Comments: WORDS IN MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY.

I just had the idea of reediting Abelard's Sic et Non (sp.?) with miodern translations of the Bible text, and giving it to all the Christian fundamentalists in the world.

Posted by John Emerson at March 24, 2006 11:30 AM

I'm not at all sure that 'cognitive' is the right word to contrast with 'natural' in this instance. Clanchy (whom I'd trust on court-documents of post-Conquest England, but not on the finer points of scholastic philosophy) seems unable to distinguish between the structure of our thought and the structure of our language. As scholars such as Pieter Verburg and Meyrick Carre have noted, logic after Abelard would be increasingly based in grammar; but Abelard, unlike Ockham, firmly believes in the isomorphism of man's knowledge with the structure of the natural world. Which means that the thought-world relation is tighter than the word-thought relation (this following Aristotle). As cognitive science seems to deal with the latter relation, it makes no sense to apply this category to Abelard's thinking.

Posted by Conrad at March 25, 2006 10:50 AM