Peter Abelard held two views that imply a form of Mereological Essentialism: first, a thing is nothing other than all its parts taken together and second, no thing has more parts at one time than it does at another. This paper situates Abelard’s theses within their historical context. The paper first examines Boethius’s suggestive remarks about the dependence of the whole upon its parts and it highlights several of the choices that were open to twelfth-century students of Boethius’s (...) mereology. Then there is a brief survey of Abelard’s understanding of Mereological Essentialism. Finally, the paper examines some of the more interesting challenges to Mereological Essentialism that were posed by Abelard’s contemporaries. The paper focuses in particular on a set of fragments that have been attributed to the school of Joscelin of Soissons. (shrink)

The Brotherton Collection, which now forms part of the Library of the University of Leeds, contains a manuscript of Cicero's De Officiis which is usually assigned to the twelfth century. On page 3 of the catalogue of the Brotherton Library the manuscript is incorrectly said to contain ‘DE OFFICIIS LIBER PRIMUS’. In fact the manuscript contains all three books with the exception of nine leaves which have been removed. At present the manuscript consists of 41 folios on vellum (...) measuring 11 in. X 7½ in. Ff. 39–41 are written by a later hand. (shrink)

This article aims to supplement our understanding of later developments within European universities, that is, Scholastic thought, by attending to how certain pre-Scholastics, namely, Peter Abelard and other twelfth-century philosophers, thought about artifacts and social constructions more generally. It focuses on the treatment of artifacts that can be cobbled together out of Abelard’s Dialectica. The article argues that Abelard attempts to sharply distinguish the world of things from the world of human-made objects. This is most apparent in his (...) treatment of creation and human acts of making. Yet there are places in his thought where we see some hesitancy. Many of Abelard’s peers seem to have drawn on the reasons why Abelard hesitates, and they blur the line between human-made objects such as houses and substances such as rocks and humans. Others seem to go further than Abelard—perhaps inspired by some of the thoughts that Abelard also entertains about social constructions such as days and speeches—and assert that even houses are merely convenient fictions. (shrink)

Twelfth-century ethics is commonly thought of as following a stoic influence rather than an Aristotelian one. It is also assumed that these two schools are widely different, in particular with regards to the social aspect of the virtuous life. In this paper I argue that this picture is misleading and that Heloise of Argenteuil recognized that stoic ethics did not entail isolation but could be played out in a social context. I argue that her philosophical contribution does not (...) end there, but that she departs from both the stoics and her teacher, Abelard, in her defence of the ideal of moderation. By insisting that virtue must strike a mean between two extremes, she shows that Aristotelian virtue ethics were present in the intellectual life of the twelfth century. (shrink)

Learned men of the twelfth century, especially the first half, frequently wrote about themselves and each other. Well-known examples of autobiographical writing include Guibert of Nogent's De vita sua or Monodiae, Rupert of Deutz's defense of his theological career in his Apologia attached to his commentary on the Benedictine rule, Peter Abelard's Historia calamitatum, and Gerald of Wales's De rebus a se gestis. Examples of biographical narrative are easily found: the life of St. Goswin included an account of (...) Goswin defeating Abelard in disputation; Baudri of Bourgueil wrote a poem about famous schools and scholars; the anonymous Metamorphosis Goliae provided characterizations of many masters; John of Salisbury's Metalogicon described the teaching methods of Bernard of Chartres and, in an autobiographical account of his own education, offered sketches of many of the leading masters in northern France, while Otto of Freising's Gesta Friderici I Imperatoris recounted parts of the academic careers of Abelard and Gilbert of Poitiers. It is therefore possible to read about twelfth-century scholars in their own words: the way they taught, their personalities, their ambitions, their disappointments; in short, their lives, or representations of their lives. Moving toward the end of the twelfth century and into the thirteenth century, however, there is very little comparable material, perhaps even none. In the thirteenth century, scholars wrote a great deal about being a scholar, but they preferred always to stress their collective identity, so that narrative accounts of particular scholarly lives did not find a place within the emerging universities. Why was there a change in the way in which scholars chose to represent themselves and each other, a change that involved obscuring their lives, both from themselves and from us? Answering that question will reveal the long-term significance of conflict between Schoolmen and monks and the impact of monastic ideals upon universities. It will show how the need for support from parties outside the university and internal debates about the true nature and purpose of learning came together, how ideas developed within the world of learning mattered when conflict led to the grant of privileges, and how specific ways of thinking became politically significant when particular events generated a certain kind of document in which those ways of thinking were embedded. (shrink)

