William of Champeaux and early twelfth-century dialectic.
Published: 2005
Language: eng
Number of pages: 141
Description: William of Champeaux (c. 1070--1122) is best known as Peter Abelard's famous teacher and adversary. None of his philosophical writings, however, was known to have survived. The two masters engaged in debate over the problem of universals, during which William's realist views were thoroughly trounced and his reputation greatly diminished.In the last few years, scholars have begun to attribute a great wealth of material to William of Champeaux, including a dialectical text-book, the  Introductiones Dialecticae, and commentaries on the texts of the  logica vetus. The earliest commentaries on rhetoric, on Cicero's  De inventione and the Pseudo-Ciceronian Ad Herennium, have also been attributed to him. Additionally, William was said to have been responsible for versions of the important late-eleventh century grammatical gloss on Priscian's Institutiones Grammaticae, the  Glosulae in Priscianum. Each of these works is supposed to be the first of its kind in the medieval tradition.But a more careful examination of the works that have been attributed to William of Champeaux is required. In chapter one of this dissertation, I analyze what can be known historically about the figure of William of Champeaux, and some of the ways in which this master and his ideas have been characterized in the history of philosophy. In chapter two, I present the attribution arguments that have been advanced by other scholars to secure the connection between extant grammatical, rhetorical and dialectical writings to William of Champeaux. I criticize the attributions of only the dialectical literature to William, and present an alternative hypothesis for the future study of this material.Although William cannot properly be said to be their author, the literature that had been associated with him is interesting and challenging nonetheless, and its study massively enlarges our scope of early twelfth century dialectic. Chapters three and four are small studies on two of the more basic features of dialectic, the utterance (vox) and the significant utterance (vox significativa). The modest aim of these chapters is to bring to light some of the detail and sophistication of this material.
Notes: Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2005.

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Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-06, Section: A, page: 2242.