Abstract

John of Jandun, the early 14th-century master of arts, is selected as a representative of Latin Averroism in an attempt to show that conventional classifications of mediaeval thought break down, and to indicate how the term "Averroist" ought to be qualified and elaborated. Advocacy of the existence of a sensus agens to explain the actualization of immaterial sensible forms residing potentially in material objects, and of the existence of a single soul which is not the form of the body but is united with the body only in the actual process of intellection, places John of Jandun in the tradition of Augustinians like Peckham, Bonaventure, and Scotus. Nevertheless such doctrines are developed in the spirit of the Aristotelianism of the faculty of arts. The author appends to the text a note on some bibliographical problems of his subject's writings as well as a listing of his works. Fifty pages of careful notes accompany a lucid text, in which philosophical issues are first stated, then placed in the context of the middle ages, and finally seen with the light given them by John of Jandun.--M. F.