This erudite collection of essays celebrates the career and scholarship of Canadian medievalist Claude Lafleur, a prolific scholar of intellectual life in medieval Paris whose important contributions to the field include critical editions of Latin texts associated with the Faculty of Arts and numerous studies relating to the teaching of philosophy in the thirteenth century more broadly. The title of the volume is a clever wink in Lafleur’s direction: Quod non est excellentior status quam vacare philosophie (“There is no better way to live than philosophically”) was the 40th thesis on the list of 219 propositions condemned in Paris by Bishop Étienne Tempier in March of 1277, a decisive moment in the development of scholastic culture. Meticulously curated by David Piché and Valeria Buffon, the collection is divided into seven relatively balanced groupings of essays in two parts touching on the major themes of Lafleur’s scholarship. The first three groupings are broadly concerned with manuscripts and the transmission of texts while the four subsequent ones focus on various aspects of teaching and philosophy in the Faculty of Arts--the sectional organization thus also evoking the standard medieval division of the trivium and the quadrivium.
The first trio of essays delve into some unedited manuscripts relating to the transmission of philosophy in the Middle Ages. Roland Hissette takes up two manuscripts in the Vatican Library (Vat. Urb. Lat. 220 & 221) that contain commentaries by Averroes, showing how they have been annotated and retouched by scholars active in Padua, and he singles out the fifteenth-century Averroist philosopher Nicoletto Vernia as a likely candidate. Olga Weijers examines a manuscript from Paris (BnF lat. 6319) that contains commentaries on Aristotle’s De anima. With close attention to interlinear and marginal glosses, helpfully reproduced in color, she shows how it was used by multiple (alas anonymous) scholars interested in the Aristotelian understanding of the soul. Finally, Heine Hansen takes up the logical works of Nicholas of Paris (d. 1263) whose Introduction to Philosophy was co-edited by LaFleur and his long-time collaborator Joanne Carrier in 1997. With reference to two principal manuscripts containing Nicholas’s commentaries on Porphyry’s Isagoge (Vat. Lat. 3011 and Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, clm. 14460) Heine provides a clearer understanding of the relation between them while also laying the paleographical groundwork for an eventual edition of the work.
The second trio of essays turn to the transmission of ancient philosophy writ large. Jean-Marc Narbonne and Paul-Hubert Poirier provide an annotated French translation of a section of a Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle by the third-century peripatetic philosopher Alexander of Aphrodisias. The passage of the commentary in question concerns the Stagirite’s tripartite division of the theoretical sciences into physics (or natural philosophy), mathematics, and theology. This is followed by a detailed study by Henry Donneaud, O.P., of the term theologia across a range of Greek and Latin authors and culminating with the writings of Hugh of St. Victor and Thomas Aquinas. Like Lafleur before him, the author refutes the notion put forward by Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) that the noun theologia refers to the word of God, showing that it refers rather to the science or study of God, and that this distinction was in fact well understood from ancient to medieval times. Finally, Valeria Buffon turns to the Platonic notion of a world soul as revealed in several teaching texts (what Lafleur had labeled “textes didascaliques”) of the thirteenth century. Her analysis covers both anonymous commentaries on the Timaeus and some of the most notable scholastics of the century, and she adroitly characterizes the thirteenth-century Faculty of Arts as a Christian melting pot of both Platonic and Aristotelian concepts relating to the world soul.
The third section continues in a similar vein and includes two critical editions of texts associated with the Faculty of Arts. First, Anne Grondeux provides an edition complete with stemma and full manuscript tradition of theSententia Hieronymi de utilitate artis grammaticae. This eighth-century insular compilation of the grammatical writings of Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory I was eventually “recycled” (p. 195) by various continental philosophers of the thirteenth century, including Oliver the Breton, whose brief Philosophia was previously edited by Lafleur. The second edited text is the Quodlibet (II, 5) by Hervé de Nédellec on the question of abstraction, another topic that Lafleur has explored in his articles. It is expertly annotated by David Piché, who in his accompanying introduction shows how Hervé tried to defend his Thomist position against the new theory of John Duns Scotus.
