Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

56 John Marenbon
and his followers had never touched on (as the Proslogion and the Philosophical
Fragments testify), is it unexpected that he should hint — gently but insistently
— that even after the bravest efforts of interpreters Aristotle’s Categories leaves
unsolved almost as many fundamental problems as it raises?
5.4 Epilogue. Anselm on Universals and the New Era
([Iwakuma, 1996; Erismann, Forthcoming])
Anselm
indexRoscelin of Compiègneopened his De incarnatione Verbi (‘On the Incarnation
of the Word’; first version 1091-2), an attack on the Trinitarian theology of the
logician Roscelin of Compiègne, by criticizing his opponent as one of those who
think that universal substances are merely the breath of an utterance
(flatum vocis) and who are not able to understand colour as other than
the body, or a person’s wisdom as other than his soul .... [Anselm,
1946, I, 285 (and cf. 289); for revised version: II, 9-10].
Anselm’s own views about universals can be elicited from passing remarks in his
various works, especially the passage from the Monologion, discussed above (5.3.i),
arguing how God is neither an individual nor a universal substance. Like most
medieval writers, he has a place for Platonic-like universals in the Word (or mind)
of God. He is also, however, an immanent realist, who thinks of there being a
common essence for all the particulars of the same genus, and who thinks of species
sharing a common differentia and individuals being individuated by a collection of
accidental properties peculiar to each one [De processione Spiritus Sancti: Anselm,
1946, ?, 217:17-20; cf. Erismann, Forthcoming-A].
Historically, Anselm’s not very developed views on this subject are less important
than the fact that he does not pause to develop them, and that even when he
attacks Roscelin, he states his point without argument, and so briefly that he has
left historians puzzling over what exactly his opponent’s position could have been.
One of the elements which would distinguish the logic of the turn of the twelfth
century and its early decades from that of Anselm and his period was the irruption
of the dispute over universals. True, it has been given a more prominent place historiographically
than it deserves — Abelard himself deprecated those who behaved
as if they thought that logic consisted just in this problem — but it is a striking
example of a more general tendency for logic to become a matter for disagreement
and dispute between the advocates of different positions. Parallel with this development,
most evident in the contest between Abelard and William of Champeaux
in the period from 1100 to 1117, was the growth of a far more regular, structured
teaching of the curriculum of the logica vetus (the Isagoge, Categories, On
Interpretation and Boethius on categorical and hypothetical syllogisms, division
and topical differentiae), which gave rise to a profusion of commentaries. Perhaps
this teaching stretched back decades earlier, as the activity of Gerbert or Abbo
would suggest; but it is only from c. 1100 that evidence of it survives. Unravelling