Medieval Philosophy

by Peter S. Adamson

Modern-day scholars have called this approach “vocalism,” alluding to Roscelin’s insistence that dialectic deals with words and not things. With this, Roscelin paved the way for Abelard’s nominalism. Roscelin’s vocalism was not offered as a solution to the problem of universals, but as the key to interpreting the works of logic that were being studied with such intensity at this time. For Roscelin, Porphyry’s Introduction and Aristotle’s Categories were about words, not things. This reading of the texts was anticipated already in antiquity, when it was suggested as a way of defusing potential conflict between Plato and Aristotle. If Aristotle was only talking about words in his logical writings, not making any claims about things, then it was no problem that he acknowledged only everyday physical objects as “substances” and made no mention of the transcendent objects recognized in Platonism.5 After all, our words refer in the first instance to physical things, not to gods, immaterial souls, or forms. Still, even if Roscelin was not espousing nominalism, his proposal could naturally lead to a position like Abelard’s. Universal species and genera play a major role in the logical treatises of Porphyry and Aristotle. So if those treatises really are only about words and not things, it stands to reason that species and genera are nothing but words, as Abelard claimed.