Peter Abelard’s Investigations into the Meaning and Functions of the Speech Sign ‘Est’

Abstract

Although Peter Abelard was the most distinguished teacher of logic of his time, a logic understood to be the science of argumentative discourse, he was not destined to found a new philosophical tradition. The historical situation offers at least a partial explanation — the pace of philosophical and theological research was so brisk in the twelfth century that many of the established schools enjoyed life spans of at most two or three generations of teachers. The restlessness of the times is embodied to a special degree in Abelard.¹ His writings include commentaries, in many cases several to a work, on the logical works of Aristotle and Porphyry then available, handed down in the form of Boethius’ translations, and on Boethius’ own logical works. Abelard has to take a number of positions into consideration here: several commentaries on Aristotle by ancient scholars, by Boethius, and by Abelard’s own predecessors and teachers, and furthermore the grammatical theories of Priscian and those deriving from Abelard’s contemporaries. He discovers with distinctive acumen that the tradition he is examining is disunited and full of tensions on basic questions. It is in the analysis and discussion of these tensions that he finds the field of his own philosophical research. He expects to reach solutions by intensifying the controversies, not by seeking harmony. Thus he traces argument and counter-argument in great thoroughness of detail and from a dizzying succession of points of view, abandoning theses and offering countertheses. What his students could learn from him was not so much a particular theory as his method of formulating and discussing problems.