William of Champeaux

Wilhelm von Champeaux (also Guillaume de Champeaux , Guglielmus de Campellis ; * around 1070 in Champeaux , France , † 1121 in Châlons-en-Champagne ) was a French bishop and philosopher . Wilhelm was a pupil of Manegold von Lautenbach , Roscelins von Compiègne and Anselms von Laon , and a friend of Ivo of Chartres and Bernhard of Clairvaux .

Life

Wilhelm came from a small village called Champeaux, 12 km east of Melun . Nothing is known about his early years.

Around 1100 he began an ecclesiastical career, initially as a canon in the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris and a teacher at the cathedral school. Just three years later, in 1103, he acquired one of the three archdeaconates at the cathedral (namely the archdeaconate of Brie ) and thus rose to the highest position. As archdeacon, Wilhelm successfully ran a dialectic chair in front of the gates of the cathedral and thus acquired a nationwide reputation until he was attacked in this position by the young Peter Abelard and his position was subsequently increasingly questioned.

In 1108 Wilhelm gave up his chair and went to Easter in a cell of the Holy Victorinus on the left bank of the Seine, just outside Paris, which is just under Bishop Girbert to a large Regularkanonikerstift goal for (inauguration by King Louis VI. In the year 1113). In Saint-Victor , Wilhelm temporarily resumed his lessons in the trivium sciences, but was attacked again by his student Peter Abelard. Nevertheless, the Saint-Victor school continued to flourish and subsequently took on a mystically oriented direction.

In 1113, William of Champeaux gave up his apprenticeship in Paris and followed the call to the bishopric of Châlons-en-Champagne . As Bishop of Châlons, Wilhelm vehemently advocated celibacy ; as an ardent defender of ecclesiastical investiture , Pope Kalixtus II sent him as a legate to the Mouzon negotiations in 1119 .

Wilhelm was friends with Bernhard von Clairvaux and is said to have been named Monachus ad succurrendum , d. H. as a fosterling, having entered the Cistercian order.

Works

For a long time, Wilhelm's philosophical works were considered lost, and it is only recently that some of his writings and theorems have been extracted from individual manuscripts, mostly in anonymous form. These are the Introductiones dialecticae , commentaries on Cicero's De inventione and his Rhetorica ad Herrennium , a Magister G.'s comments on grammar, based on the Glosulae on Priscian's Institutiones grammaticae . In Liber Pancrisis , too , individual tenets are ascribed to Wilhelm von Champeaux. Most of what we know about Wilhelm's philosophy, however, can be derived from the certainly not very objective statements by Peter Abelard in his Historia calamitatum . The theological works are also incomplete: De origine animae , a Liber sententiarum and a Dialogus seu altercatio cujusdam Christiani et Iudaei .

Universality dispute

According to the Historia Calamitatum, the so-called universal dispute between Wilhelm von Champeaux and Peter Abelard ended in favor of the latter. Wilhelm was influenced by the writings of Boethius and, in contrast to his teacher Roscelin, an extreme nominalist , represented a moderate realism :

For Wilhelm, the universal was a single identical substance . Since each substance was assigned to accidental activities, individuality had to emerge from the various accidental activities. Abelard attacked this thesis in Saint-Victor: Quoting the texts of Aristotle , Porphyrius and Boethius , he showed that it is obviously impossible that, for example, the human species is identical in Plato and Socrates, and that an unreasonable living being is not the same could be like someone gifted with reason. Therefore one has to admit that opposites exist in one and the same substance. For Wilhelm, the universal existed entirely in every individual and, on top of that, before things: universalia ante rem . Then, as Abelard argued, the individual composed by his accidents could not be the subject, since the subject existed before the accidents. And: to maintain indifference, namely to assert that with regard to being human there is no difference between Socrates and another human being, that cannot be. On the other hand, if Socrates and Plato were not different in man, then neither were they different in stone. With these arguments, Abelard led Wilhelm von Champeaux to absurdity . Elsewhere, in his Dialektica , Abelard also criticized other attitudes of Wilhelm, e.g. B. his overly strong reference to the then newly discovered grammar of Priscian.

The thought model that Abelard opposed to the realism of Wilhelm von Champeaux entered into a compromise between extremely realistic and nominalist positions and was also called conceptualism .

Although Wilhelm dropped his theory of indifference during his lifetime, it continued in places into the 13th or 14th century.

Quote

"At that time I returned to him to hear rhetoric from him; apart from various other joint attempts at disputation, I brought him, through incontrovertible evidence, to the fact that he changed his old doctrine of universals, and even rejected it entirely. His doctrine of the commonality of universals consisted in asserting that one and the same essence was whole and at the same time in all individual things, so that these certainly had no difference in essence, but only a variety due to the multitude of accidents. Now he changed his teaching insofar as he no longer asserted the identity of the essential quality, but only its indistinguishability.This question has always been considered by the dialecticians as one of the most important in the doctrine of the universals, so that even Porphyry in his Isagogues, when he wrote about the universals, did not decide it dared, but only said, 'This is a very spacious company.' Since Wilhelm von Champeaux had changed his doctrine on this point, or rather involuntarily gave it up, his lectures became so discredited that he was hardly allowed to read the other doctrines of dialectic, as if this whole science were at its core in this doctrine of the universals would have ... "

