William Of Moerbeke Research Articles

Buellens, Pieter, The Friar and the Philosopher: William of Moerbeke and the Rise of Aristotle's Science in Medieval Europe

Buellens, Pieter, The Friar and the Philosopher: William of Moerbeke and the Rise of Aristotle's Science in Medieval Europe

The Friar and the Philosopher: William of Moerbeke and the Rise of Aristotle’s Science in Medieval Europe, by Beullens, Pieter

The Friar and the Philosopher: William of Moerbeke and the Rise of Aristotle’s Science in Medieval Europe, by Beullens, Pieter

Parmenides e In Parmenidem. La recepción del diálogo platónico y la de sus intérpretes tardoantiguos en la doctrina cusana de la negación

The purpose of the paper is to locate Nicholas of Cusa as part of the exegetical tradition of Plato’s Parmenides dialogue. His first access to the topic of negation in Platonic dialogue was indirect, through the corpus Areopagiticum and Proclus’ Commentary in the Latin version done by William of Moerbeke. After reading the Commentary, he asked the famous Aristotelian George of Trebisonda to make a Latin version of the whole dialogue. He read this translation before writing De non aliud and it proved decisive for the writing of that work because it reformulates the vocabulary related to otherness as a mode of negation. The originality of this Cusan text consists in the presentation of a double negative formula, inspired by the dialogue Parmenides and its Dionysian and Proclean interpretations. Thus “non aliud” is not understood as opposed to “aliud” but rather as the opposition of the opposites without opposition.

Why William of Moerbeke Is Not the Author of ‘His’ 'Geomantia' (And Why That Does Not Make the Text Less Interesting)

The intention of this note is to assess the current tendency to view the Geomantia as a genuine work by William of Moerbeke. While the attribution in the colophons is accepted at face value, other lines of enquiry have remained unexplored. This note advocates the inclusion of linguistic elements and the study of the transmission's cultural background into the debate.

Necessary Political Aristotelianism

This paper seeks to present the intellectual framework in which the Latin translation of Aristotle’s Politics by William of Moerbeke in 1265 emerges and to some extent evaluate its first repercussions in the classification of scientia practica in the university context of the 13th century Latin. It is not a matter of making an exhaustive study of the reception of Politics, nor of scrutinizing the intellectual conditions, particularly university, of the Latin medieval world prior to the translation of Politics, but of understanding the conditions of assimilation of the aristotelian political text within the framework of understanding the practical sciences

Aristotle’s Metaphysics Lambda: Annotated Critical Edition Based upon a Systematic Investigation of Greek, Latin, Arabic and Hebrew Sources by Stefan Alexandru

