The Problem of Universals from Boethius to John of Salisbury by Roberto Pinzani (review)

Roberto Pinzani has written a closely-argued, highly original, valuable but difficult book. The Problem of Universals, indeed, is—and has been for nearly two centuries—the most frequently treated topic in medieval philosophy, and solutions to it proposed by two of the philosophers discussed here, Boethius and Abelard, have been examined countless times. But no one has before tried to cover the whole period, from circa 500 to circa 1150, looking in detail at a whole variety of writers. Moreover, what Pinzani has to say even about Boethius and Abelard is new.

After a chapter setting out the problem, as he understands it, and looking especially at predication in Aristotle, Pinzani goes on to Boethius and then the ninth-century thinker John Scottus (Eriugena). The next chapter is mainly about the realist theories of Abelard's teacher, William of Champeaux, and others, as presented, mainly, in Abelard's discussions. Then Pinzani considers the anti-realist views from circa 1100. The next two chapters discuss a pair of sophisticated twelfth-century realist theories: the view that the individual and universal are identical, linked to Walter of Mortagne, and the theory that universals are collections, which Pinzani attributes to Joscelin of Soissons. There follow chapters on Abelard, Gilbert of Poitiers, and John of Salisbury.

Although Pinzani's range seems wide—and he is one of the first to investigate John of Salisbury's own views on the subject rather than his reports of others, there is a great deal of recently discovered twelfth-century material that he neglects, such as the texts related to William of Champeaux in the Notae Dunelmenses and the Priscian Glosule, investigated by Irène Rosier-Catach, and the many unpublished twelfth-century Isagoge commentaries, made available in transcription by Yukio Iwakuma.

Pinzani indeed makes it clear that he is not interested in historical detail, such as matters of attribution. Nonetheless, he is usually a careful scholar, although his bibliography of primary sources goes disastrously wrong, with anonymous twelfth-century treatises being attributed to Boethius and Eriugena. He writes correct but sometimes rather odd English (see the passage quoted below), which sometimes makes him difficult to understand. His method is that of close textual analysis. He looks at the details of the arguments, explaining them, putting them into diagrams and frequently translating passages—almost always accurately, although sometimes he diverges too far from a literal version.

There is a great deal to learn from these analyses, which use the tools of contemporary philosophy to elicit exactly what each passage is arguing and where the arguments go wrong. But many readers may feel a sense of disorientation or alienation, and, apart from the passages translated, find it difficult to recognize in Pinzani's analyses the early medieval discussions with which they are familiar, and impossible to discern which of the differing interpretations put forward by recent scholars of, for instance, Boethius or Abelard on universals, Pinzani prefers (a difficulty exacerbated by the fact that, although he refers to much of the relevant secondary literature, he almost never engages with it explicitly). Pinzani tends to see the Problem of Universals as being really just a problem about predication. But predication is an issue within semantics, whereas many consider that the Problem of Universals, if such a Problem can be isolated, has a metaphysical dimension too. Are there are any universal things? That question is not totally absent from Pinzani's discussion, but it is almost never its focal point.

The sense of alienation may also have something to do with Pinzani's own apparent alienation from the material he is studying. He ends the study thus: "Every answer to the Porphyrian questions we have considered in this work only result in new and seemingly insurmountable difficulties. . . . The position of the problem of universals has to do with an attempt to justify the truth of categorical statements. However, the complications of the paths...