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.

It is difficult to establish who was the first to mention ‘Sibelius's shadow’. The idea pops up in the 1920s at the latest. In an essay on ‘the youngest Finnish music’ from 1928, the composer Ernest Pingoud (1887–1942) refers to the ‘reappraisal of certain values’ during the First World War, notably to the ‘bankruptcy of Romanticism’ in the field of aesthetics.

Pingoud was of Russian origin and had emigrated to Finland from St Petersburg in 1918, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Although well integrated into the society of his patrie choisie ten years later, he remained an outsider in one important respect. Nationalism, the fundamental generating force in Finnish culture at the turn of the century, was none of his concern. He sympathised with it from the outside, as revealed in an article on Sibelius from 1909 in which he described the tone poem Finlandia, ‘the most national of Sibelius's works’, as ‘radiating a deep sorrow for his enslaved fatherland’.

Sibelius's songs, a trove of lyrical and dramatic gems, refract his compositional, aesthetic, and cultural outlooks in myriad ways. Sibelius proved as adept at framing a brief lyrical mood, or an intense dramatic outburst, as at staging a mighty orchestral climax. His distinctive musical interpretations of poetic texts lend themselves to all manner of critical explorations, but we might best introduce the attractions of his hundred or so songs by focusing on a representative sample of them. Examining a selection of Sibelius's songs on the subjects of love and sex serves our purposes particularly well, as they reveal the multiplicity of musical styles that he brought to bear on his texts, and the modernist outlook around which these sundry styles coalesced.

Transient love

Josef Julius Wecksell's poem ‘Vardet en dröm?’ reflects on the impermanence of a lover's happiness, its titular question repeatedly calling into doubt the reality of memories of a past affair of the heart:

A week before Sibelius first mentioned the Violin Concerto, his thoughts returned to his youthful dream of becoming a violin virtuoso:

Becoming a violin virtuoso had been Sibelius's first priority ever since he started to study the instrument in the autumn of 1881 at the age of fifteen. ‘When I play [the violin], I am filled with a strange feeling; it is as though the insides of the music opened up to me’, he wrote two years later. Along with violin playing he had also started to compose, and year by year his compositional activity increased. During his early years, however, composing was not given first place.

Barely a year before the completion of Kullervo, Sibelius still planned public appearances as a violinist: ‘I play the violin every day. I think I should perform in Helsinki some time in the coming year,’ he wrote to his fiancée Aino from Vienna. He also auditioned for the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, but the result was not what he had hoped for: the jury regarded his playing as ‘not at all bad’, but nevertheless recommended him against playing the violin because of his nerves.

Recording Sibelius

‘Few composers have benefited as much from the invention of the phonograph as has Sibelius,’ claimed Harold Johnson in 1959. Appreciating the role of recording technology in shaping our view of Sibelius's music is vital, whether we are studying his historical importance or his musical style. There is useful information to be extracted from any part of the recording tradition we choose to examine: the emergence of the earliest recordings, the flourishing of different performing styles, and his continued popularity on record today each tell a story.

With the wealth of recorded material available on CD and other accurate, easily accessible formats at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is hard to imagine how different life must have been for a music student, enthusiast, or scholar before the advent of musical recording. Favourite pieces, standard repertoire, and new works could be encountered only through close study of the score, by playing them oneself (in piano solo or piano duet versions for orchestral or other large works), or in occasional, treasured performances. The study of complex, large-scale, or musically innovative works was greatly facilitated once listeners could obtain a reliable way of hearing them repeatedly. The major wave of popularity for Sibelius in the 1930s was caused by many factors, including a political and aesthetic resistance to the German avant-garde and a desire for symphonic works as a comprehensible alternative; however, another significant factor was the new process of electrical recording which allowed relatively faithful reproduction of the complex sounds of a symphony orchestra.

Beginnings

One way of surveying the history of musical composition in the twentieth century is through consideration of the ways in which the time-honoured aesthetic aspiration to balance innovation and conservation, the individual voice and the common language, was carried forward. The idea that innovation and conservation are wholly opposed in the music of any era is simplistic fantasy, and the reality of an intricate interaction between divergent tendencies affecting form and style, technique and expression, has been increasingly acknowledged by commentators alert to the strategies by which composers – even when they disclaim all conscious intention – manage to exploit that interaction.

For some years after his death, Sibelius was generally regarded as more representative of the long nineteenth century, and of late Romanticism, than of the newly progressive twentieth century, with the implication that the reasons why he was so highly praised by influential critics like Donald Tovey and Constant Lambert were also the reasons why his influence on younger composers was harmful – inhibiting rather than liberating, dedicated to conservation and rejecting innovation. In this context, even Schoenberg's accolade that Sibelius – with Shostakovich – had ‘the breath of symphonists’ could be construed as a coded warning about the need for music to move beyond such tradition-enshrining categories: and awareness, after 1970, that tonality was showing a new capacity to adapt as well as to survive, increased the conviction that contemporary tonal music needed to avoid debilitating associations with late Romantic idioms and formal strategies.