Reviewed by: Aristotle’s Metaphysics Lambda: Annotated Critical Edition Based upon a Systematic Investigation of Greek, Latin, Arabic and Hebrew Sources by Stefan Alexandru Pantelis Golitsis Stefan Alexandru. Aristotle’s Metaphysics Lambda: Annotated Critical Edition Based upon a Systematic Investigation of Greek, Latin, Arabic and Hebrew Sources. Philosophia Antiqua, 135. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Pp. x + 295. $131.00. This is the second edition of Aristotle’s Metaphysics Lambda within two years, following Silvia Fazzo’s Il libro Lambda della Metafisica di Aristotele (Naples, 2012). Unlike Fazzo, Alexandru does not accompany the Greek text with a translation, but he should be thanked for providing a most valuable and exhaustive critical apparatus, which makes almost unnecessary any further work on the available sources. Alexandru has examined with great accuracy all forty-three Greek manuscripts that transmit Lambda and has fully collated the thirteen manuscripts that are independent according to the stemma codicum established by Dieter Harlfinger; he adds to them a hitherto unknown manuscript of the β-family, namely the Vaticanus gr. 115, which was previously considered to contain only the first six books of the Metaphysics. Alexandru has also carefully explored the available Arabic (by Ustāth, Mattā ibn Yûnus, and Yahya ibn ‘Adī) and the most important Latin translations (the “translatio media” and those by William of Moerbeke and Bessarion), the Hebrew translation of Averroes’s commentary, as well as the Aldine edition and the editions of Erasmus and Casaubon. The Greek commentators are also taken into account, although not as exhaustively as possible. For instance, Michael of Ephesus’s and George Pachymeres’s readings in 1075a20 and 1075b14 (ὅ τι ἔτυχε and πάντα instead of ὁτιοῦν and πάντες) are not recorded in the apparatus, although their reading is stematically intriguing, since it exceptionally disagrees with the manuscripts M (Ambrosianus F 113 sup.) and C (Taurinensis B.VII.23). Similarly, Alexandru does not fully explore the collations added by a scholiast (EΣ) onto E (Parisinus gr. 1853), which allow us to better reconstruct the descent of β (one of the two archetypes of the manuscript tradition of the Metaphysics). Thus, despite the fact that he recognizes, unlike Fazzo, that M and C are heavily “contaminated” β-manuscripts, he fails to notice, for instance, that the variant reading recorded by EΣ in 1074a20 (τέλος instead of τέλους), confirmed by Michael’s commentary, is in all probability a genuine β-reading, which corresponds to the authentic reading of the Metaphysics. Against Fazzo’s claim that M, unlike Αb (Laurentianus 87,12), is a genuine β-manuscript, Alexandru advances among other textual considerations the interesting argument that M, unlike Αb, does not exhibit a reclamans (ancient catchwords) at the end of book Iota, although reclamantes pertained to the archetype β as a relic from a papyri edition of late antiquity. With regard to the constitutio textus, Alexandru is rather conservative, following in most cases the choices of previous editors, who have generally privileged Ab. Unlike Fazzo, Alexandru does not draw the consequences from a pertinent observation made by Michael Frede and Günther Patzig, recently confirmed by Oliver Primavesi, that β (a copy of which is Ab) transmits a text that has been revised with the intention of smoothing out difficulties of style or subject matter. I have counted about fifty-five divergences between Alexandru’s and Fazzo’s editions and I think that, in the majority of them, Fazzo, who has generally privileged the manuscripts of the α-family and in particular E, is right. Nonetheless, unlike Fazzo, Alexandru adopts correctly the reading of E in 1072b8 (ἐνέργεια instead of ἐνεργείᾳ, transmitted by Ab and M, and adopted by Ross and Jaeger), although this whole passage needs to be reconsidered. Alexandru, combining Bonitz’s edition with Ross’s, prints [End Page 497] 1072b5–6 as ὥστ᾽ εἰ φορὰ πρώτη ἡ ἐνέργειά ἐστιν, ᾗ κινεῖται ταύτῃ γε ἐνδέχεται ἄλλως ἔχειν . . . , whereas β (i.e. EΣ and Ab) delivers an almost perfectly coherent text: ὥστ᾽ εἰ ἡ φορὰ πρώτη καὶ ἐνέργειά ἐστιν ᾗ κινεῖται, ταύτῃ δε ἐνδέχεται ἄλλως ἔχειν, κατὰ τόπον, καὶ εἰ μὴ κατ᾽ οὐσίαν. We need only to correct with Jaeger ἐνέργεια to ἐνεργείᾳ to understand that if the motion of the heavens—which is the first to be moved by the first mover and (καὶ) is actual (ἐνεργείᾳ) insofar as it is moved by the first mover—is to be changing its state perpetually, then the heavens must move locally (and not substantially) in a circle and, for this to be true, there must be...

William of Moerbeke's Church at Merbaka: The Use of Ancient Spolia to Make Personal and Political Statements

William of Moerbeke's Church at Merbaka: The Use of Ancient Spolia to Make Personal and Political Statements

Uncertain Knowledge: Scepticism, Relativism, and Doubt in the Middle Ages ed. by Dallas G. Denery, II, Kantik Ghosh, and Nicolette Zeeman (review)

