![]() ![]() Descartes desired to find indubitable ground on which all the sciences could be placed and progressively built. René Descartes was concerned with the uncertainty in the sciences and the radical scepticism which spread across Europe when publications of Sextus Empiricus became available. They would therefore feel no pain but no supernatural happiness either (only natural) because, it was held, they would not be able to see the deity that created them. The Vatican accepted the view that unbaptized babies did not, as at first believed, go straight to Hell but to a special area of limbo, "limbus infantium". Pope Innocent III accepted Abelard's Doctrine of Limbo, which amended Augustine of Hippo's Doctrine of Original Sin. His thought in this direction, anticipating something of modern speculation, is the more remarkable because his scholastic successors accomplished least in the field of morals, hardly venturing to bring the principles and rules of conduct under pure philosophical discussion, even after the great ethical inquiries of Aristotle became fully known to them. He laid particular stress upon the subjective intention as determining, if not the moral character, at least the moral value, of human action. Outside of his dialectic, it was in ethics that Abelard showed greatest activity of philosophical thought. As regards his so-called Conceptualism and his attitude to the question of Universals, see Scholasticism. Before his time Plato's authority was the basis for the prevailing Realism. It was at this time that the completed Organon, and gradually all the other works of the Greek thinker, first came to be available in the schools. He helped to establish the ascendancy of the philosophical authority of Aristotle which became firmly established in the half-century after his death. However his own particular interpretations may have been condemned, they were conceived in essentially the same spirit as the general scheme of thought afterwards elaborated in the 13th century with approval from the heads of the Church. The general importance of Abelard lies in his having fixed more decisively than anyone before him the scholastic manner of philosophizing, with the object of giving a formally rational expression to received ecclesiastical doctrine. The Chambers Biographical Dictionary describes him as "the keenest thinker and boldest theologian of the 12th Century". The story of his affair with and love for Héloïse has become legendary. ![]() Peter Abelard (1079 – April 21, 1142) was a scholastic philosopher, theologian and logician. ![]()
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