William holds the view that genera and species exist ontologically in a real world beyond
sense experience; his position can be described as an extreme sort of Platonist realism.
Abélard makes a careful distinction between thought and language on the one hand and
reality on the other. Genera and species exist as concepts in the mind but they also signify
the same real things that particular concepts represent. Insofar as they are words, they are
corporeal and sensible; but insofar as they are able to signify many individual things, they
are incorporeal, for sense experience does not show them to us. Aristotle is correct when
he says that universals exist in sensible things as their forms, but at the same time Plato is
also right to believe that universals exist independently of the sensible world when they
are abstracted from it by the mind that thinks about the empirical world or as they exist in
the Divine Mind. Abélard also asks whether universals continue to have meaning if the
individual things that they signify stop existing. His answer is that indeed they have
meaning in the mind, because it makes sense to say that something that has existed no
longer exists.
These views of Abélard’s became especially controversial when he began applying
them to theological doctrines, such as that of the Trinity. For example, an analysis of the
the word “God” in Abélard’s terms as a universal concept signifying the three individual
divine persons but itself not existing in the real world, could easily lead to the heresy of
tritheism or alternatively to the idea of the three persons as mere modes of the single
God. Small wonder, then, that Abélard was several times condemned at church councils:
at Soissons in 1121, and especially through the efforts of Bernard of Clairvaux and
William of Saint-Thierry again at Sens in 1140. The issues that Abélard raised were of
great importance because they helped set the stage for later discussions on the status of
language and meaning. Besides, Abélard’s way of reasoning and the style of his writing
contributed in an important way to the development of the scholastic method, especially
to its ahistorical character.
A third philosophical debate that moved the minds of many theologians and
philosophers in medieval Paris centered on the Parisian master Nicholas of Autrecourt.
Nicholas seems to have been regarded by the university as the leader of a group of
philosophers who questioned the authority of Aristotle in philosophical matters. Nicholas
held that Aristotle was mistaken about the principle of causation, on which rests the
entire system of scholastic theology. According to Nicholas, certitude in scientific
demonstration depends only on the principle of contradiction. It is the application of this
principle that makes syllogisms viable, and syllogisms are the building blocks of science.
Now, the premises of syllogisms are derived from sense experience, but sense experience
tells us nothing about substances, only about appearances. Thus syllogisms—and
science—can tell us nothing about either substances or about any causal connections
between them. Only analytic propositions make sense, and for this reason it is obvious
that any traditional proof, whether cosmological or physico-teleological, for the existence
of God does not stand up to scrutiny.
Nicholas’s philosophy put the ax to the very roots of scholasticism, and his
contemporaries fully understood this. In 1346, under Pope Clement VI, his teachings
were condemned and his degrees revoked, and he was forced to recant his doctrines; a
year later, he had to burn his writings at the University of Paris. He then fled to Germany
but later was appointed dean of the cathedral of Metz. Nicholas’s ideas, however, were
not lost: toward the end of the 14th century, much of his analysis of propositions found
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