My aim is to discuss Anselm of Canterbury's use of basic modal terms (necessity, possibility, impossibility) and his interpretation of the meaning of these and some related notions. I will first sketch modal conceptions in philosophical and theological traditions with which Anselm was familiar, and then take a look at some eleventh-century modal controversies entered in Peter Damian's On Divine Omnipotence and also discussed by Anselm. The third section deals with Anselm's views against the general historical background, and the last section is about his attempt to sketch the semantics of modal terms.

MODALITIES IN ANSELM’S SOURCES

The main line of the history of modal theories in ancient and medieval times can be described as follows. There are four originally Aristotelian ways of understanding the meaning of modal terms in ancient philosophy: the “statistical” or “temporal frequency interpretation” of modality, the conception of possibility as a potency, the conception of diachronic modalities (antecedent necessities and possibilities), and the idea of possibility as noncontradictoriness. I will explain below how these modal paradigms occur in Boethius (c. 480–523), whose works made them known to early medieval thinkers. Ancient conceptions did not include the view that the meaning of modal terms should be spelled out by considering simultaneous alternative states of affairs. This new idea was introduced into Western thought in early medieval discussions influenced by Augustine’s (354–430) theological conception of God as acting by choice between possible alternatives. Ancient habits of thinking continued to play an important role in scholasticism,However, and the systematic significance of the new conception was not fully realized before the extensive discussions by John Duns Scotus, William Ockham, John Buridan, and some other fourteenth-century thinkers. Many scholars have paid attention to the similarities between these late-medieval theories and the contemporary possible-worlds semantics for modal logic.

A book like this has to give a picture not only of the modern philosophical and theological interest of its subject's writings, but of the context in which he wrote. For a writer whose works have been the subject of debate for nearly a millennium, there is the additional task of seeking to convey the changing nuances of expectation with which he was read century by century. All this is of more than historical importance. To discuss in translation the thought of someone who chose his words very carefully in Latin is not necessarily to discuss exactly what he wrote. And to analyze ideas out of context is to discuss matters which, while they may be of high philosophical interest in themselves, may also not be exactly the topics or the solutions Anselm had in mind.

Anselm of Bec and Canterbury is read as a thinker in his own right and not merely as a prominent exponent of a mode of thought belonging to a particular period period of medieval thought. Nevertheless, he was in a number of respects a man of his time and the thought itself was conditioned by personal and historical circumstances which need to be understood if his ideas are to be interpreted with sensitivity to what preoccupied him and what he meant to say. This chapter is biographical and historical; it seeks to provide a brief but necessary context and to encourage the reader to consider in this light the “Anselmian” complexion of the topics covered in other chapters.

Philosophy and theology both ask what sort of being God is. One way toward an answer begins from the idea that God is in all respects perfect, and fills out the concept of God by reasoning about what a perfect being would be like. Anselm's is perhaps the name most associated with this program. The perfect-being project had a long history before Anselm. Plato, Aristotle, and such Stoics as Zeno and Cicero all offered perfect-being arguments. But Anselm probably had no access to these. It is likely that passages in Augustine and Boethius suggested the perfect-being project to him.

Anselm took up the perfect-being project in Monologion 15. Prior to this, the Monologion has argued that there is something “through which all good things are good” (Mon. 1) – something that plays the role of a property of goodness all good things share. But, Anselm suggests, whatever it is that makes all good things good must be a great good itself. (This suggestion is not backed up. Perhaps Anselm had some such thought as this in mind: delete this thing from reality, and all goodness goes with it. Perhaps an item’s goodness is in some proportion to how much less good things would be without it.) If this thing is good, it must be good through itself, as it is that through which all good things are good. So there is, Anselm thinks, a good thing whose goodness is entirely due to its own intrinsic character – not a function of its relations to anything else. Anselm asserts that this is the best of all goods, just because it is not good through anything other than itself (Mon. 1). The highest good turns out to be the efficient cause of all things other than itself (Mon. 7). So while it plays the role of a property of goodness, it is not after all a property. Properties are not causes.

Abelard's philosophy is the first example in the Western tradition of the cast of mind that is now called nominalism. Although his view that universals are mere words (nomina) is typically thought to justify the label, Abelard's nominalism - or better, his irrealism - is in fact the hallmark of his metaphysics. He is an irrealist not only about universals, but also about propositions, events, times other than the present, natural kinds, relations, wholes, absolute space, hylomorphic composites, and the like. Instead, Abelard holds that the concrete individual, in all its richness and variety, is more than enough to populate the world. He preferred reductive, atomist, and material explanations when he could get them; he devoted a great deal of effort to pouring cold water on the metaphysical excesses of his predecessors and contemporaries. Yet unlike modern philosophers, Abelard did not conceive of metaphysics as a distinct branch of philosophy. Following Boethius, he distinguishes philosophy into three branches: logic, concerned with devising and assessing argumentation, an activity also known as dialectic; physics, concerned with speculation on the natures of things and their causes; and ethics, concerned with the upright way of life.