This book is an annotated translation of Xu Shuwei’s collection of 90 medical case records – Ninety Discussions of Cold Damage Disorders – which was the first such collection in China. The translation reveals patterns of social as well as medical history. This book provides the readers with a distinctive first hand perspective on twelfth-century medical practice, including medical aspects, such as nosology, diagnosis, treatment, and doctrinal reasoning supporting them. It also presents the social aspect of medical practice, (...) detailing the various participants in the medical encounter, their role, the power relations within the encounter, and the location where the encounter occurred. Reading the translation of Xu’s cases allows the readers high-resolution snapshots of medicine and medical practice as reflected from the case records documented by this leading twelfth-century physician. The detailed introduction to the translation contextualizes Xu’s life and medical practice in the broader changes of this transformative era. (shrink)

IT is well known that the art of logic (logica or diale(c)tica) knew a remarkable flourishing period during the twelfth century. In the first half of the century its main centres in Paris were: the School of Notre DameI, of St. Victor2, of the Petit Pont3 and of Mont Ste Geneviève4. The present paper aims to offer some new evidence from the manuscripts on the teaching of logic as given in the School of Mont Ste.

Dominicus Gundissalinus was both a philosopher and a translator; he was active in the unique context of Toledo in the second half of the twelfth century, a cultural melting pot of Muslims, Jews, and Christians. While he was philosophically trained in the Latin tradition, he found answers to the philosophical problems originating from that Latin training in the Arabic tradition of authors and texts which he himself translated. Outside the boundaries of specialised knowledge and research, this intriguing thinker (...) is unknown; this study contributes to the re-discovery of Gundissalinus, with a philosophical and historical analysis of his metaphysical reflection in order to display its profound originality and pioneering contribution to the course of medieval philosophy. (shrink)

Irven Michael Resnick - Jews and Christians in Twelfth-Century Europe - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:2 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.2 257-258 Book Review Jews and Christians in Twelfth-Century Europe Michael A. Signer and John Van Engen, editors. Jews and Christians in Twelfth-Century Europe. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001. Pp. xi + 380. Cloth, $49.95. Paper, $24.95. This volume, a collection of conference papers presented at Notre Dame (...) in 1996, draws attention to the twelfth-century renaissance for the evolution of medieval Jewish-Christian relations. Rather than treating the anti-Jewish violence of the first Crusade as a decisive break leading directly to Jewish isolation and, finally, expulsion from medieval Christendom, the editors have selected papers that seek "to integrate the Jewish and Jewish-Christian stories into a larger European story" focusing.. (shrink)

Early twelfth-century logicians invoked past-tensed statements with future-oriented contents to undermine the assumption that every proposition ‘about the past’ is determinate. In the second half of the century, the notion of future-dependence was used to restrict the scope of necessity per accidens. At some point, this idea began to be applied in theology to solve puzzles surrounding predestination, prescience, prophecy, and faith. In the mid-1160s, Magister Udo quotes some thinkers who insisted that the principle of the necessity (...) of the past should exclude dicta that ‘relate to the future’, such as that he has been predestined. Peter of Poitiers adopted this ‘Ockhamist’ strategy around 1170. We find similar accounts in Simon of Tournai and Alan of Lille, who invoked it in other contexts as well. By the time of Praepositinus of Cremona, Hubert of Pirovano, and Stephen Langton, the restricted principle became something of a common view at Paris. (shrink)

