Abelard's conception of logic

Of all the scholastic logicians writing while the old logic (logica vetus) was still virtually the whole of the logical curriculum in the schools, Abelard is generally conceded to have been the most profound and original. He himself was keenly aware of the subtlety required of the logician and in one place says it depends on a divinely bestowed talent, rather than anything that can be developed by mere practice. Abelard treats dialectic (= logic) as an ars sermocinalis, i.e., like grammar a linguistic science. Its peculiar subject matter is arguments as expressed in language, whose validity it tries to judge in a scientific way. This linguistically oriented conception of the subject means that dialectic will overlap to some extent with grammar. In the first section below I shall selectively explore this overlap; in the second section I shall consider some of Abelard's views on more purely logical topics.

For Abelard logic also had a close relation to physica, i.e., the sciences of nature, since in explaining the ‘uses of words’ the logician must investigate in a general way the ‘properties of things’ which the mind uses words to signify. This relationship leads to a concern with the psychology of signification, to be explored in the third section below, and with ontology, the topic of the fourth section. This discussion is necessarily very selective and must omit consideration of many of Abelard's philosophical insights on relevant topics.