Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

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76 John Marenbon
by no means clear though what sense is made by the views Jolivet attributes to
Roscelin, or whether Roscelin really held them. (See also [Tweedale, 1988, 000-
000]). Another opponent of realism was immediately recognized in Gerlandus
(though his work was wrongly place in the eleventh century: see §4 above). In the
preface to his edition of the Dialectica, perhaps still the best analysis of Gerlandus’s
position, De Rijk notes what he calls his ‘problemless nominalism’ [Gerlandus,
1959, liii-lv; Tweedale, 1988, 000-000]. Gerlandus clearly hopes to interpret the
Isagoge and Categories as discussions about utterances (voces), and yet there is no
explicit sign of argument for a metaphysical position (such as that there exist only
particulars), and his semantics remains unclear, because some of the most difficult
and revealing passages in the Dialectica have not yet been properly explained.
Recently, an ambitious attempt has been made by Yukio Iwakuma to bring
together what is known about Roscelin and Gerlandus, with some anonymous
material he has discovered and the chronicle accounts (see above, §6) into an
account of ‘vocalism’ or ‘pre-vocalism’ (the term derives from the Latin vocales,
used in the early twelfth century to describe Abelard and those who followed
his position on universals) [Iwakuma, 1992]. The chronicles, he believes, name
the main protagonists: John (otherwise unknown); his pupils – Roscelin, Arnulf
of Laon and Robert of Paris. To these he adds Gerlandus, now recognized as
Gerlandus of Besançon. All the literal commentaries listed in §3 above (except for
P6, C6 and H7, on which he has not written) are linked by him to this movement.
Constant Mews at one stage suggested that the Priscian Glosulae might belong
to it too, and that their original author was the John mentioned in the chronicles;
but his view has not found much support [Mews, 1992, 14, 33; cf. Mews, 1998, 50
— 55, and cf. 68- 73].
I contributed to this discussion [Marenbon, 1997b, 108-113; 2004, 26-34] by
linking the supposed early commentaries by Abelard (P5, H4, D7) with the movement
identified by Iwakuma. I also insisted that this group of early ‘vocalists’
identified by Iwakuma (including the young Abelard) needed to be distinguished
sharply from Abelard and the vocalists who were his school. The mature Abelard,
I said, had a very definite metaphysical position: that only particular substances
and accidents exist. The earlier group of logicians, and Abelard c. 1100-5, were,
by contrast just following an exegetical strategy — that of reading the texts of
Aristotle, Porphyry and Boethius in voce, that is to say, taking the words of the
text to refer to other voces, not to things. That they read the texts in this fashion
did not mean that they must have believed that there are no things which correspond
to the words; for, as I pointed out, even mentions of individual substances
and accidents in the texts were read as referring to words. Iwakuma now accepts
this qualification of his position, and distinguishes between ‘proto-vocalists’ (at
the turn of the twelfth century) and ‘vocalists’ (Peter Abelard and h is followers)
[Iwakuma, Forthcoming-B].
My view, however, obscures as much as it reveals. Although it is true that
explaining the logical texts was the priority for these teachers, and that it is important
not to wish on them a metaphysical position, the idea that they were