THREE PRINCIPLES

Three principles underlie Abelard's ontology: nominalism, strong naturalism, and a very strict view of the separateness of particular things. What do they each involve and how do they relate?

Nominalism

Abelard's nominalism is to be understood as it was defined in the previous chapter: the view that there is no thing which is not a particular. It is hard to tell to what extent the view was among his deep philosophical intuitions, to what extent he reached it through force of circumstances – the early influence of in voce exegesis and the need to find a clear point of difference between his position and that of established teachers such as William of Champeaux. But Abelard's nominalism was certainly explicit, and he supported it with a series of detailed arguments against each of the current views which recognized universal things.

Strong naturalism

Abelard took over the strong naturalism he found in the Categories and in his out-of-context reading of the Isagoge. Like Aristotle, he accepts that the world is made up of members of natural kinds, and that we unproblematically know to which kind any given particular substance belongs. He also conveniently ignores those natural kinds, like water, where the individuation of particular members is problematic. Like Aristotle, too, Abelard believes that every member of a given natural kind has the same underlying structure, which can be described in terms of genera, species and differentiae.

But how can this be, when Abelard is a nominalist and so does not accept that there are universal things? On one level this question is quite easily answered.