Peter Abelard 1079 – 1142

Peter Abelard was a French philosopher, logician, and theologian and one of the most original thinkers of the twelfth century. He made decisive contributions to the problem of universals, arguing for a moderate position now usually called conceptualism, and he developed an ethics centered on the intention of the agent rather than on the outward act. His method of juxtaposing apparently conflicting authorities in Sic et Non helped to shape the scholastic tradition. He is also remembered for his tragic love affair with Heloise, preserved in their correspondence.

Peter Abelard was born in 1079 at Le Pallet in Brittany, the eldest son of a minor nobleman. He renounced his inheritance in favor of the schools, studied logic under Roscelin of Compiegne and the realist William of Champeaux at Paris, and made his reputation through a series of public disputations in which he outargued his teachers. By his early thirties he was the most celebrated master in the Paris schools.

Around 1115 he became the tutor of Heloise, the gifted niece of Canon Fulbert of Notre-Dame; their love affair, secret marriage, and the violent retaliation that ended in his castration are described with extraordinary candor in his Story of My Calamities and in their later correspondence. The remainder of his life was spent as a monk, sometime hermit, abbot, and embattled teacher; his works include the Sic et Non, several versions of his Theologia, the ethical treatise Know Yourself, and the dialectical Logica.

His non-realist account of universals, his intention-based ethics in which the moral quality of an act lies in the consent of the will, and his methodological insistence that contradictory authorities must be reconciled by reason laid the groundwork for scholasticism. Twice condemned for heresy, at Soissons in 1121 and at Sens in 1141, he died at Cluny in 1142.