This volume is about the 12th-century logician and philosopher Alberic of Paris (aka Alberic de Monte). Alberic was an influential figure in his time, but apart from having proved that the logic of his famous rival Peter Abelard (1079–1142) was inconsistent, he is not very well known today. The book brings together essays by an international team of experts who from various angles—philosophical, philological, and palaeographical—explore a range of topics and themes relating to Alberic and the school of thought he founded, known as the Albricani. Together they aim to illuminate some of the many interesting aspects of the extant source material and, drawing on other edited and unedited sources, to place it in its proper philosophical and historical context. Here, we offer a brief outline of the volume and its chapters.
The volume is organized into five parts around the following themes: (i) Background, (ii) Universals and Individuals, (iii) Time and Change, (iv) Arguments and Fallacies, and (v) Textual Transmission. The background is given in Chapter 1 where we, the volume editors, gather and consider the main evidence known to exist for Alberic and his school and then present a list of the source material in which their philosophical views are recorded and on which the subsequent chapters of the volume draw.
The second part of the volume deals with some of the more familiar topics in 12th-century metaphysics: universals and individuals. In Chapter 2, “A Tract on Universals from the School of Alberic of Paris,” Enrico Donato presents a new edition of an anonymous tract on universals found in Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek 2486, fols 1r–4r and 57vb–59rb. After providing some details about the text and highlighting the shortcomings of Martin Grabmann’s previous edition, Donato goes on to discuss the intellectual milieu in which the tract originated. Here he shows that, although it has been contested, L.M. de Rijk’s attribution of the tract to a follower of Alberic is correct. The core of the chapter is devoted to examining the contents of the tract, and in particular the view—mentioned by John of Salisbury in his Metalogicon—that genera and species are types of things (maneriae rerum). As Donato argues, the anonymous author conceives of types as sets of universal properties that are instantiated by one or more individuals. Donato argues that this account has the advantage of being in alignment with the auctoritates and yet, as presented in the text, it is not entirely successful as a theory of universals, because it does not explain how the universal properties which make up the different types may be shared by several individuals.
In Chapter 3, “Individuals and Names of Individuals in the First Half of the Twelfth Century,” Caterina Tarlazzi turns to 12th-century reflections on the notion of the individual. In particular, she focusses on the exegesis of the first lines of the second chapter of Porphyry’s Isagoge, where Porphyry distinguishes various meanings of the word
Concluding the part on universals and individuals, Charles Girard’s chapter, “Do Individuals Have Generality and Speciality? A Survey of a Twelfth-Century Problem,” explores how 12th-century commentators on Porphyry’s Isagoge and Aristotle’s Categories try to square a commitment to properties such as generality and speciality—that is to say, the properties that make a genus a genus and a species a species—with Aristotle’s insistence on the ontological primacy of primary substances, which requires that a property inheres in some secondary substances if and only if it inheres in some primary substance (Cat. 5.2b1–3). Girard catalogs and characterizes the various strategies used by the commentators in dealing with this question. Thus, it emerges that some commentaries, the anonymous Albrican commentaries known as C15 and C17 among them, distinguish different types of inherence and invoke a sort of grounding to solve the apparent problems. It also emerges that in one commentary (C15) this results in a very complicated theory in order to accommodate Alberic’s view that the subject terms in sentences such a “man is a species” stand for individuals.
The third part of the volume concerns issues surrounding time and change. In Chapter 5, “Abelard on the Perils of Presentism,” Peter King examines Abelard’s account of what it means to be located in time—a particularly vexing problem, given Abelard’s presentism, on which nothing exists but the present instant. For Abelard, the Aristotelian category of When is to be understood in relational terms: all things have their own time relative to what King calls the Big Siderial Clock—that is, the celestial rotation that is the same for all other objects in the universe. But, as King argues, it need not follow that Abelard’s account of time is intrinisically relational: time is, rather, a sort of container of all things. As King shows, the view of time that Abelard maintains and develops has, as a consequence, the radical claim that no times outside the present exist, and so successive temporal wholes like days or years are, themselves, nothing. Even so, we can speak about them in an Abelardian way, in much the same way as we speak synechdochally of other wholes in terms of their specific parts. King’s thorough examination, which concludes by offering English translations of Abelard’s discussions of time in the Dialectica and Logica “Ingredientibus,” sets the scene for the next chapter, which explores Alberic and his followers’ contrasting view on the subject.
