bartowski/soob3123_Veritas-12B-GGUF
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https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | In the philosophical literature, the term “abduction” is used in two related but different senses. In both senses, the term refers to some form of explanatory reasoning. However, in the historically first sense, it refers to the place of explanatory reasoning in generating hypotheses, while in the sense in which it is... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | This entry is exclusively concerned with abduction in the modern sense, although there is a supplement on abduction in the historical sense, which had its origin in the work of Charles Sanders Peirce—see the | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | See also the entry on scientific discovery, in particular the section on discovery as abduction. | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | Most philosophers agree that abduction (in the sense of Inference to the Best Explanation) is a type of inference that is frequently employed, in some form or other, both in everyday and in scientific reasoning. However, the exact form as well as the normative status of abduction are still matters of controversy. This... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | You happen to know that Tim and Harry have recently had a terrible row that ended their friendship. Now someone tells you that she just saw Tim and Harry jogging together. The best explanation for this that you can think of is that they made up. You conclude that they are friends again. | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | One morning you enter the kitchen to find a plate and cup on the table, with breadcrumbs and a pat of butter on it, and surrounded by a jar of jam, a pack of sugar, and an empty carton of milk. You conclude that one of your house-mates got up at night to make him- or herself a midnight snack and was too tired to clear... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | Walking along the beach, you see what looks like a picture of Winston Churchill in the sand. It could be that, as in the opening pages of Hilary Putnam’s book Reason, Truth, and History, (1981), what you see is actually the trace of an ant crawling on the beach. The much simpler, and therefore (you think) much better,... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | In these examples, the conclusions do not follow logically from the premises. For instance, it does not follow logically that Tim and Harry are friends again from the premises that they had a terrible row which ended their friendship and that they have just been seen jogging together; it does not even follow, we may s... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | Abduction is normally thought of as being one of three major types of inference, the other two being deduction and induction. The distinction between deduction, on the one hand, and induction and abduction, on the other hand, corresponds to the distinction between necessary and non-necessary inferences. In deductive i... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | But not all inferences are of this variety. Consider, for instance, the inference of “John is rich” from “John lives in Chelsea” and “Most people living in Chelsea are rich.” Here, the truth of the first sentence is not guaranteed (but only made likely) by the joint truth of the second and third sentences. Differently... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | It is standard practice to group non-necessary inferences into inductive and abductive ones. Inductive inferences form a somewhat heterogeneous class, but for present purposes they may be characterized as those inferences that are based purely on statistical data, such as observed frequencies of occurrences of a parti... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | However, the relevant statistical information may also be more vaguely given, as in the premise, “Most people living in Chelsea are rich.” (There is much discussion about whether the conclusion of an inductive argument can be stated in purely qualitative terms or whether it should be a quantitative one—for instance, t... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | The mere fact that an inference is based on statistical data is not enough to classify it as an inductive one. You may have observed many gray elephants and no non-gray ones, and infer from this that all elephants are gray, because that would provide the best explanation for why you have observed so many gray elephant... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | A noteworthy feature of abduction, which it shares with induction but not with deduction, is that it violates monotonicity, meaning that it may be possible to infer abductively certain conclusions from a subset of a set S of premises which cannot be inferred abductively from S as a whole. For instance, adding the prem... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | The type of inference exemplified in the cases described at the beginning of this entry will strike most as entirely familiar. Philosophers as well as psychologists tend to agree that abduction is frequently employed in everyday reasoning. Sometimes our reliance on abductive reasoning is quite obvious and explicit. Bu... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | Abductive reasoning is not limited to everyday contexts. Quite the contrary: philosophers of science have argued that abduction is a cornerstone of scientific methodology; see, for instance, Boyd 1981, 1984, Harré 1986, 1988, Lipton 1991, 2004, and Psillos 1999. According to Timothy Williamson (2007), “[t]he abductive... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | At the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was discovered that the orbit of Uranus, one of the seven planets known at the time, departed from the orbit as predicted on the basis of Isaac Newton’s theory of universal gravitation and the auxiliary assumption that there were no further planets in the solar system. On... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | The second example concerns what is now commonly regarded to have been the discovery of the electron by the English physicist Joseph John Thomson. Thomson had conducted experiments on cathode rays in order to determine whether they are streams of charged particles. He concluded that they are indeed, reasoning as follo... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | As the cathode rays carry a charge of negative electricity, are deflected by an electrostatic force as if they were negatively electrified, and are acted on by a magnetic force in just the way in which this force would act on a negatively electrified body moving along the path of these rays, I can see no escape from t... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | The conclusion that cathode rays consist of negatively charged particles does not follow logically from the reported experimental results, nor could Thomson draw on any relevant statistical data. That nevertheless he could “see no escape from the conclusion” is, we may safely assume, because the conclusion is the best... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | Many other examples of scientific uses of abduction have been discussed in the literature; see, for instance, Harré 1986, 1988 and Lipton 1991, 2004. Abduction is also said to be the predominant mode of reasoning in medical diagnosis: physicians tend to go for the hypothesis that best explains the patient’s symptoms (... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | Last but not least, abduction plays a central role in some important philosophical debates. See Shalkowski 2010 on the place of abduction in metaphysics (also Bigelow 2010), Krzyżanowska, Wenmackers, and Douven 2014 and Douven 2016a for a possible role of abduction in the semantics of conditionals, and Williamson 2017... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | Responses to these arguments typically point to the fact that the notion of empirical equivalence at play unduly neglects explanatory considerations, for instance, by defining the notion strictly in terms of hypotheses’ making the same predictions. Those responding then argue that even if some hypotheses make exactly ... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | Precise statements of what abduction amounts to are rare in the literature on abduction. (Peirce did propose an at least fairly precise statement; but, as explained in the supplement to this entry, it does not capture what most nowadays understand by abduction.) Its core idea is often said to be that explanatory consi... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | In textbooks on epistemology or the philosophy of science, one often encounters something like the following as a formulation of abduction: | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | An observation that is frequently made about this rule, and that points to a potential problem for it, is that it presupposes the notions of candidate explanation and best explanation, neither of which has a straightforward interpretation. While some still hope that the former can be spelled out in purely logical, or ... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | Furthermore, many of those who think ABD1 is headed along the right lines believe that it is too strong. Some think that abduction warrants an inference only to the probable truth of the best explanation, others that it warrants an inference only to the approximate truth of the best explanation, and still others that ... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | The real problem with ABD1 runs deeper than this, however. Because abduction is ampliative—as explained earlier—it will not be a sound rule of inference in the strict logical sense, however abduction is explicated exactly. It can still be reliable in that it mostly leads to a true conclusion whenever the premises are ... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | How reasonable is it to suppose that this extra requirement is usually fulfilled? Not at all, presumably. To believe otherwise, we must assume some sort of privilege on our part to the effect that when we consider possible explanations of the data, we are somehow predisposed to hit, inter alia, upon the absolutely bes... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | In response to this, one might argue that the challenge to show that the best explanation is always or mostly among the hypotheses considered can be met without having to assume some form of privilege (see Schupbach 2014 for a different response, and see Dellsén 2017 for discussion). For given the hypotheses we have m... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | Alas, there is a catch. For even though there may be many hypotheses Hj that imply Hn+1 and, had they been formulated, would have been evaluated as being a better explanation for the data than the best explanation among the candidate explanations we started out with, Hn+1 itself will in general be hardly informative; ... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | A more promising response to the above “argument of the bad lot” begins with the observation that the argument capitalizes on a peculiar asymmetry or incongruence in ABD1. The rule gives license to an absolute conclusion—that a given hypothesis is true—on the basis of a comparative premise, namely, that that particula... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | The first option is to modify the rule so as to have it require an absolute premise. For instance, following Alan Musgrave (1988) or Peter Lipton (1993), one may require the hypothesis whose truth is inferred to be not only the best of the available potential explanations, but also to be satisfactory (Musgrave) or goo... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | Needless to say, ABD2 needs supplementing by a criterion for the satisfactoriness of explanations, or their being good enough, which, however, we are still lacking. | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | Secondly, one can formulate a symmetric or congruous version of abduction by having it sanction, given a comparative premise, only a comparative conclusion; this option, too, can in turn be realized in more than one way. Here is one way to do it, which has been proposed and defended in the work of Theo Kuipers (e.g., ... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | Clearly, ABD3 requires an account of closeness to the truth, but many such accounts are on offer today (see, e.g., Niiniluoto 1998). | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | One noteworthy feature of the congruous versions of abduction considered here is that they do not rely on the assumption of an implausible privilege on the reasoner’s part that, we saw, ABD1 implicitly relies on. Another is that if one can be certain that, however many candidate explanations for the data one may have ... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | As mentioned, there is widespread agreement that people frequently rely on abductive reasoning. Which of the above rules exactly is it that people rely on? Or might it be still some further rule that they rely on? Or might they in some contexts rely on one version, and in others on another (Douven 2017, forthcoming)? ... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | With respect to the normative question of which of the previously stated rules we ought to rely on (if we ought to rely on any form of abduction), where philosophical argumentation should be able to help, the situation is hardly any better. In view of the argument of the bad lot, ABD1 does not look very good. Other ar... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | Even if it is true that we routinely rely on abductive reasoning, it may still be asked whether this practice is rational. For instance, experimental studies have shown that when people are able to think of an explanation for some possible event, they tend to overestimate the likelihood that this event will actually o... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | We have already encountered the so-called argument of the bad lot, which, we saw, is valid as a criticism of ABD1 but powerless against various (what we called) congruous rules of abduction. We here consider two objections that are meant to be more general. The first even purports to challenge the core idea underlying... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | The first objection has as a premise that it is part of the meaning of “explanation” that if one theory is more explanatory than another, the former must be more informative than the latter (see, e.g., van Fraassen 1983, Sect. 2). The alleged problem then is that it is “an elementary logical point that a more informat... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | It is important to note, however, that in any other kind of case than the “paradigm” one, the putative elementary point is not obvious at all. For instance, it is entirely unclear in what sense Special Relativity Theory “has more ways of being false” than Lorentz’s version of the æther theory, given that they make the... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | The second objection, proffered in van Fraassen 1989 (Ch. 6), is levelled at probabilistic versions of abduction. The objection is that such rules must either amount to Bayes’ rule, and thus be redundant, or be at variance with it but then, on the grounds of Lewis’ dynamic Dutch book argument (as reported in Teller 19... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | However, this objection fares no better than the first. For one thing, as Patrick Maher (1992) and Brian Skyrms (1993) have pointed out, a loss in one respect may be outweighed by a benefit in another. It might be, for instance, that some probabilistic version of abduction does much better, at least in our world, than... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | For another thing, Douven (1999) argues that the question of whether a probabilistic rule is coherent is not one that can be settled independently of considering which other epistemic and decision-theoretic rules are deployed along with it; coherence should be understood as a property of packages of both epistemic and... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | Hardly anyone nowadays would want to subscribe to a conception of truth that posits a necessary connection between explanatory force and truth—for instance, because it stipulates explanatory superiority to be necessary for truth. As a result, a priori defenses of abduction seem out of the question. Indeed, all defense... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | The best-known argument of this sort was developed by Richard Boyd in the 1980s (see Boyd 1981, 1984, 1985). It starts by underlining the theory-dependency of scientific methodology, which comprises methods for designing experiments, for assessing data, for choosing between rival hypotheses, and so on. For instance, i... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | Critics have accused this argument of being circular. Specifically, it has been said that the argument rests on a premise—that scientific methodology is informed by approximately true background theories—which in turn rests on an inference to the best explanation for its plausibility. And the reliability of this type ... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | To this, Stathis Psillos (1999, Ch. 4) has responded by invoking a distinction credited to Richard Braithwaite, to wit, the distinction between premise-circularity and rule-circularity. An argument is premise-circular if its conclusion is amongst its premises. A rule-circular argument, by contrast, is an argument of w... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | Even if the use of abduction in Boyd’s argument might have led to the conclusion that abduction is not reliable, one may still have worries about the argument’s being rule-circular. For suppose that some scientific community relied not on abduction but on a rule that we may dub “Inference to the Worst Explanation” (IW... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | It is fair to note that for Psillos, the fact that a rule-circular argument does not guarantee a positive conclusion about the rule at issue is not sufficient for such an argument to be valid. A further necessary condition is “that one should not have reason to doubt the reliability of the rule—that there is nothing c... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | Be this as it may, even if rule-circularity is neither vicious nor otherwise problematic, one may still wonder how Boyd’s argument is to convert a critic of abduction, given that it relies on abduction. But Psillos makes it clear that the point of philosophical argumentation is not always, and in any case need not be,... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | There have also been attempts to argue for abduction in a more straightforward fashion, to wit, via enumerative induction. The common idea of these attempts is that every newly recorded successful application of abduction—like the discovery of Neptune, whose existence had been postulated on explanatory grounds (see Se... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | In the past decade, Bayesian confirmation theory has firmly established itself as the dominant view on confirmation; currently one cannot very well discuss a confirmation-theoretic issue without making clear whether, and if so why, one’s position on that issue deviates from standard Bayesian thinking. Abduction, in wh... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | This requires some clarification. For what could it mean for a Bayesian to be an explanationist? In order to apply Bayes’ rule and determine the probability for H after learning E, the Bayesian agent will have to determine the probability of H conditional on E. For that, he needs to assign unconditional probabilities ... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | Exactly how are explanatory considerations to guide one’s choice of priors? The answer to this question is not as simple as one might at first think. Suppose you are considering what priors to assign to a collection of rival hypotheses and you wish to follow Lipton’s suggestion. How are you to do this? An obvious—thou... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | Perhaps Lipton’s proposal is not intended to address those who already assign highest priors to best explanations, even if they do so on grounds that have nothing to do with explanation. The idea might be that, as long as one does assign highest priors to those hypotheses, everything is fine, or at least finer than if... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | (As an aside, it should be noticed that, according to standard Bayesian usage, the term “priors” does not necessarily refer to the degrees of belief a person assigns before the receipt of any data. If there are already data in, then, clearly, one may assign higher priors to hypotheses that best explain the then-availa... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | A more interesting answer to the above question of how explanation is to guide one’s choice of priors has been given by Jonathan Weisberg (2009). We said that mainstream Bayesians regard one assignment of prior probabilities as being as good as any other. So-called objective Bayesians do not do so, however. These Baye... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | The proposal is intriguing as far as it goes but, as Weisberg admits, in its current form, it does not go very far. For one thing, it is unclear how exactly explanatory considerations are to determine the weights required for the second step of the proposal. For another, it may be idle to hope that taking explanatory ... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | Another suggestion about the connection between abduction and Bayesian reasoning—to be found in Okasha 2000, McGrew 2003, Lipton 2004 (Ch. 7), and Dellsén 2018—is that the explanatory considerations may serve as a heuristic to determine, even if only roughly, priors and likelihoods in cases in which we would otherwise... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | Bayesians, especially the more modest ones, might want to retort that the Bayesian procedure is to be followed if, and only if, either (a) priors and likelihoods can be determined with some precision and objectivity, or (b) likelihoods can be determined with some precision and priors can be expected to “wash out” as m... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | Psillos (2000) proposes yet another way in which abduction might supplement Bayesian confirmation theory, one that is very much in the spirit of Peirce’s conception of abduction. The idea is that abduction may assist us in selecting plausible candidates for testing, where the actual testing then is to follow Bayesian ... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | Finally, a possibility that has so far not been considered in the literature is that abduction and Bayesianism do not so much work in tandem—as they do on the above proposals—as operate in different modes of reasoning; the Bayesian and the explanationist are characters that feature in different plays, so to speak. It ... | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | [Please contact the author with suggestions.] | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | epistemology: Bayesian | induction: problem of | Peirce, Charles Sanders | scientific explanation | scientific realism | simplicity | skepticism | underdetermination, of scientific theories | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | Copyright © 2021 by Igor Douven <igor.douven@paris-sorbonne.fr> | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | View this site from another server: | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2021 by The Metaphysics Research Lab, Department of Philosophy, Stanford University | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ | Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054 | abduction |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abelard/ | Peter Abelard (1079–21 April 1142) [‘Abailard’ or ‘Abaelard’ or ‘Habalaarz’ and so on] was the pre-eminent philosopher and theologian of the twelfth century. The teacher of his generation, he was also famous as a poet and a musician. Prior to the recovery of Aristotle, he brought the native Latin tradition in philosop... | abelard |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abelard/ | Abelard’s life is relatively well-known. In addition to events chronicled in the public record, his inner life is revealed in his autobiographical letter Historia calamitatum [“The Story of My Troubles”] and in his famous correspondence with Héloïse. | abelard |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abelard/ | Abelard was born into the lesser nobility around 1079 in Le Pallet, a small town in Brittany near Nantes. He received early training in letters, and took to his studies with enthusiasm; his later writings show familiarity with Cicero, Horace, Juvenal, Ovid, Lucan, Seneca, and Vergil. Abelard eventually renounced his i... | abelard |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abelard/ | During the first years of the twelfth century, Abelard felt confident enough to set himself up as a lecturer, first at Melun and then at Corbeil, competing mainly with William of Champeaux (Paris) for students and reputation. The strain proved too much—Abelard’s health failed, and he returned to Brittany for several y... | abelard |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abelard/ | Abelard returned to Paris sometime between 1108 and 1113 with his health restored and his ambition intact. He attended William of Champeaux’s lectures, and entered into debate with William over the problem of universals. According to Abelard’s report, he bested his teacher in debate, and gained his reputation as a dia... | abelard |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abelard/ | Upon returning to Paris, Abelard became scholar-in-residence at Notre Dame, a position he held until his romantic entanglement with Héloïse led to his castration, at which point he entered the Benedictine monastery of Saint Denis and Héloïse entered the convent of Argenteuil. After his recovery, Abelard resumed teachi... | abelard |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abelard/ | It was not to be. Abelard says that poverty forced him to resume teaching. He and the students who flocked to him in droves constructed an oratory named the Paraclete, where he continued to write, teach, and research. This idyll came to an end around 1126, when Abelard accepted an invitation to become abbot of the mon... | abelard |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abelard/ | By the mid-1130s Abelard was given permission to return to Paris (retaining his rank as abbot) and to teach in the schools on the Mont Ste.-Genevieve. It was during this time that his theological treatises were brought to the attention of Bernard of Clairvaux, who objected to some of Abelard’s conclusions as well as t... | abelard |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abelard/ | Abelard’s students were active as kings, philosophers, poets, politicians, theologians, and monks; they include three popes and several heads of state. Explicit references to Abelard’s thinking in the later Middle Ages are few, likely because of the cloud cast by the verdict of the Council of Soissons, but it is clear... | abelard |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abelard/ | The dates of composition and even the number of Abelard’s writings remain largely obscure and a matter of controversy among scholars. One reason for this is that Abelard constantly revised and rewrote, so that several distinct versions of a given work might be in circulation; another reason is that several of his writ... | abelard |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abelard/ | The first category consists of Abelard’s works on dialectic—works concerned with logic, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. His two masterworks are: | abelard |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abelard/ | Both of these works follow the pattern of the logica vetus, the “old logic” inherited from antiquity: Porphyry’s introduction to Aristotle, the Isagoge; Aristotle’s Categories and On Interpretation; Boethius’s Introduction to the Categorical Syllogism, Categorical Syllogisms, Hypothetical Syllogisms, On Topical Differ... | abelard |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abelard/ | The first of these is a series of elementary commentaries on the old logic (though again not completely preserved); their simple level has led some scholars to think they must come from early in Abelard’s career, others to deny that they are Abelard’s work at all. Second, the Logica ‘nostrorum petitioni sociorum’ is s... | abelard |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abelard/ | The second category consists of Abelard’s