Reviewed by: Uncertain Knowledge: Scepticism, Relativism, and Doubt in the Middle Ages ed. by Dallas G. Denery, II, Kantik Ghosh, and Nicolette Zeeman Lola Sharon Davidson Denery, Dallas G., II, Kantik Ghosh, and Nicolette Zeeman, eds, Uncertain Knowledge: Scepticism, Relativism, and Doubt in the Middle Ages (Disputatio, 14), Turnhout, Brepols, 2014; hardback; pp. viii, 345; 10 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. €90.00; ISBN 9782503547763. This book originated in a research project and workshop examining uncertain knowledge in the Middle Ages. The papers fall broadly into two camps, philosophical and literary. The editors’ Introduction makes clear that this breadth arises from an explicit strategy aimed at exploring both the role played by scepticism in the scholastic production of authorised knowledge and the subversion of that institutional knowledge by vernacular and lay cultural players. The focus is determinedly epistemological and largely ignores the vexed and voluminous subject of religious orthodoxy and heresy. Dallas G. Denery II opens the discussion with John of Salisbury’s meditations on the attitude of the superior man in an environment, namely the court, rendered inherently deceptive by flattery and illusory pleasures. Denery sees in John a continuing humanist tradition masked by the ascendancy of scholasticism until its resurgence in the early modern era. Eileen C. Sweeney looks at the reception of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics by Grosseteste and Roger Bacon whose move to privilege scientific knowledge, and thereby implicitly problematise other forms, was resisted by the Summa fratris Alexandri and William of Auvergne’s championing of faith as the only possible certainty. Dominik Perler brings us to medieval considerations of the classical grounds of scepticism through Walter Chatton’s and William Ockham’s responses to Peter Aureol’s attempt to account for sensory illusions by mediated perception. Perler concludes that radical scepticism was impossible within an Aristotelian framework committed to the reliability of our natural capacities. Christophe Grellard continues this theme with John Buridan’s explanation of how it is possible to believe falsely. Buridan sympathetically employed the figure of the ‘little old woman’ to explain how habit, social pressure, and imagination might combine to distort perception and permit false belief. Concluding the more strictly philosophical section, Rita Copeland reveals the difficulty commentators, such as Giles of Rome, Buridan, and even the translator, William of Moerbeke, had in situating Aristotle’s Rhetoric within the Ciceronian rhetorical tradition. Notwithstanding Aristotle’s placing it under logic, the manuscript tradition preferred to group it with ethics and politics. Lesley Smith bridges the shift from the scholastic to the literary by looking at uncertainty in the study of the Bible. Medieval scholars were aware that they were dealing with fallible translations from unreliable texts and not all were content to resolve problems by allegorising. Nicholas of Lyra turned to a rabbi for the cultural background of the Bible. William of Auvergne and Richard and Hugh of St Victor sought rational explanations of biblical stories while accepting that uncertainty would persist. [End Page 232] Karen Sullivan shifts the focus to vernacular literature with Robert de Boron’s Merlin. Rejecting a rationalist denunciation of Merlin as diabolically inspired, Boron draws on a contemplative perspective that employs the prophet’s mysterious nature to valorise intellectual humility and faith. Helen Swift continues this perspective in her chapter on love poetry. The lover’s desire renders him peculiarly incapable of discerning the truth but this inability is itself willed for: the continuance of uncertainty is the precondition for the continuance of desire. Jean de Meun, Chaucer, and Lydgate are the subject of Nicolette Zeeman’s contribution. She sees these authors turning the weapons of the scholastic philosophers against them in a systematic problematising of sanctioned epistemological, moral, social, and gender hierarchies. Next, Mishtooni Bose focuses on the role of opinion in the vernacular philosophical and moral works of Christine de Pizan and Bishop Reginald Pecock. Notwithstanding the Introduction’s disclaimer, Kantik Ghosh addresses heresy and the policing of intellectual debate in the trials of Richard Fleming, Jerome of Prague, and Jan Hus, all of whom were accused of following Wyclif. Fleming successfully defended himself on the grounds of academic debate, but Hus and Jerome found arguments for academic freedom powerless against the Inquisition and...

