Alberic the Logician

abstract: Alberic of Paris (fl. 1130s) was one of the most prominent philosophers of the twelfth century, and Peter Abelard’s main rival. In this paper, I argue that the aim of Alberic’s logical program was to propound a realist conception of logic. That is, Alberic rejected the nominalistic theorem according to which logic deals only with names, and argued that logic also deals with things, both particular and universal. In this regard, Alberic’s logic hinges on a clear commitment to the existence of universals. To show this, I examine the core elements of Alberic’s logic and contrast them with their nominalistic counterparts. My analysis shows that Alberic, unlike Abelard and the Nominales , systematically construed logical relations and operations with reference to things and their universal natures. Moreover, I demonstrate that Alberic’s realism was in many ways an attempt to recover the original spirit of Boethius’s logic from the unorthodox and profound transformations that had been introduced by Abelard in the 1110s.