Philosophy of the 10th and 11th centuries: The Berengar of Tours controversy (1)

What interests the history of philosophy is less dialectic as an art of discussion than the use we try to make of it to arrive at a conception of reality. To clarify, let us recall that Boethius’ collection posed several problems, specifically metaphysical, firstly the problem of the reality of universals in the famous text of Porphyry; then (like Saint Augustine) the problem, no less famous in the Middle Ages, of the limit of applications of categories; the ten categories or genera of being only apply to the sensible world; dialectic, which only operates with genera and species subordinate to categories, cannot therefore reach a higher reality either. But then it is a question of knowing how we can talk about this reality. Finally, let us add that Boethius’ comments provided some of the technical notions of Aristotle’s philosophy, for example that of form and matter, that of act and power.

There is something completely different here than a simple art of discussion. We can already see this in Fredegisus’s Epistola de nihilo et tenebris, a little treatise that is quite “stupid and naive,” as Pranü, the historian of logic, says; the author, a student of Alcuin, maintains that nothingness (nihil) exists; because to say that it is nothing implies that it is.

Gerbert’s little treatise De Rationali et ratione uti is far more instructive than this crude realism. Porphyry says in chapter VII of Isagoge: “Reasonable being the specific difference, using reason is said of this difference; and it is also said of all species of beings subordinate to this difference.” Porphyry was objected to the logical rule which requires that the predicate have an extension greater than or at most equal to that of the subject: a rule which is violated here since, the reasonable term being a power of which using reason is the act , the subject would have more extension than its predicate. Gerbert responds by distinguishing the predicates which are part of the essence of the subject, such as reasonable is part of the essence of man, and accidental predicates, such as using reason, when it is called reasonable: the rule indicated does not only applies to predicates of the first kind.

It is this clear distinction between essential and accidental attributes which allows us to clearly pose the problem of universals: because the universals, of which we wonder if they are real, are only the genera and the species, animal, man, which are essential attributes of an individual like Socrates. On this point, Boethius’ commentators, such as the pseudo-Rhaban Maur (whose Super Porphyrium is agreed to be placed in the first half of the 11th century), followed the indications found in the master’s work, and which come from of Aristotle; they repeated what Boethius and also Simplicius had said, that the Categories, study of attributes, cannot relate to things (since res non praedicatur), but only to words as they signify things. Hence the solution, steeped in Aristotle, of the problem of universals: genus and species exist only as predicates essential to the individual. “Individuals, species and genus are the same reality (eadem res), and universals are not, as is sometimes said, anything different from individuals.” And we hear as an echo of the thought of Anstote, through Boethius, in these words that the genus is to the species, and the species to the individual, like a matter to a form .