Itinerario de las traducciones latinas de "Ethica Nicomaquea" durante el s. XIII

This article gathers and brings together, for the first time in a single study, the different aspects regarding the manuscript tradition, the dating and the authorships of the three translations of Ethica Nicomachea circulating among scholars during the 13th century. This work of Aristotle, of significant and enduring influence in the field of practical philosophy, eluded not only the prohibitions imposed during this period on other important treatises of the Stagirite, but was also honored by the work of three translators of recognized talent and scholarship: Burgundio of Pisa, Robert Grosseteste and William of Moerbeke. Thanks to the common work of a number of philologists, paleographers and other specialists in medieval studies, the itinerary of the latin translations of Ethica Nicomachea represents a model of scientific cooperation, whose numerous and even unexpected results are often dispersed in an extended literature. This study provides the reader with a complete and comprehensive map of them, along with a number of conclusions suggested by a more panoramic view of the different events.

Un manuscrit d’Aristoteles Latinus à la National Diet Library, Tokyo, Japon

This article offers a description of the manuscript Tokyo, National Diet Library, Ms. WA42-29. This manuscript, purchased in London in 1987, contains Latin translations of Aristotle’s logical works, some original works on logic by Boethius, and William of Moerbeke’s Latin translation of De anima. It is most likely identical with a manuscript of a similar composition that disappeared in the first decades of the twentieth century from what is today the Hochschul- und Landesbibliothek Fulda. The manuscript was once part of the collection of Johannes Guldin, Domherr of Konstanz in the fifteenth century. The suggestion that this Guldin was also the author of Questiones veteris et nove logice, preserved in Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Cod. HB X 2, turns out to be incorrect.

Commission II: The Latin Aristotle and Medieval Latin Commentaries on Aristotle (2007-2012)

This report is divided into two main parts, devoted (1) to the Aristoteles Latinus and (2) to the Editions of Latin Commentaries on Aristotle. The report on the Aristoteles Latinus sheds light on recent research on medieval Latin translations of Aristotle's works. Among other things, it discusses the editions published in the context of the Aristoteles Latinus (Meteorologica, translations of Aristippus and William of Moerbeke; the anonymous translation of De motu animalium; De motu animalium-De progressu animalium, translated by William of Moerbeke), and some recent studies and collective volumes on individual texts and translators. The report on Editions of Latin Commentaries on Aristotle gives information for each edition of a commentary on Aristotle that has been published in the last five years (2007-2012) and on those editions that are about to be published or are in preparation or are planned to start within the next five years.