The fourth section of the book comprises four case studies addressing issues of epistemology and methodology. Antoine Coté investigates a logical text by one Maino de Manieri, a physician and philosopher active in Paris in the early years of the fourteenth century. Though broadly in line with his contemporaries, Maino advanced an even more radical position by declaring logic to be on par with metaphysics. Circling back to some of the “textes didascaliques” edited by Lafleur, Olivier Boulnois traces the genealogy of moral philosophy; that is, how this branch of ethics emerged as independent from both moral theology and political theory. Gilbert Dahan looks briefly at the classification of sciences in the introductions to biblical commentaries from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries while Francisco Bertellioni offers a detailed excursus into the prehistory of the reception of Aristotle’s Politics. He shows how late antique authors from Boethius and Cassiodorus until the scholastics of the High Middle Ages contributed to setting the classificatory stage onto which the Politics would ultimately be absorbed in the second half of the thirteenth century.
The next quartet of essays focus on various aspects of the teaching of logic, a topic central to Lafleur’s scholarly output and one of supreme importance to all aspects of scholastic culture. Alessandro Conti looks at Boethius’s commentary on Aristotle’s Categories, showing how his theories of substance and predication provide the basis for Walter Burley’s nominalist and William of Ockham’s realist position each. Violeta Cervera Nova argues for the importance of Aristotle’s Categories in the first Latin commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics, with a particular focus on the lemma tria sunt in anima. Ana María Mora-Márquez takes up the relation between dialectic and logic in yet another of the textbooks previously edited by Lafleur, theCommunia logice (dated by Lafleur to around 1280) but focuses on a version in the University Library of Salamanca that contains a discussion of Aristotle’s New Logic. Positioning it as a transitional work, she dates it to before 1270. Finally, Gustavo Fernandez Walker looks at the role of Book VIII of Aristotle’s Topics (on dialectical argumentation) in the context of medieval treatises on obligationes, that most elusive of disputational genres.
The sixth section contains three essays on Thomist philosophy. Alain Galonnier looks at a pseudepigraphal commentary on the Consolation of Philosophy, formerly attributed to Aquinas, and provides several arguments for not simply attributing it to a student of Aquinas either. Luca Gili and Giuseppe Pezzini offer a close rereading of a key passage from the commentary on Aristotle’s Perihermenias where Aquinas discusses future contingent events. They posit that modern translations have misconstrued this passage as representing a change of mind in his later years and argue that a close linguistic analysis of the reflexive phrase in se ipso existens shows in fact that Aquinas remained staunchly anti-eternalist in his views. Third, Ruedi Imbach considers Aquinas’s shifting reliance on Averroes in the later years of his career, noting that while the number of citations may have diminished after about 1260, when he broke with certain Averroist principles, he nevertheless continued to depend on the Islamic scholar for many things, not least for his very definition of God.
The seventh and final section of the book offers a triptych of essays on the famous question of universals by three of the leading authorities in the field. Alain de Libera traces a subset of ideas pertaining to the unity of intellect and the unity of the soul from their ancient origins through their post-medieval aftermath, paying special attention to how realism gets refracted in Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697) and in the writings of the pioneer medievalists of the nineteenth century. Claude Panaccio shows how Ockham’s theory of difference, which of course rejects realism, depends as much on the ontology (or essence of being) as the semantics of nominalism. Finally, John Marenbon suggests that there is a “methodological lesson” to be had by placing modern historicist and universalist approaches to the study of realism alongside each other: he compares three philosophical discussions of universals from different historical periods--the lekta of the Stoics, the dicta of Peter Abelard, and the complexe significabilia of Adam of Wodeham and Gregory of Rimini in the fourteenth century--and argues for a more balanced approach to the history of philosophy, one that integrates the context of the historicists with the philosophy of the universalists.
This learned and often very technical collection of essays offers a rich panoply of texts and studies relating to the study of philosophy both in Paris and beyond. From the volume’s twenty-two contributions one can not only appreciate in full the scholarly depth and historiographical impact of the book’s dedicatee, but also marvel at the complex web of sources, questions, and arguments that animated the minds of medieval Paris’s most restless crowd: the scholastics.