William of Champeaux, a twelfth-century Scholastic, philosopher, and theologian, b. at Champeaux, near Melun, in the neighbourhood of Paris, about the year 1070; d. at Châlons-sur-Marne, 1121. After having been a pupil of Anselm of Laon, he began in 1103 his career as teacher at the cathedral school of Paris. In 1108, owing chiefly to Abelard’s successful attempts to criticise his realistic doctrine of universals, he retired to the Abbey of St. Victor and there continued to give lessons which, no doubt, influenced the mystic school known as that of St. Victor. In 1113 he was made Bishop of Châlons-sur-Marne. Portions of his work ‘De origine anime” and of a “Liber sententiarum”, as well as a dialogue entitled “Dialogus seu altercatio cujusdam Christiani et Judzi”, have come down to us. On the problem of universals William held successively a variety of opinions. All of these, however, are on the side of exaggerated Realism and opposed both to the Nominalism of Roscelin and to the modified Nominalism of Abelard. In his treatise on the origin of the soul he definitely rejects the theory known as Traducianism and maintains that each and every human soul originates by the creative act of God. Among his contemporaries he enjoyed a very great reputation for learning and sanctity. He was, moreover, looked -upon by the conservative thinkers of that age as the ablest champion of orthodoxy. His creationist doctrine is his chief title to distinction as a Scholastic philosopher.
LEFEVRE, Les variations de Guillaume de Champeaux, etc. (Lille, 1898); MICHAUD, G. de Champeaux et les écoles de Paris au XTITe Siécle (Paris, 1867); GRABMANN, Gesch. der schol. Methode (Freiburg, 1911), 136 sq.; DE WULF, Hist. of Medieval Phil., tr. COFFEY (New York, 1909), 179; Turner, Hist. of Philosophy (Boston, 1903), 279 sq.
William Turner.