La discussione sulla materia in alcuni commenti medievali ad Aristotele (original) (raw)
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Th is paper analyzes the theory of mixtures, material substances and corpuscles put forward by the Portuguese Thomistic philosopher Francisco Soares Lusitano. It has been argued that the incapacity of the Aristotelian- Th omistic tradition to reconcile an Aristotelian theory of mixtures with hylomorphism opened the way to the triumph of atomism in the seventeenth century. By analyzing Soares Lusitano’s theory of mixtures, this paper aims to demonstrate that early modern Thomism not only rendered the Aristotelian notion of elements compatible with the metaphysical bases of hylomorphism, but further incorporated an explanation of physical phenomena based upon the notion that bodies were basically made up of small and subtle corpuscles. By doing so, it shows that, contrary to what is so often claimed, early modern corpuscularism was not intrinsically incompatible with late Aristotelian philosophy.
Gesta, 51/1, 2012
Influenced by typological exegesis and traditions of theological- philosophical speculatio, medieval people understood materials and material things as participants in powerful economies of signification. In his landmark 1958 essay, “Vom geistigen Sinn des Wortes im Mittelalter” (On the Spiritual Sense of the Word in the Middle Ages), the cultural philologist Friedrich Ohly described the medieval meaning of things (Dingbedeutung) as authorized by modes of scriptural analysis but exceeding the boundaries of sacred texts to include monuments, artifacts, and materials. This essay serves as an introduction to Friedrich Ohly’s life and work and offers an analytic orientation to the methodological and historical questions taken up by this special issue of Gesta dedicated to medieval conceptions of significationes rerum (the signification of things). Reflecting on both the insights and limitations of Ohly’s penetrating account of medieval significs (the meaning of things in the world as expressed through words), the essay poses several art historical challenges to Ohly’s vision of medieval works of art and architecture, while arguing for the continuing relevance of his thought for art historical consideration of the meaning of things in the Middle Ages.
Objects, Romans, materialities
Antiquity, 2018
The three books reviewed here document the emergence of the new paradigm in Roman and Mediterranean archaeology, often associated with the material turn that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s in all disciplines related to human artefacts. It is a paradigm that puts things, not makers or users, at the centre of enquiry and that studies what things do, not their meaning. Its key notions are material and materiality, agency, practice, connectivity, the trajectories of objects and globalisation. It is also a rejection of the representational approach to material culture, which takes objects to represent people or immaterial aspects, such as religious ideas or group identities of the culture that created them. At first sight this new paradigm looks very materialist, but it is in fact driven by the attribution of all kinds of immaterial qualities and activities, such as agency, the capacity to act or afford human-thing entanglement, to objects.