Suhrawardi, a Twelfth-Century Muslim Neo-Stoic? JOHN WALBRIDGE EUROPEANS FIRST BECAME AWARE OF ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY through texts trans- lated into Latin in the Middle Ages, the youngest of which were the works of the Spanish philosopher Averroes, dating from the second half of the twelfth century. The latest eastern Islamic philosophical texts known to Europeans dated from almost a century earlier. Western orientalists later became familiar with the original Arabic texts of works of the major authors (...) previously known in Latin translation -- Fftrabi, Avicenna, Ghazfdi, Averroes, and others -- along with works of other Islamic philosophers of the same period. While it was known that there continued to be philosophers in the Islamic world after 12oo, it was assumed that their works reflected the general "decline" of the Islamic world and that the authors known to Europeans represented the "classical" Islamic philosophical tradition. The later tradition of Islamic phi- losophy tended to be ignored or dismissed with references to "epitomes" and "supercommentaries. ''' In fact, it can be argued that the historical reality is exactly the opposite, that it is precisely the part of the Islamic philosophical tradition not known to the I am presently working on a collection of Arabic texts relating to Stoicism, including scientific as well as philosophical material. I would.. (shrink)

This is the first comprehensive study of the philosophical achievements of twelfth-century Western Europe. It is the collaboration of fifteen scholars whose detailed survey makes accessible the intellectual preoccupations of the period, with all texts cited in English translation throughout. After a discussion of the cultural context of twelfth-century speculation, and some of the main streams of thought - Platonic, Stoic, and Arabic - that quickened it, comes a characterisation of the new problems and perspectives of (...) the period, in scientific inquiry, speculative grammar, and logic. This is followed by a closer examination of the distinctive features of some of the most innovative thinkers of the time, from Anselm and Abelard to the School of Chartres. A final section shows the impact of newly recovered works of Aristotle in the twelfth-century West. (shrink)

Jeffrey Hause - Virtue and Ethics in the Twelfth Century - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:2 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.2 328-329 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Jeffrey Hause Creighton University István P. Bejczy and Richard G. Newhauser, editors. Virtue and Ethics in the Twelfth Century. Brill's Studies in Intellectual History, 130. Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2005. Pp. vi + 393. Cloth, $189.00. The essays collected in this fascinating volume on virtue (...) reveal both the increasing debt twelfth-century thinkers owe to Augustinian moral psychology, as well as the extent to which those thinkers integrate classical moral philosophy and its canons of rationality into their medieval Christian worldview. However, the authors also explore the historical, social, economic, and theological genesis of.. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to present a new witness of Averroes' reception in the Muslim world, in the years that immediately followed his death. Indeed Abū al-Ḥağğāğ al-Miklātī is an Ašʿarite theologian, who was born in Fez. He is the author of a Quintessence of the Intellects in Response to Philosophers on the Science of Principles in which he aims at refuting the Peripatetic philosophers in their own field, using their own weapons. This article will first attempt to (...) draw the portrait of this atypical theologian. It will then focus on showing that al-Miklātī – although he never mentions his name – is a reader of Averroes and in particular, of his Tahāfut al-Tahāfut, of which he makes various and unexpected uses. A close look at these uses will enable us to better define the nature of al-Miklātī's work. More importantly, this article will try to prove that al-Miklātī provides us with a key passage of Averroes' lost treatise On the Prime Mover. At the heart of the Rushdian criticism of Avicenna's “metaphysical” proof, this passage should throw new light on Averroes' precise understanding of this proof.L'objectif de cet article est de présenter un nouveau témoin de la réception d'Averroès dans le monde musulman, dans les années qui suivirent immédiatement sa mort. En effet, Abū al-Ḥağğāğ al-Miklātī est un théologien ašʿarite, né à Fès. Il est l'auteur d'une Quintessence des intellects en vue de répondre aux philosophes en matière de science des fondements, où il entreprend de réfuter les philosophes – les Péripatéticiens en premier lieu – sur leur terrain et avec leurs propres armes. Cet article cherchera dans un premier temps à dresser le profil de ce théologien atypique. Il s'attachera ensuite à montrer qu'al-Miklātī – bien qu'il ne mentionne pas une seule fois son nom – est un lecteur d'Averroès et en particulier de son Tahāfut al-Tahāfut, dont il fait des usages variés et inattendus. L'examen de ces usages permettra de mieux définir le statut de l'œuvre d'al-Miklātī. Enfin, et surtout, cet article tentera de prouver qu'al-Miklātī nous fournit un passage clé d'un traité perdu d'Averroès: le Traité sur le Premier Moteur. Au cœur de la critique rushdienne de la preuve “métaphysique” d'Avicenne, ce passage devrait apporter un éclairage nouveau à la compréhension qu'Averroès pouvait avoir de cette preuve.Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.AL-MIKLĀTĪ, A TWELFTH CENTURY AŠʿARITE READER OF AVERROESVolume 22, Issue 2Yamina Adouhane DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S095742391200001XYour Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. AL-MIKLĀTĪ, A TWELFTH CENTURY AŠʿARITE READER OF AVERROESVolume 22, Issue 2Yamina Adouhane DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S095742391200001XAvailable formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. AL-MIKLĀTĪ, A TWELFTH CENTURY AŠʿARITE READER OF AVERROESVolume 22, Issue 2Yamina Adouhane DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S095742391200001XAvailable formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