works on ethics: | abelard |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abelard/ | The Ethics offers an analysis of moral worth and the degree of praise or blame that should attach to agents and their actions; it breaks off at the beginning of the second book. The Conversations is a pair of debates (among characters who appear to Abelard in a dream) over the nature of happiness and the supreme good:... | abelard |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abelard/ | Moral advice and edifying sentiments are found in this series of distichs. | abelard |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abelard/ | The third category consists of Abelard’s works of philosophical theology. His three main works are devoted to a philosophical analysis of the Trinity, the several versions representing successive stages of his thought and his attempts at orthodoxy (each rewritten several times): | abelard |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abelard/ | The first version of the Theology seems to have been the work condemned at the Council of Soisssons, the last the work condemned at the Council of Sens. In addition to these three works, in which problems in philosophical theology are treated thematically, Abelard also wrote several commentaries: | abelard |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abelard/ | The first three commentaries are brief, but Abelard’s discussions of the first verses of Genesis and of Paul’s letter are extensive and detailed (the latter also relevant to Abelard’s ethical theory). Abelard also took up questions about faith and reason in a short work: | abelard |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abelard/ | This brief inner dialogue, modelled on Augustine’s Soliloquies, has “Peter” talking things over with “Abelard.” Theological questions of a more practical nature were raised by Héloïse in a series of questions she asked on her behalf and on behalf of the nuns of the Paraclete: | abelard |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abelard/ | Practical issues are also addressed in Abelard’s sermons, hymns, and lamentations (planctus). Finally, Abelard composed an extremely influential theological work that contains no theoretical speculation at all: | abelard |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abelard/ | Abelard assembles a series of 158 questions, each of which is furnished with patristic citations that imply a positive answer (sic) to the question and other patristic citations implying a negative answer (non). Abelard does not attempt to harmonize these apparently inconsistent remarks, but in his preface he lays dow... | abelard |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abelard/ | Abelard’s students and disciples also record many of his views, though this material has yet to be explored carefully. There are references in Abelard’s extant works to other works we do not have: Grammatica, “Grammar”; Rhetorica, “Rhetoric”; a commentary on Ezekiel written at the beginning of his studies in theology;... | abelard |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abelard/ | Abelard’s metaphysics is the first great example of nominalism in the Western tradition. While his view that universals are mere words (nomina) justifies the label, nominalism—or, better, irrealism—is the hallmark of Abelard’s entire metaphysics. He is an irrealist not only about universals, but also about proposition... | abelard |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abelard/ | Abelard defends his thesis that universals are nothing but words by arguing that ontological realism about universals is incoherent. More exactly, he holds that there cannot be any real object in the world satisfying Boethius’s criteria for the universal, namely something present as a whole in many at once so as to co... | abelard |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abelard/ | Suppose universals were things in the world, so that one and the same item is completely present in both Socrates and an ass at the same time, making each to be wholly an animal. Abelard points out that then the same thing, animal, will be simultaneously rational (due to its role in constituting the species human bein... | abelard |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abelard/ | To the rejoinder that rationality and irrationality are not actually present in the same thing, Abelard offers a twofold reply. First, he rejects the claim that they are present only potentially. Each species is actually informed by a contrary, and the genus is actually present in each as a whole; hence it is actually... | abelard |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abelard/ | If we object to this last piece of reasoning, on the grounds that individuals are unique in virtue of their non-essential features, Abelard replies that this view “makes accidents prior to substance.” That is, the objection claims that individual things are individual in virtue of features that contingently characteri... | abelard |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abelard/ | Prospects are no better for realism if the universal is identified not with a single thing but with a collection of things. Abelard points out that collections are posterior to their parts, and, furthermore, the collection is not shared among its parts in the way a universal is said to be common to many. Nor does it h... | abelard |
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Stanford Encyclopedia Philosophy (Teeny-Tiny Castle)
This dataset is part of a tutorial tied to the Teeny-Tiny Castle, an open-source repository containing educational tools for AI Ethics and Safety research.
How to Use
from datasets import load_dataset
dataset = load_dataset("AiresPucrs/stanford-encyclopedia-philosophy", split = 'train')
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