As Heine Hansen shows in Chapter 6, “Omnia tempora sunt: The Albricani on Time,” Alberic and his followers disagreed strongly with Abelard about the nature of time. In fact, one of the theses ascribed to them in Iwakuma and Ebbesen’s list of sources to the 12th-century schools is that all times exist (omnia tempora sunt). But contrary to what this thesis suggests, Hansen’s exploration of a set of commentaries on the Categories from Alberic’s school reveals that Alberic and his followers were not eternalists or omnitemporalists. Rather, their main disagreement with Abelard appears to have been about the existence of temporal wholes. In contrast to Abelard, Alberic claimed that such wholes do indeed exist, but that they are fundamentally different from ordinary wholes insofar as their parts exist not all at once but one after the other. As Hansen furthermore shows, the Albricani also disagreed with another aspect of Abelard’s view of time in that they held that each individual substance is the bearer of it’s own temporal properties.
Following the discussions of time in the two previous chapters, Wojciech Wciórka’s “Successive Wholes in Twelfth-Century Logic: Conceptual Evolution,” examines some issues connected with the central notion of the successive whole, which, as he shows, the Albricani were among the first to employ. After reconstructing the background for the distinction between successive and permanent wholes, which is provided by Categories 6, Wciórka goes on to consider several texts from the 12th century, both logical and theological, that deal with successive wholes. Here Wciórka contrasts the notion of the successive whole with those of permanent, integral, and continuous wholes, and demonstrates that the categorization of successive wholes varied from author to author on the basis of their unique metaphysical and logical assumptions. Finally, Wciórka shows that at some point around the end of the 12th century the notion of being successive became detached from that of the successive whole, and suggests that the two were perhaps used to designate different classes of entities.
Mereological issues are also the subject of Chapter 8, Andrew Arlig’s “Chairs and Rivers: How to Survive Change if You Have No Soul.” Things with parts can lose them, and also gain other parts they didn’t have before. For animate beings like animals and plants, this poses no significant problem for 12th-century Aristotelianism: the soul (anima) binds the plant or animal together, and so the whole can surivive a loss of parts. But what about inanimate objects like chairs and rivers? Arlig first maps out the range of logically available options to answer this question within a 12th-century framework and beyond, before turning to the Albrican view defended in the Introductiones Montanae maiores, and to the view found in an anonymous commentary, known as B14, perhaps written by a Melidunensis, on Boethius’s On Topical Differences. A common answer, in many forms, is what Arlig calls Process Tracking: an object undergoing change in its parts can remain the same if it continues, as a process, to have the same “role,” loosely defined. This notion is especially well developed in B14. By Process Tracking, the water in the river Seine has a shared causal history that extends across time. Moreover, several 12th-century thinkers adopt a pragmatic view, which anticipates later turns in thinkers like John Buridan, whereby changes in constitutive parts that are not perceptible do not, themselves, count against the identity of the whole.
The part of the volume concerned with time and change concludes with Chapter 9, Boaz Faraday Schuman’s “Can Divine Foreknowledge Change? A Characteristic Theo-Logical Doctrine of Alberic and His School.” On the basis of a critical edition and translation of two key texts, Schuman examines an important debate spurred by a highly distinctive claim associated with Alberic: that divine foreknowledge of future contingents is subject, like the contingents themselves, to change. That is, God can know otherwise than He does, both by knowing what He does not know, and not knowing what He does know. Thus the problem of squaring divine omniscience with future contingency is solved. Defense of this solution rests largely on the claim that an alteration in what is known does not entail an alteration or change in the knower, and that the total amount of divine knowledge is unchanged by coming-to-know or coming-not-to-know. Some of the arguments to this effect are, as Schuman shows, quite sophisticated. And, judging by the sheer volume of the discussion of these claims across the three Peri hermeneias commentaries associated with Alberic’s school, it received the most attention of all their doctrines pertaining to that text.
