On Abelard's View Of Universal

This thesis mainly focuses on the medieval philosopher Abelard and his conceptualism.The problem of universals is quite a big problem in western philosophy. This thesis firstly deals with those key concepts such as universals and particular which are the preconditions of this thesis. Then I deal with the history of this problem, from the very beginning of ancient Greece to the lately medieval time. This problem is quite important in medieval time because of the characteristic of that special era. In medieval time, there was a tension between philosophy and theology, which shows the tension between human ration and their act of believe. The problem of universals is no longer a philosophical problem, but also a problem in belief. The history of this problem is ended here in this thesis with Abelard's conceptualism. At last, this thesis talked about the influence and significance of Abelard in his generation and also later time.The key issue of this thesis is Abelard's view of universals, his conceptualism. Abelard joined in the controversy between realists and nominalists in medieval time. The viewpoint of realist was that they admit the objective existence of various objects and properties, while the nominalist thought that the only feature that particulars falling under the same general term have in common is that they coverd by the same term. Abelard accepted the view of Aristotle, he concludes that given Aristotle's definition of universals as those things that can be predicated of several things. By dividing vox(voice) and sermo(word), he said it is only universal words that can be regarded as really existing universals. The universals in Abelard's theory are the generalization of he similarities of things, and also the symbols and concepts with which we can know different things, universals lie in human's mind, and can only be reached by understanding, but they're not the creation of mind, the origin of universals is still the particulars.In the medieval times, the discussion about that problem is the inheriting from Greek tradition. It is based on the salvation to phenomenon, and limited in the range of position of universals on the process of understanding. Therefore we used to deal with it as a problem of epistemology. But in my opinion, the process that people access universals is actually the seeking of truth, actually it has a more fundamental sence of that kind of seeking-solving the problem that how cognition is possible is not the end, and the real final purpose is to find a way of seeking the essence, to ask ourselves and.to know ourselves. Consequently, the importance of universals can be seen.