Peter Abelard (1079-1142) was a student of both Anselm and Roscillinus. A brilliant thinker and speaker and a canon (priest) of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, he became a popular teacher at the University of Paris.

In 1117, he (now 38) met a sixteen year old girl named Heloise. An orphan, she was being raised by her uncle Fulbert. She was particularly intelligent, as well as beautiful, and so her uncle asked Abelard if he would tutor her in exchange for room and board. Abelard himself commented that this was like entrusting a lamb to a wolf!

His teaching suffered a bit. He was more likely to compose love poems than lectures! But Heloise became pregnant and had a son they named Astrolabe (after an instrument for measuring the position of the stars!). Her uncle was furious, but Abelard promised to marry Heloise, if Fulbert would keep the marriage a secret. The only way he could become a priest while married would be for her to become a nun, which was unacceptable to either of them. She was willing to be his mistress, but he convinced her to marry him in secret.

Well, Uncle Fulbert remained upset by all this, and eventually sent some men to teach Abelard a lesson: They cut off his genitals! The people of Paris (being French, even in the Middle Ages) had complete sympathy with their hero Abelard, but Abelard himself was mortified. Heloise became a nun, and Abelard a monk in order to pay for their sins. They exchanged letters for many years, and her first to him can be seen by clicking here.

Abelard was, however, persuaded to continue teaching and writing. Arguing, among other things, that the trinity referred not to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but to God’s power, wisdom, and love, he began to irritate some of the people with power in the church. The Pope issued an order condemning Abelard to perpetual silence and confinement to a monastery (the usual for heresy at this time). On his way to Rome to defend himself, he died at 63. Heloise convinced his Abbot to bury him at her convent, and twelve years later, she died and was buried next to him.

Abelard invented “sic et non” -- yes and no, pros and cons -- in a book by the same name. "Sic et non" is a Socratic method that lays the arguments of two opposing points of view side by side for comparison. Abelard is very much the rationalist, and he made his motto “I understand in order to believe” (intelligo ut credam). He believed that the truth of faith and reason must still agree, as did all his teachers, but reason has precedence. It is faith that has to adapt, i.e. the church must re-evaluate the meaning of its teachings when they fail to measure up to reason.

For Abelard, ethics is a matter of conduct inspired by a good heart, good will, good intentions. If you have a good conscience, you can do no wrong (sin). You can only be mistaken. He had said, for example, that when Romans killed Christians (including Christ himself), they were only acting according to their conscience, and therefore were not guilty of sin!

He is best known, however, for conceptualism, his attempt to synthesize nominalism and realism. Although the thing and its name have a reality of their own, universals exist in the mind as ideas, he said, which refer to groups of things and are represented by words. The mind creates abstractions out of real things by detecting similarities, so the meaning of the word cat is the mental abstraction we created by looking at individual cats and noting that they all have four legs, fur, pointy ears, two eyes with funny pupils, meow, etc. etc. This is still an important perspective in modern cognitive psychology.

This answer to the question of universals is, as you might have guessed by now, still not without problems. Notice that we are assuming that we can use words like legs, ears, eyes.... But what do they refer to? They can only refer to the mental abstractions we make of individual legs, ears, eyes.... So how do you tell you are looking at a leg? Well, it's a mental abstraction we make out of flesh with a hip joint, a knee, and a foot at the end. So what is a knee? Well, it's.... At what point do we reach a unique thing?

[Personally, I believe that these abstractions or characteristics are based on errors, that is, when individual things are easily mistaken for each other!]