Abelard worked against an institutional and intellectual background that was complex and various not just because of his period - before the rise of the universities regularized the structure of academic teaching and learning - but also as a result of his own character and fortune. The aim of this chapter is to examine how Abelard fitted into these contexts and, in particular, to look at how his philosophical ideas relate to those of the thinkers who immediately preceded him. It aims also to show that Abelard was a changing, developing thinker.

In the first section, “Life and works,” I give a very brief sketch of Abelard’s life, and then of his works, and try to show the main direction of his intellectual interests in a career which, as I shall argue, falls into two distinct halves. In Section ii, I add a little detail to this bare account, by considering (in very roughly chronological order) the various cultural settings in which Abelard worked. Three of them are particular milieus to which he belonged: the logical schools at the beginning of the twelfth century, the world of twelfth century monastic thinking and reform, and the Paris schools, logical and theological, of the 1130s. One is a cultural setting in rather a different sense: Abelard’s reading. In Section iii, I have chosen two topics through which to examine more precisely, and very selectively, aspects of Abelard’s relation to earlier and contemporary medieval philosophers: Abelard’s nominalism, and his treatment of Plato’s idea of a World Soul. The discussions in Section ii are general and aim to introduce readers both to important aspects of Abelard’s intellectual life and, more widely, to the culture and education of the twelfth century. Those in Section iii are more detailed. They aim to put forward some new suggestions, and to give an idea of the sort of evidence the historian must sift and interpret in order to understand how Abelard’s thought developed within its intellectual context.

Abelard's investigations into the philosophy of language are of great interest not only with respect to the history of philosophy, but also with respect to systematic considerations. These investigations, however, are not readily accessible. They offer nothing to a reader who wants to glean information quickly from them. A thorough study is required, and this itself requires extraordinary patience. The purpose of this chapter is to contribute to the project of making Abelard's investigations into the philosophy of language accessible to the general philosophical community.

Unlike contemporary philosophers, Abelard does not conceive of philosophy of language as a distinct or separate branch of philosophy. Indeed, as he conceives of philosophy, it is a genus with just three species, namely, logic, physics, and ethics (LNPS 506.18–19). If we want to identify his contribution to what we now recognize as issues in philosophy of language, therefore, we must extract his views from his discussion of that branch of philosophy in which they are embedded, namely, logic or, as he also refers to it, dialectic (hereafter I shall use the terms “logic” or “dialectic” synonymously).

Peter Abelard had a great influence upon his contemporaries. As he himself reports, many students followed him, and, as is clear from what we know about the history of twelfth-century logic, his rivals could not neglect his innovating theories and discussions, feeling it necessary to develop their own theories in response to his. In the next century, however, his direct influence disappeared in logic as well as in theology. The census of Peter Abelard's works shows that very few manuscripts from the thirteenth century preserve his works, and that there are no manuscripts at all for his logical works. He did, however, leave a school - the so-called Nominales, named after his own commitment to nominalism - but it survives for only one or two generations after him. As a result, Abelard is known in the next century only in connection with the name, or rather the notoriety, of the school of the Nominales, together with a few distinctive theories associated with it.

Much of Abelard's philosophy, specifically his philosophy of language, rests on an account of cognition and philosophy of mind. Abelard recognized this dependence. His more famous discussions of universals and propositions each include a brief treatment of cognition and mind as essential groundwork. Around 1125 he wrote the Treatise on Understandings (Tractatus de intellectibus) to present his views in a single work and in a more coherent fashion than he had hitherto undertaken to do. The Treatise's stated purpose is to distinguish and explain the operations of the mind “necessary for the doctrine of sermones” (TI 1), and it reflects Abelard's somewhat ambivalent feelings about the philosophical importance of issues in cognition and philosophy of mind. The issues are important enough to warrant discussion in an independent work, but Abelard did not consider their study to be a philosophical end in itself.

Peter Abelard (1079-1142) is a philosopher and theologian whose reputation has always preceded him. Indeed, to this day he remains among the best-known figures of the entire Middle Ages. Although one can hardly overestimate the value of his intellectual legacy, his reputation owes at least as much to his flamboyant personality and to the sensational details of his biography. Very early on Abelard established his place as one of the most celebrated masters in Paris by challenging - and then defeating - his teachers and rivals in public disputation. In some cases, he literally drove these rivals out of business: he stole their students and set up his own schools (the first when he was only twenty-five) just down the road from them. He aroused the fiercest devotion in students, and the fiercest enmity in rivals. He also inspired the love and devotion of (some would say merely seduced) a seventeen-year-old Heloise. But when Heloise became pregnant and ran away with him to be secretly married, Abelard earned the hatred of her uncle and guardian, Fulbert, who was also the canon of Notre Dame.

Though the main concern of this volume is Abelard's work in philosophy and theology, he made important and original contributions in a number of fields. His substantial essays in apologetic and biblical exegesis are discussed in other chapters. Studies still in progress are revealing his extensive and wide-ranging activity as a liturgist, and seeking to recover concrete evidence of his work as a composer of music. But his most remarkable non-philosophical role is as a literary artist, a master of narrative and lyric form who produced art of a high order out of his own complex and tormented life.

