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Updated: May 19, 2025
Having vanquished the masters in the provincial schools, he turned his steps to Paris, at that time the intellectual centre of Europe. The university was not yet established, but the cathedral school of Notre Dame was presided over by William of Champeaux, who defended the Realism of Anselm.
At the same time Kellermann was doing on the left wing what Champeaux and Watrin had done on the right. Two cavalry charges made an opening through the enemy's line; but behind that first line was a second. Not daring to go further forward, because of superior numbers, Kellermann lost the fruits of that momentary victory. It was now noon.
The Cathedral School of Paris was the great attraction to these young men, then presided over by William of Champeaux, a very respectable theologian, but not a remarkable genius like Aquinas and Bonaventura, who did not arise until the Dominican and Franciscan orders were established to combat heresy.
I am now in Paris in the School of Master William of Champeaux, the greatest of all the men of his time whom I have known, in every branch of learning. When we hear his voice we think that no man, but, as it were, an angel from heaven, is speaking; for the melody of his words and the profundity of his ideas transcends, as it were, human limitations....
She is a bond between all Christians; she is a general idea common to them all, so that in her each individual feels himself several, feels himself many; although it is true that were she not believed in by anyone she would be nothing." At bottom he was a nominalist, but more subtle, also more profound and more precise, having a better grasp of what William of Champeaux had desired to say.
General Watrin, with the sixth light infantry and the twenty-second and fortieth of the line, started in pursuit and drove him nearly a thousand rods beyond the rivulet. But this movement separated the French from their own corps; the centre divisions were endangered by the victory on the right, and Generals Watrin and Champeaux were forced to fall back to the lines they had left uncovered.
A pupil of both Roscelin and William of Champeaux the two extremes of Nominalism and Realism he aimed in his teaching at arriving at a via media to which subsequent writers have given the name Conceptualism.
William of Champeaux was then the head of the cathedral school of Notre Dame and the leading teacher of logic in France. "Within a few months Abelard made his authority totter, and set his reputation on the wane. In six or seven years he drove him in shame and humiliation from his chair, after a contest which filled Christendom with its echoes."
In brief, the realists maintained that the idea is a reality distinct from and independent of the individuals constituting it; their motto, Universalia sunt realia, was readily capable of extension far beyond the Church, and William of Champeaux himself carried it to the extent of arguing that nothing is real but the universal.
William of Champeaux had rested on a Platonic basis, Abélard assumed that of Aristotle, and the clash began. "According to the latest authorities, the doctrine of universals which convulsed the schools of the twelfth century has never received an adequate answer. What is a species: what is a genus or a family or an order?
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