Peter Abelard, Historia Calamitatum

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Essays

• Karin M. Fredborg: The commentaries in Cicero's “De inventione” and “Rhetorica ad Herennium” by William of Champeaux . In: Cahiers de l'Institut du Moyen Âge Grec et Latin , Vol. 17 (1976), pp. 1ff. ISSN  0591-0358
• Yukio Iwakuma: Introductiones dialecticae secundum Wiligelmum et secundum G. Paganellum . In: Cahiers de l'Institut du Moyen Âge Grec et Latin , Vol. 63 (1993), pp. 45ff. ISSN  0591-0358
• Yukio Iwakuma: Pierre Abélard et Guillaume de Champeaux dans les premières années du XIIe siècle . In: Joël Biard (ed.): Langage, sciences, philosophie au XIIe siècle . Vrin, Paris 1999, pp. 93-124, ISBN 2-7116-1417-4 .
• Yukio Iwakuma: William of Champeaux on Aristotle's Categories . In: Joëlrs Biard (ed.): La tradition médiévale des Catégories. Actes du XIIe symposium européen de logique et de semantique médiévales, Avignon 2000 . Peeters, Louvain 2004, pp. 313-328, ISBN 90-429-1335-5 .
• Constant J. Mews: Philosophy, Communities of Learning and Theological Dissent in the Twelfth Century . In: Giulio D'Onofrio (Ed.): The medieval paradigm. Religious, thought and philosophy. Papers of the International Congress, Rome, October 29–1. November 2005 . Brepols, Turnhout 2011, ISBN 978-2-503-52549-5 .
• Paulin Paris : Guillaume de Champeaux, evesque de Chalons sur Marne . In: Antoine Rivet de La Grange ( Gre .): Histoire litéraire de France, Vol. 10: Qui comprend la suite du douzième siècle de l'église jusqu'à l'an 1124 . Kraus Reprint, Nendeln 1973, p. 307ff. (Reprint of the Paris 1868 edition).
• Werner Robl: Wilhelm von Champeaux and Saint-Victor . In: Ders .: Peter Abelard in Paris. Investigations into the topography of Paris and the everyday history of the early scholastics between 1100 and 1140 . Self-published, Neustadt 2003, pp. 38–40.

Monographs

• Eric Hicks: La vie et les épistres. Pierre Abaelard et Heloys et sa femme, Vol. 1: Introduction, Textes . Champion, Paris 1991, ISBN 2-05-101173-7 .
• Odo Lottin: Psychologie et morale aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles, Vol. 5: L'école d'Anselme de Laon et de Guillaume de Champeaux . Duculot, Gembloux 1959.
• Eugène Michaud : Guillaume de Champeaux et les écoles de Paris . Didier, Paris 1867.
• Heinrich Weisweiler: The literature of the school Anselms von Laon and Wilhelms von Champeaux in German libraries. A contribution to the history of the spread of the oldest scholastic school in Germany (contributions to the history of the philosophy of the Middle Ages; Vol. 33 / 1–2). Aschendorff, Münster 1936.

Web links

• Entry in Edward N. Zalta (Ed.): Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy .

Footnotes

1. ↑ Next to the Saint-Christophe church. See Werner Robl: Wilhelm von Champeaux and Saint-Victor. ( Memento of September 3, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) In: Ders .: Peter Abelard in Paris. Studies on the topography of Paris and the everyday history of early scholastics between 1100 and 1140. Self-published, Neustadt 2003, pp. 38–40.
2. ↑ According to Muratori z. Among his pupils were the Italians Pandulf, cathedral priest of Milan, Anselm von Pustella and Olrich, vice cathedral of Milan, the latter two subsequently Archbishops of Milan (1126–1148), and the Englishman Robert von Bethune, later bishop of Hereford .
3. ↑ At least that is how it is presented in Abelard's Historia calamitatum .
4. ^ Rainer Berndt : Sankt Viktor, school of . In: Theologische Realenzyklopädie (TRE), Vol. 30, Berlin / New York 1999, pp. 42–46, here p. 43.
5. ↑ According to recent research, it cannot be maintained that Saint-Victor was founded by Wilhelm, nor that this would have happened in 1108 and in one attempt. See the work of Constant J. Mews: Philosophy, Communities of Learning and Theological Dissent in the Twelfth Century . In: Giulio D'Onofrio (Ed.): The medieval paradigm. Religious, thought and philosophy. Papers of the International Congress, Rome, October 29–1. November 2005 . Brepols, Turnhout 2011, ISBN 978-2-503-52549-5 ; as well as Werner Robl: Wilhelm von Champeaux and Saint-Victor ( Memento of the original from September 3, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The  archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . In: Ders .: Peter Abelard in Paris. Investigations into the topography of Paris and the everyday history of the early scholastics between 1100 and 1140 . Self-published, Neustadt 2003, pp. 38–40.
6. ↑ For a detailed bibliography cf. Constant J. Mews: Philosophy, Communities of Learning and Theological Dissent in the Twelfth Century . In: Giulio D'Onofrio (Ed.): The medieval paradigm. Religious, thought and philosophy. Papers of the International Congress, Rome, October 29–1. November 2005 . Brepols, Turnhout 2011, ISBN 978-2-503-52549-5 ; and Eric Hicks .: La vie et les epistres Pierres Abaelart et Heloys sa fame . Paris 1991.
7. ^ Eric Hicks .: La vie et les epistres Pierres Abaelart et Heloys sa fame . Paris 1991.

predecessor	Office	successor
Hugues de Châlons	Bishop of Châlons 1113–1121	Eble de Roucy