ABSTRACT
Peter Abelard may have rated logic, by the twelfth century there had been considerable regression in logical knowledge. Abelard, historians of logic complain, no longer seems to have a clear idea of the difference between propositional logic and term logic; he implies that the force of a conditional is dependent on terms; his concept of truth is not purely semantic but relies on relations in the world. As authorities were complied, however, some of Abelard’s predecessors had gently begun to propose the usefulness of logic to the faith. Logic, for Abelard, was a weapon, and he was ready to use it in a fight to the death, if not of actual bodies, certainly of reputations and honor. Inconsistencies, Abelard argued in the preface to Sic et Non, were inevitable and need not be detrimental to faith if logic is used to help sort out the truth. Abelard, like his predecessors, struggled to defend logic against the charge of contentlessness.