Peter Olivi’s Dialogue with Aristotle on the Emotions

Peter Olivi’s Dialogue with Aristotle on the Emotions1 O.F.M. Dominic Whitehouse (bio) Peter of John Olivi composed Question 57 of his Quaestiones in secundum librum Sententiarum (“Questions on the Second Book of the Sentences”) in the decade after William of Moerbeke had translated, not long before 1270, Aristotle’s On Rhetoric into Latin.2 It was above all Moerbeke’s translation that gave thirteenth-century Europe access to the analysis of the emotions that Aristotle had placed in Book Two of the work. Two earlier translations existed: one that Hermannus Alemannus had made from an Arabic translation in 1256, and another that an anonymous translator had done from the Greek, sometime in the middle of the century.3 Few had read Hermannus’s version; and even fewer that of the unknown translator. In Opus Majus (1267–68), Roger Bacon [End Page 189] bemoaned the situation. He speculated that the cause probably lay in the poor quality of Hermannus’s translation, which had been done at a remove from the Arabic by someone who, on his own admission, had no education in logic.4 It is hard to gauge when Olivi would have read Aristotle’s On Rhetoric. He could have read it in Hermannus’s translation earlier in his time as a student at the Franciscan studium generale in Paris, or in Moerbeke’s later during his stay. How long Olivi actually spent in Paris is still debated. It seems likely that he arrived in the summer or early autumn of 1267.5 He himself says that he heard Bonaventure give the series of homilies entitled Collationes de septem donis Spiritus Sancti from February 25 until April 7, 1268.6 This would suggest that he was already there for the start of the academic year of 1267–68. When he left is even more uncertain. The earliest date would be the end of the four-year period normally spent by Franciscans preparing to be lectores (viz. teachers appointed to the regional houses of study); in Olivi’s case, this would have been in mid-1271, if we take it that he arrived in mid-1267. Sylvain Piron, however, argues [End Page 190] for the much later date of mid-1274.7 He bases his hypothesis firstly on the fact that Olivi’s texts reveal an acquaintanceship with Collationes in Hexaemeron, the cycle of homilies that Bonaventure gave in Paris between April 9 and May 28, 1273.8 He also argues that the earliest of the Quaestiones in Quaestiones in secundum librum Sententiarum appear to have arisen out of a course on Aristotle’s Physics that Olivi would have given at the Parisian studium after the four-year period normally granted to lectors.9 While Piron’s hypothesis is certainly possible, it is nevertheless highly speculative. All we know for sure is that Olivi was back in Languedoc in the later 1270s. Although one might suspect that Olivi had read On Rhetoric in his student years, especially given the interest that Moerbeke’s (if not Hermannus’s) translation had triggered in academic circles, all that we know, from the textual evidence which Question 57 provides, is that he had read at least the section in Book II on the emotions by the time that he wrote this question. Unfortunately, we can only say approximately when that was. Passages in the question suggest that Olivi had read the text of the articles condemned by Bishop Tempier [End Page 191] and his advisors on March 7, 1277.10 I would tend to agree with Sylvain Piron, therefore, in dating it to 1277 or the earlier part of 1278.11 What needs to be kept in mind, however, is that the question addresses disputes about the nature and real existence of liberum arbitrium that go back to Olivi’s student years in Paris. A question that we might first want to ask is why Olivi would embark upon such a full-blown investigation of the emotions in a question whose primary purpose is to investigate whether or not humans possess the capacity to decide freely; namely “liberum arbitrium,” which is more often than not translated as “free choice” (“… quaeritur an...

Sobre as origens do vocabulário político medieval

O fenômeno da incorporação do corpo lexical político aristotélico transliterado do grego ao contexto latino do século XIII nos remete a problemas sobre as presenças e ausências terminológicas, não somente na tradução da Política, feita por Guilherme de Moerbeke, e nos comentários de Alberto Magno e Tomás de Aquino ao texto latino de Aristóteles, mas também à possível reverberação desses vocábulos políticos moerbekianos em alguns leitores da Política, no século XIV. Não se trata apenas de verificação de quem usou ou não usou tais ou quais termos, nem mesmo da elaboração de juízos sobre esses usos, como que para rotular pensadores; antes, trata-se de tentar individuar, a partir dos usos terminológicos, o surgimento de um novo modo de pensar e compreender a esfera da vida humana que é a dimensão pública, ou melhor, política. Tentaremos compreender, neste artigo, especificamente como emerge, a partir dessa tradução latina da Política, um novo quadro conceitual, a saber: a esfera política. Constataremos que a tradução da Política de Moerbeke consolida um novo vocabulário e um novo quadro conceitual que será, doravante, um dos fundamentos do pensamento político.

Rimescolare le carte. Il tema del governo misto in Tommaso d’Aquino e nella riflessione politica tardomedievale

William of Moerbeke’s rendering of Aristotle’s Politics (about 1260) put a new problem to his late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century readers, forcing those magistri to question themselves about the advantages of the adoption of a mixed type of government which combines some elements of the rule of the many with others of aristocracy and monarchy. Thomas Aquinas, first of all, and then both Peter of Auvergne and Ptolemy of Lucca do all agree in accepting a mixed constitution as the best political arrangement, but between them we could find some considerable differences.

Thirty-six Hippocratic Aphorisms of Nephrologic Interest

In this article, we discuss the nephrologic content within Hippocrates' Aphorisms. Although similar attempts have taken place ever since antiquity, we believe that in each era new insights may be gained by examining the aphorisms through the prism of current medical knowledge. Of the 400 aphorisms in the Hippocratic text, we discuss the 36 that we consider to be most relevant to nephrology. We conclude that these aphorisms support the concept of Hippocrates as the "Father of Clinical Nephrology."