Any account of Abelard the artist must begin with the Historia calamitatum, the narrative of his struggles as man, philosopher, and monk over thirty years. Ostensibly written to console an unnamed friend by inviting him to contrast his own misfortunes with the far greater sufferings of Abelard, the Historia seems clearly to have been designed to engage a wider audience. Whether viewed as an authentic apologia pro vita sua or as an astute exercise in historical romance, this unique document and the story it tells have inevitably defined our sense of the character and personality of Abelard. So compelling is the Historia indeed, so evocative of romance and hagiography in its framing of the crucial events of Abelard’s life, and so eloquent in the lessons it draws from these events, that it is hard to resist the suspicion that it is essentially a work of imaginative fiction. But it is unique too in that its historicity has been tested perhaps as rigorously as that of any comparable work. Its status as a work of Abelard, and as initiating the series of “personal” letters by Abelard and Heloise that accompany it in virtually all manuscripts, now seems to have been decisively established, while the exhaustive readings to which it has been subjected have greatly enhanced our ability to appreciate it as a literary text.

Peter Abelard's contributions to ethics are concentrated in two works, his Ethics (or Scito te Ipsum) and his Dialogue between a Philosopher, a Jew, and a Christian (or Collationes). There are ethical insights to be found scattered elsewhere in his works, but for the sustained presentation of an ethical theory, one can only turn to these two works. The Dialogue is actually two dialogues, one between a philosopher and a Jew, the other between the philosopher and a Christian, debating the relative merits of pagan philosophy, Judaism, and Christianity. The Ethics concentrates on the development of a distinctively Christian ethical theory. It was to have consisted of two books.

The unfinished second book of the Ethics begins with a description of what Abelard takes himself to have accomplished in the first book, namely, the provision of an understanding of what sins are, how they are rectified, and how they differ from vices (Sc. 128.1–4; Spade 1995, 226). The second book was supposed to have taken up the topic of what it is to do good, or, as he prefers to put it in his more careful moments, what it is to do well (Coll. 163.3229–3230; Spade 1995, 404). The text was abandoned after one page. The Ethics, then, consists of a rather elaborate and zestful account of wrongdoing along with the merest of gestures towards an account of right-doing. It is as if Dante had neglected to write Paradiso after finishing Inferno. But as the newspapers attest daily, accounts of wrongdoing fascinate us more than accounts of right-doing: how many more people have read Inferno than Paradiso?

“From time to time some of my friends startle me by referring to the Atonement itself as a revolting heresy,” wrote Austin Farrer, “invented by the twelfth century and exploded by the twentieth. Yet the word is in the Bible.” Farrer is referring to Romans 5:11 in the Authorized Version: “we also joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have now received the atonement.” Here the word “atonement” - literally, the state of being “at one” - translates the Greek katallage, which means “reconciliation.” The doctrine of the Atonement, then, is in its essentials the claim that the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ effects a reconciliation between God and human beings, who had been - and apart from Christ's gracious action would have remained - estranged on account of human sin. And that doctrine, far from being a twelfth-century innovation, is a prominent theme of the Pauline epistles and a matter of theological consensus from the earliest days of Christian thought.

During the Middle Ages, theology is the preeminent academic discipline and, as a result, most great thinkers of this period are highly trained theologians. Although this much is common knowledge, it is sometimes overlooked that the systematic nature of medieval theology led its practitioners to develop full treatments of virtually every area within philosophy. Indeed, theological reflection not only provides the main context in which the medievals theorize about what we would now recognize as distinctively philosophical issues, but it is responsible for some of their most significant philosophical contributions. To give just a few examples: it is problems with the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation that prompt medievals to develop the notions of substance and person in striking and original ways; it is problems with the doctrine of the Eucharist that lead them to consider the possibility of accidents that do not inhere; and it is problems of interpreting particular scriptural texts, such as the Book of Job, that introduce refinements in their understanding of the nature and purpose of evil.

A great deal of Peter Abelard's writing is concerned with what he regarded as logic, but which we would now classify as ontology or philosophical semantics. Following Cicero and Boethius, Abelard holds that properly speaking the study of logic has to do with the discovery and evaluation of arguments (LI Isag. 3.10). A necessary preliminary for this is an examination of the issues dealt with by Porphyry in the Isagoge and by Aristotle in the Categories, and De interpretatione (LI Cat. 113.26-114.30). In the present chapter, however, I will ignore most of this material and concentrate on the central issue of logical theory both for Abelard and for us, that is, on the nature of the relation of consequence, or following. Even with this limitation there is a great deal of ground to cover. Abelard sets out his theory of entailment and argument in two very extended and dense discussions both of which have suffered considerable textual corruption. The treatment of topics and hypothetical syllogisms in the Dialectica, is apparently the earlier. The other is the surviving fragment of Abelard's commentary on Boethius's De topicis differentiis, Glossae super De topicis differentiis, which seems to belong with his other commentaries on the works of the logica vetus published as the Logica “ingredientibus.” The two expositions disagree on some crucial questions, but here I will restrict myself almost entirely to the discussion in the Dialectica.