Roscelin of Compiègne (c.1050–after 1120)

Roscelin of Compiègne was one of a group of logicians in late eleventh and early twelfth-century Europe who, in defiance of most of their predecessors in the field, treated logic as dealing with the concrete physical things that serve as verbal signs of realities rather than the realities those signs signified. This meant that although the things logic talks about are part of the physical world, it talks about them not as things referred to by language but as parts of language itself. All the technical notions of Aristotelian logic, for example ‘universal’, ‘individual’, ‘category’, ‘genus’ and ‘species’, apply only to those linguistic signs themselves qua signs.