Although his narrative is more popularly termed Abelard and Heloise, Peter Abelard was more than his illicit love affair. He was one of the most prominent Christian philosophers in the 11th century in France. He held astonishing insight on Aristotelian logic and shares his systematic character and skepticism about Plato’s teachings – which by then had become a part of Christian dogma. The widely accepted view of realism at that time was based on Plato’s Theory of Forms and maintained that all materials have properties in common that exist independently as Universals.
Abelard, contrary to this belief, resonated more with Aristotle’s belief that Universal only exists in our thoughts and hence it is not to be accepted as reality but as a concept. Abelard’s take on this theory – later known as conceptualism – was initially criticized and refuted, however, it became a stepping stone for Aristotelian ideologies to be adopted in Christian theology along with Platonism.