The Archimedes codex: how a medieval prayer book is revealing the true genius of antiquity's greatest scientist

T his is a fascinating account of the nearly unbelievable ups and downs of the ‘‘Archimedes Palimpsest,’’ a Byzantine codex containing, under the text of a prayer book, a small library of unique ancient texts, including exceptionally important Archimedes treatises. The account is written in alternating chapters by William Noel, Curator of Manuscripts at the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, and Reviel Netz, Professor of Classics and Philosophy at Stanford University. The story of the three known codices with works of Archimedes is told in the chapters written by Noel. The story begins with Archimedes, a prominent citizen of Syracuse, a Greek city in Sicily, sending letters with a number of his mathematical works for further distribution to colleagues in Alexandria, such as Conon, Dositheus and Eratosthenes. Archimedes was killed in 212 BC, when Syracuse fell to the invading Romans, but copies of his works, written on papyrus scrolls, continued to circulate. Early in the sixth century A.D., Eutocius wrote commentaries to some of Archimedes’s works: Sphere and Cylinder I-II, Measurement of the Circle and Balancing Planes. At about this time, the texts of some of Archimedes’s treatises that were still around were transferred from papyrus scrolls to a new and less fragile medium with greater capacity, codices made of stacks of folded parchment sheets stitched together. A new change of medium in the ninth century involved the transition from majuscule to minuscule, lowercase script. Manuscripts written in the older script were often destroyed. After centuries of neglect, a revival of interest in Archimedes’s texts in the Byzantine Renaissance in the ninth and tenth centuries may be one of the reasons for the survival of three codices with Archimedes treatises, now called Codices A, B and C. A and B both contain the treatises Balancing Planes and Quadrature of the Parabola, while B also contains On Floating Bodies, and A also contains Sphere and Cylinder, Measurement of the Circle, Spiral Lines, Conoids and Spheroids, and Sand-Reckoner. Today, both A and B are lost, but copies of A still survive, and so does a Latin translation of B, made in 1269 by William of Moerbeke, a Franciscan friar. After being lost for nearly a millennium (as is now known, after having spent several centuries being used as any other prayer book at the monastery of St. Sabas in the Judaean desert), Codex C sensationally resurfaced in 1899, when a few lines of a partially erased text visible under the text of a medieval prayer book were reproduced in a catalog of manuscripts in the library of the Metochion of the Holy Sepulcher in Constantinople. The Dane J. L. Heiberg, a prominent Greek scholar, recognized the lines as being taken from a work of Archimedes. Subsequently he went to Constantinople, where he could verify that the prayer book was a palimpsest, with the text of the prayer book written above

Thirteenth and Fourteenth-Century Commentaries On the De LONGITUDlNe Et Brevitate Vitae

AbstractThe article seeks to summarise recent research carried out by the author into thirteenth and fourteenth-century commentaries on the De longitudine et brevitate vitae. The texts of some representative commentaries are examined as a means of assessing the reception of Aristotle's natural philosophy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. As this is an area which has received comparatively little attention from researchers up to now, it is hoped that in examining commentaries on this one text of the Parva naturalia what emerges might serve to give a clearer picture of the reception and understanding of Aristotle's natural philosophy. The article also contains some brief comments on the two medieval translations of the De longitudine, by James of Venice and William of Moerbeke. In an appendix, a transcription of the prologue to Walter Burley's commentary is also included.

