Logical-Theological Problems of the Debate About Universals: The Context of Early Scholasticism

The article analyzes the relationship of continuity that was formed in solving the problem of universals in the era of antiquity and the era of early scholasticism. The author shows that the 12th century became the time of renewed interest in the designated problem due to the fact that it was an era of cultural renaissance. The latter is considered as a transitional era, which is always characterized by the “closure of experience” (S.S. Neretina's term) - of any experience - to the individual. Roman classics and Greek philosophy in the 12th century were assimilated by the Latin Christianized culture; the culture of the Muslim world became the means of this assimilation - this is the context in which the interest in the problem of universals revived in the 12th century. In the field of education, philosophy and logic came to priority positions by the end of the Middle Ages, which also contributed to the revival of interest in the logical and theological side of the debate about universals. Universals are presented as ambiguous (the construct “equivocation” in Boethius's terminology): equivocative - ambiguous (as divine ideas that conclude the act of creation and exist in the status of common names of things, including concepts). The concepts of realism - nominalism - conceptualism are separated. Conceptualism is based on the idea of the possibility of revealing the universal through the special, by means of referring to the concrete (“fused being”). The author substantiates the thesis that the incompleteness of the debate about the universals of Hilbert and Abelard is due to Hilbert's position regarding relations. The relation itself is the ability to be one of the two terms of the relation: the relation is intrinsically inherent in the substance, since its essence is to enter into a series of relations. By linking relation to substance, Hilbert gives infinity to the debate with Abelard. In Abelard's interpretation, the true meaning of objects of nature is inexpressible through language; judgments about the invisible are in the competence of faith. Universals have the status of being in intellectual cognition, but this is a conceptual world. Hilbert and Abelard disagree on the question of how the categories of the individual and property, subject and predicate, genus and species are represented ontologically; however, the two are united in the scholastic idea that, distinguished by logic, these categories are rooted not only in language, but also in reality: knowledge created through judgments that have a subject-predicate structure is true if the connection of terms in the judgment reproduces the ratio of the parts designated by them. As shown in the study, the dominant premise that theological and philosophical thought brought the problem of universals back to life in the 12th century was, in the author's opinion, the following: it was during this period that the style of thinking was formed and was able to be applied in the analysis (as a way of reasoning and evidence), characteristic of the era of early scholasticism. Friedrich Engels drew attention to this feature when he wrote that the history of the Middle Ages knew only one ideology - religion and theology. Taken in conjunction with the scholastic ideal of knowledge of the era of early scholasticism, the indicated style of thinking provided interest in the problem of universals.

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