For historians of philosophy, time should have four dimensions. Three of them relate just to the philosophers who are being studied. The first dimension is their present. Whether, as here, the subject is someone who lived nine hundred years ago, or whether it is a more recent thinker, this present is not our present, and understanding it requires special historical knowledge and skills. The second dimension is their past. Philosophers look back to teachers, predecessors and the sources from which they have learned to think. The third dimension is their future: the ways in which their ideas and words have been understood or misunderstood, neglected, studied, adapted and distorted, up to the present day. The fourth dimension lies in the relation between the past thinkers and philosophy today, between their times and our present.

** To study a philosopher?s present means doing many things. They include, for example, looking at the social and the intellectual assumptions of the time, the literary forms then current for philosophical writing; in the case of a twelfth-century thinker, such Abelard, they would also involve exploring the links between his work and both the school curriculum and religious developments of his time. The following two chapters, however, concentrate, not on Abelard?s context, but on his present in a more immediate and intimate sense: on Abelard as a philosopher living through time and, like any human being, developing and changing his ideas. ** A philosopher?s own present is always a period of time?a philosophical career which may span many decades. Few thinkers, even the steadiest and most consistent ones, retain entirely the same ideas and interests throughout their lives, and many change their views radically. Is it, then, one of the tasks of historians of philosophy to trace how their chosen thinkers developed philosophically from their earliest to their latest works? Recent work on Abelard implies both positive and negative answers to this question. From 1980 onwards, Constant Mews has tried to establish a detailed chronology of Abelard?s works and to show how Abelard?s thinking changed over the years; my own book The Philosophy of Peter Abelard (1997) relies at various points on positing a development in Abelard?s views and takes a view about the general way in which his interests developed. By contrast, the leading specialists whose background is a purely philosophical one have had little to say about Abelardian chronology or the development of his ideas.

A student approaching this author through either of two gateways much used in the anglophone philosophical community?the Cambridge Companion and the article in the Stanford Encyclopedia dedicated to him?would receive, for the most part, the impression of a single, unchanging body of thought. (excerpted from Introduction and Chapter 1).