Abelard on Grounding in Ontology and Logic

Contemporary discussions of grounding have found an historical ancestor for their claims in Aristotle’s appeal to the four causes. In this paper I propose what I think is a much closer and certainly more developed anticipation of theories of grounding as dependence in the work of Peter Abelard. Abelard explicitly appeals to grounding in his account of the ontological structure of substance in terms of what we now call tropes. This theory itself then grounds his appeal to the theory of the dialectical topics in formulating the truth conditions of conditional propositions and the validity conditions of arguments corresponding to different grounding relationships.