Abstract

What is understood when “man” is understood? This question proves troublesome for Peter Abelard’s nominalist account of universal understandings which, to be sound, must attend to things as they really are. If there are no universal things, how can universal understandings be sound? His answer, in the Treatise on Understandings, is that such understandings, far from being about nothing, are about natures. However, it is hard to see how this solves the problem, given how he states earlier in the treatise that natures are identical to individuals. In this paper, I present a reading of what he means by “nature” that allows us to make sense of his proposed solution to the problem. In addition, I contend that, for his solution to work, the relevant relation between the mind and the world is to be understood as attention, instead of his previous view based on similitude.