Desmond Paul Henry

The logic of Saint Anselm

Saint Anselm, the 11th-century Archbishop of Canterbury, is well-known for his ontological argument for the existence of God. This book places his argument in the context of modal logic derived from Boethius, and also shows how linguistic analysis was developed extensively through Anselms work.

Universals and particulars

The medieval version of the problem of universals centres around propositions such as ‘man is a species’ and ‘animalis a genus’. One of C. Lejewskis analyses of such propositions shows the semantic status of their terms by means of Ajdukiewicz-style categorical indices having participial or infinitive forms as their natural-language counterparts. Some medievals certainly used such forms in their corresponding analyses, thus avoiding the alleged referential demands generated by nominally-termed propositions. Boethius the Consul exemplifies the confusion which may still arise from the traditional definition of universal in terms of predication of many. Unnecessary adherence to nominally-termed analyses not only grounded a tendency towards nominalism and Platonism, but also towards the moderns’ ‘way of ideas’.

Abelard and Medieval Mereology

It is a pity that the stock story of early medieval thought tends to concentrate on something called the ‘universals controversy’ and does so in a way which inappropriately subsumes the twists and turns of a highly complex situation under somewhat ill-fitting headings. Although a start has now been made on a saner account of the matter both in general1 and insofar as it affects Abelard,2 nevertheless the usual connotations of a term such as ‘realism’ when applied to the topic of universals render somewhat startling the realisation that one such theory attacked by Abelard was the polar opposite of any other-worldly Platonic-style theory, namely the ‘collectio’ theory. It is yet a greater pity that in his attack on this theory3 Abelard by no means does justice either to it or to his own wide-ranging account of part/ whole relations. At the time of his attack his maturer thoughts (in the Dialectica) were still to come, yet some of the essentials of that later work are already to be found in his gloss on Boethius’ De Divisione, a gloss dated as belonging to the end of his first teaching phase.4