The fourth part of the volume deals with arguments and fallacies. Regarding the latter, Alberic was one of the very first Latin commentators on Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations—perhaps even the first. His own, seemingly quite extensive, commentary is lost, but a number of his views are recorded in two anonymous texts, the Glose in Aristotelis Sophisticos Elencos and Summa Sophisticorum Elencorum. In “Alberic of Paris on the Sophistici elenchi,” Sten Ebbesen presents a new edition of the testiomonia to Alberic’s views and provides them with an extensive commentary that discusses and contextualizes his views both in relation to the Latin tradition of commenting on the Ars vetus and to the Greek commentary tradition as channeled by James of Venice, whose commentary on the Sophistical Refutations Alberic clearly knew and engaged critically with.
Next, in Chapter 11, “Modal Syllogisms in the Introductiones Montanae maiores,” Paul Thom provides a study of the theory of syllogismi incisi contained in the Introductiones Montanae maiores. These are syllogisms that move from a modal and a non-modal premise to a modal conclusion, where modality is taken by the author of the Introductiones to apply to things and not propositional meanings. In the Introductiones, Thom shows, three main claims are made concerning syllogismi incisi, namely that (1) they do not obey the standard conversion rules; that (2) they are all valid in the direct first figure and third figure but not in others; and that (3) the class of valid inference may be widened by requiring terms to be substantial. Thom first develops a semantical framework that validates claims (1) to (3) but prescinds from deeper semantical and historical questions; he then proceeds to develop a second framework that tries to integrate and do justice to these issues as well.
Finally, in the last part and chapter of the volume, we move from the doctrinal and philosophical contents of the Albrican source material to issues concerning the transmission of texts. Indeed, just as the philosophical contents of the source material has not previously been much explored, so the medieval manuscripts that transmit it remain largely unexamined from a palaeographical and codicological angle. In “A Commentary on the Categories from the School of Alberic in Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria 2087,” Sofia Orsino contributes to this important and much-needed work by analyzing a very interesting manuscript, today held in Padua. As de Rijk discovered, this manuscript transmits a very extensive and important commentary on Aristotle’s Categories by a committed follower of Alberic. As Orsino shows through careful analysis, the manuscript is in fact largely a palimpsest, the erased layer of which was made up of grammatical material, and it was produced at some point during the second or third quarter of the 12th century, most likely, despite its current location, in a school context in northwestern Europe (perhaps France).
With this the volume comes to a close. But it is our hope that, having demonstrated the richness of the source material associated with Alberic and his school, and of 12th-century logical and metaphysical thought more generally, it will help point to and open up future avenues of research not only on Alberic but on the 12th-century logical schools more generally.
Acknowledgements
This volume is one of the results of the research project Exploring Twelfth-Century Philosophy: Alberic of Paris and his School, funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark under grant number 1024–00214B and led by Heine Hansen at the Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen, from 2022 through 2024. The groundwork for the book was laid at the conference Alberic in Context, held in Copenhagen on 14–16 June 2023, where most of the papers that make up its 12 chapters were presented and discussed. We would like to thank all the contributors to the volume as well as Magdalena Bieniak, Laurent Cesalli, Karin Margareta Fredborg, Anne Grondeux, Pietro Podolak, Timothy Tambassi, and Luisa Valente for making the event a great success. A very special thanks is due to Yukio Iwakuma and Chris Martin, who besides attending this and several other events organized within the project, both spent longer periods of time working with us in Copenhagen and generously offered their help and expertise during various stages of the project.
Heine Hansen, Enrico Donato, and Boaz Faraday Schuman