This special issue grew out of a small conference The Known & the Unknown: Exploring Twelfth-Century Philosophy, which was funded by the Carlsberg Foundation, hosted by the Saxo Institute, and held at the University of Copenhagen in April 2018. Its central topic was the many, mostly unexplored, commentaries on Aristotle, Boethius, and Porphyry that constitute the key textual evidence for a fascinating phenomenon that, although it played a pivotal role in the philosophical revival of Western Europe, remains frustratingly (...) underexplored to this day: the logical schools of the twelfth century. The present introduction has two parts. In the first part, John Marenbon lays out the background to this special issue of Vivarium as a whole, explaining both what the philosophical project pursued by twelfth-century logicians was and how, and how far, the historical project of understanding it has progressed over the last two hundred years. In the second part, Heine Hansen briefly presents the issue and its contents. (shrink)

This article scrutinizes the political thought of a twelfth-century Parisian master, Peter the Chanter , with reference to a theme that has been prominent recently in political philosophy. This is the idea that a just government ought to be free from every kind of arbitrary interference in the lives of those “governed,” that is, that no person ought to be governed according to another's unconstrained will.

The Cosmographia of Bernard Silvester was the most important literary myth written between Lucretius and Dante. One of the most widely read books of its time, it was known to authors whose interests were as diverse as those of Vincent of Beauvais, Dante, and Chaucer. Bernard offers one of the most profound versions of a familiar theme in medieval literature, that of man as a microcosm of the universe, with nature as the mediating element between God and the world. Brian (...) Stock's exposition includes many passages from the Cosmographia translated for the first time into English. Arising from the central analysis are several more general themes: among them the recreation by twelfth-century humanists of the languages of myth and science as handed down in the classical tradition; the creation of the world and of man, the chief mythical and cosmographical problem of the period; the development of naturalistic allegory; and Bernard's relation to the "new science" introduced from Greek and Arabic sources. Originally published in 1972. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Karl Morrison discusses historical writing at a turning point in European culture: the so-called Renaissance of the twelfth century. Why do texts considered at that time to be masterpieces seem now to be fragmentary and full of contradictions? Morrison maintains that the answer comes from ideas about art. Viewing histories as artifacts made according to the same aesthetic principles as paintings and theater, he shows that twelfth-century authors and audiences found unity not in what the reason (...) read in a text but in what the imagination read into it: they prized visual over verbal imagination and employed a circular, or nuclear, spectator-centered perspective cast aside in the Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Twelfth-century writers assimilated and transformed a tradition of the conceptual unity of all the arts and attributed that unity to the fact that art both conceals and discloses. Recovering that tradition, especially the methods and motives of concealment, provides extraordinary insights into twelfth-century ideas about the kingdom of God, the status of women, and the nature of time itself. It also identifies a strain in European thought that had striking affinities to methods of perception familiar in Oriental religions and that proved to be antithetic to later humanist traditions in the West. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