Commentary on the Book of Causes of St. Thomas Aquinas. trans. by Vincent A. Guagliardo, O.P., Charles R. Hess, O.P., Richard C. Taylor

BOOK REVIEWS 477 One minor observation: Scholars not familiar with recent developments in Thomist studies should note that Jean-Pierre Torrell, O.P., Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Person and His Work (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996) has replaced Father Weisheipl's Friar Thomas d'Aquino (Washington, 1983), which Kent cites on p. 62, n. 51, as the standard work for dating the works of Aquinas and for other bibliographical and biographical material on the Angelic Doctor. St. John's Seminary Boston, Massachusetts ROMANUS CESSARIO, 0.P. Commentary on the Book ofCauses ofSt. Thomas Aquinas. Trans. by VINCENT A. GUAGLIARDO, O.P., CHARLES R. HESS, O.P., and RICHARD C. TAYLOR. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996. Pp. xxxvii + 193. $26.95 (cloth), $16.95 (paper). Among his last writings, Aquinas's commentary on the Liber de causis is of particular interest for two reasons. First, it forms, together with the De substantiis separatis, Thomas's most mature expression of the participation metaphysics which he developed in good part from the Liber's creationist adaptation of Neoplatonism. Second, the commentary exemplifies what may be styled Aquinas's Neoplatonic hermeneutic, a hermeneutic which he took over from Neoplatonism, the aim of which was to reconcile in a higher synthesis Platonic participation and Aristotelian causality. The translation into English of the Super libmm De causis expositio is thus a significant contribution to the corpus of an "English Thomas," a corpus that has been growing apace in this century with the waning of Christian Latinity. This first English edition of the Commentary on the Book ofCauses offers an extensive bibliography of both primary and secondary sources. It also includes literature on what Thomas himself first identified in the Middle Ages as the subtext of the De causis, namely Proclus's Elements of Theology. Upon the translation of the Elements into Latin by William of Moerbeke, Thomas saw that the anonymous author of what is probably an Arabic work of the ninth century was engaging in the same project as pseudo-Dionysius, namely the translation ofNeoplatonic emanationism into monotheistic creationism. Whereas Dionysius translated the Platonic hierarchy of subsisting forms into an order of participated perfections unified in the intensively infinite existence of God, the author of the De causis sought to replace the hypostasized perfections of Proclean emanation with a creationist procession from the First Cause of Intellect and Soul, and then the material world. It is the author's 478 BOOK REVIEWS consequent preoccupation with the immanent principles of entity, and with real composition and real causality at every level of entity, that most influenced Aquinas's subsequent synthesis. If Dionysius provided Thomas with a hermeneutic and lexicon for applying the metaphysical intuitions of the Neoplatonists to the creator, then the author of the De causis can be credited for doing the same for creatures. The profound influence of the De causis on Aquinas's metaphysics of creation is well illustrated by Guagliardo's list of the themes Thomas took over from its author (xxx), not least of which is that esse is the first of created things and the most proper and universal effect of God, and that God alone is absolutely infinite and simple, while intelligences or angels are "form and being," or as Aquinas will say, essence and existence. Omitting Proclus's prologue on the one and the many, the author of the De causis begins his treatise on first causes with the work's seminal proposition: "Every primary cause infuses its effect more powerfully than does a universal second cause" (5). That the author thus bypasses the Platonic antinomy between unity and being intimates his creationist shift from a concern with the formal determination of being to a concern with its efficient production, together with the subordination of the former problem to the latter. The author's concern with primary causes, from which came the nickname Liber de causis (the proper title is De bonitate pura), indicates how he will explicate the similitudes of formal exemplar causality in terms of relationships of dynamic dependence and of a total subordination and unification of all effects in the first Cause. In both the...

Florence, 1492: The Reappearance of Plotinus*

In the western world, Plotinus was only a name until 1492. None of his treatises had been translated during the Middle Ages, and the translations dating back to antiquity had been lost. He was not totally unknown, however, thanks to scholars like Firmicus Maternus, Saint Augustine, Macrobius, and to those parts of the works of Proclus translated in the thirteenth century by William of Moerbeke. But Plotinus's own writings remained completely unknown,and as Vespasiano da Bisticci observed in his Vite, “senza i libri non si poteva fare nulla” (“without the books, nothing can be done”). This fact was to change completely only with the publication by Marsilio Ficino of his Latin translation of the Enneads.

William of Moerbeke, the Papal Greek Manuscripts and the Collection of Pappus of Alexandria in Vat. gr. 218

William of Moerbeke, the Papal Greek Manuscripts and the Collection of Pappus of Alexandria in Vat. gr. 218