack his maturer thoughts (in the Dialectica) were still to come, yet some of the essentials of that later work are already to be found in his gloss on Boethius’ De Divisione, a gloss dated as belonging to the end of his first teaching phase.⁴

Some themes of the present paper are also discussed in Desmond Paul Henry, ‘Abelard’s Mereological Terminology’, in E. P. Bos (ed.), Medieval Semantics and Metaphysics (Artistarium Supplementa II), Ingenium Publishers, Nijmegen, 1985, pp. 65-92.