In the absence of the Arabic text of al-Khw's Arithmetic, which has not yet been found, the oldest Latin adaptations from the twelfth century are the only evidence documenting the genesis and the first spreading of a decimal arithmetic that uses nine figures and zero, i.e. the Indian reckoning known in the Middle Ages as algorismus. This paper studies these texts, their content, their sources, and identifies their authors and the milieus in which they were written.

Recent research has shown that the use of astronomy as a chronological problem-solving tool has deep roots in the scholarly practices of the Latin Middle Ages, as is manifest from the writings of Marianus Scotus, Gerland, and other “critical computists” of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. This essay enlarges the existing picture by introducing a hitherto unknown epistolary treatise of the mid-twelfth century. Written in Lotharingia in 1144, this poorly preserved work documents an attempt to reconstruct the (...) timeline of world history via techniques that had emerged within the Latin computus tradition prior to the advent of Greco-Arabic astronomy. Drawing on the so-called computus naturalis, the author performed lunar computations on the basis of observed eclipses and used them to propose new dates for the Creation and the Last Supper. He also relied on a revised estimate of the time and date of the vernal equinox, placing it on 16 March, and gave a detailed account of how this result can be derived from solar observations with a meridian line. By virtue of these methodological features, the Chronology of 1144 represents an important transitional stage between the “critical computists” and the use of eclipse-based dating methods by later scholars such as Giles of Lessines (fl. 1260). (shrink)

This article offers the first comprehensive study of Manchester, John Rylands Library, MS Latin 182, a twelfth-century codex formerly belonging to the Benedictine Abbey of Gladbach in Germany. I begin with a full codicological and palaeographical analysis of the entire manuscript, before moving on to a discussion of its contents. These include the Venerable Bede‘s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum and the Continuatio Bedae, as well as two hagiographical works copied at the end of the manuscript. I then propose (...) a new possible context of reception for Bede‘s Historia ecclesiastica during the twelfth century, one that interlinked with the prevalent discourses on secular ecclesiastical lordship and monastic reform at Gladbach, as well as, perhaps, in Germany more widely. In doing so, I essentially argue for the possibility that the Gladbach scribes and their audiences may have used and understood the Historia ecclesiastica not only in the conventional context of history and historiography, but also as an example of the golden age of monasticism which during the later twelfth century was re-framed and re-contextualised as both a spiritual guide and a source of miracle stories. (shrink)

L’articolo cerca di rispondere alla domanda se la scelta di Calcidio di usare la parola silva per indicare la materia e, in particolare, il ricettacolo platonico influenzò le teorie dei filosofi di lingua latina del XII secolo, che tanto dovevano al commento di Calcidio al Timeo. In particolare, vengono analizzati alcuni dei più importanti passi sulla silva tratti dalle opere di Gilberto Porretano e Bernardo Silvestre. Al fine di rendere più chiaro l’esame dei brani, è proposta anche una breve ma (...) completa rassegna dei diversi significati del termine silva e delle parole da essa derivate. Il risultato dell’analisi dei testi è che, sebbene nessuna delle tesi sulla silva di Gilberto e Bernardo sia stata direttamente influenzata dalle connotazioni di questo termine, tali connotazioni hanno probabilmente aiutato questi pensatori a comprendere meglio le affermazioni di Platone e Calcidio sulla natura primordiale. (shrink)