Kataphasis and Apophasis in Thirteenth Century Theology: The Anthropological Context of the Triplex Via in the Summa fratris Alexandri and Albert the Great (The Heythrop Journal 57 [2016]: 293-311) (original) (raw)
Related papers
2023
Open Access at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003309895/contextualizing-premodern-philosophy-katja-krause-luis-xavier-lópez-farjeat-nicholas-oschman Abstract: The article has three interrelated aims. First, to analyze a crucial passage of the Long Commentary on the De Anima by Averroes (Ibn Rušd, d. 1198 CE), one of the most informative criticisms of Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā, d. 1037 CE) devised by the Commentator, unraveling its details by means of similar passages in other Aristotelian commentaries and other works by Averroes. Second, to emphasize the historical importance of this passage as a precious testimonium of the entrance of Avicenna’s philosophy in Andalusia, documenting that, in this text and in other quotations, Averroes’ knowledge of Avicenna’s thought is probably based on a given summa by Avicenna, the Kitāb al-Šifāʾ (Book of the Cure, or: of the Healing), apparently known first-hand. Finally, to advance the possibility that, in what he says about Avicenna in the passage under discussion, Averroes may depend on the Introduction of the Kitāb al-Šifāʾ authored by al-Ǧūzǧānī.
Reading Proclus and the Book of Causes, Volume III. On Causes and the Noetic Triad, ed. D. Calma, Brill, Leiden-Boston, 2022
Previous scholarship has emphasized the centrality of chapter viii.4 of the Ilāhiyyāt (Science of Divine Things, or Metaphysics) of Avicenna's Kitāb al-Šifāʾ (Book of the Cure / Healing) as the main piece of evidence that can be invoked to argue for the dependence of Avicenna's metaphysical thought on the Arabic tradition of Proclus in general, and of the Liber de causis in particular.1 Scholars have stressed that this chapter contains the most glaring example of Avicenna's debt towards the Arabic Proclus, in the form that the Proclean Arabic tradition takes in the Kitāb fī Maḥḍ al-Ḫayr, the Book of the Pure Good, better known as Liber de causis. In other words, to get the best idea of Avicenna's recourse to the Liber de causis in the Ilāhiyyāt of the Šifāʾ (henceforth: Ilāhiyyāt), one has to look at chapter viii.4 of Avicenna's work. The key-doctrine in this regard is the theory according to which the First Cause or God does not have any essence, since It is only being. This idea, which surfaces in Ilāhiyyāt viii.4, is notoriously expressed in the famous proposition viii[ix] of the Liber de causis. This proposition marks a "dramatic" departure from the original Proclean and Plotinian tenet of a totally transcendent and unspeakable nature of God, and ascribes to the First Principle a positive nature, namely being. This nature maintains the uninformed or shapeless character of the divine nature already postulated by Proclus, but also holds a precise and intelligible content.2 With Ilāhiyyāt viii.4 and proposition viii[ix] we are at the doctrinal core, respectively, of Avicenna's magnum opus on metaphysics and of the Liber de causis. With respect to Avicenna, we find in this chapter the fundamental discrimination of Avicenna's cosmos between created beings, on the one hand, and God, on the other, drawn by means of the pivotal distinction of essence and existence in created being
The Summa Halensis on Theology and the Sciences: The Influence of Aristotle and Avicenna
The Legacy of Early Franciscan Thought
This chapter investigates the conception of theologya sascience in the Summa Halensis,and shows how the author of book Iutilizesthe theories of Aristotle and Avicenna. The Summist introduces his owni nnovative system of the sciences, into which theologyi si ntegrated. Ia rgue that in justifying the claim that theology is as cience and in explaining how both metaphysics and theologya re wisdom, the author takes over Aristotle'st heory of what constitutes as cience and his definition of wisdomand uses Avicenna'sterminologyfor the first cause. In his solution to the problem of the subject-matter of theology, he adopts Avicenna'si nfluential distinctionb etween the proper subject-matter of as cience and that which it seeks. Instead of Avicenna'so wn expressions,h owever,h eu ses the vocabulary of Augustine and Peter Lombard. The chapter thus shows how the author reactstothe newlyavailable sources translated from the Arabic and incorporates them into his own framework. Under theiri nfluence, the Summa suggests as olution to the novel problem of theologya sascience by creating at heory of theologyw hich combines the requirements of 'sacred doctrine' with ap hilosophical, rationalc oncept of science.
The Summa Halensis: Sources and Context, ed. L. Schumacher, De Gruyter, Berlin 2020, pp. 135-154 OPEN ACCESS https://www.degruyter.com/view/title/571774, 2020
The present paper aims to provide some methodological tools for obtaining a more precise understanding of the way Avicenna’s metaphysics contributed to shaping the metaphysical views expressed in the Summa. More specifically, it will try to offer a detailed assessment of the ways in which the authors of the Summa quoted, contextualized, and employed for their own purposes the only metaphysical work by Avicenna available to them, namely, the Liber de Philosophia prima sive Scientia Divina, which is the Latin translation of the metaphysical part of Avicenna’s magnum opus, the Book of the Cure (or: of the Healing). The general aim is coherently to situate the Summa within the framework of the Latin reception of Avicenna’s metaphysics in the 13th century, and to document its full significance as a remarkable specimen of one of the possible ways of using it as a source, i. e. what has been labelled elsewhere the ‘Philosophia prima and Metaphysics’ pattern of joint reception of Avicenna and Aristotle.
The present article analyzes the evidence available in Arabic sources (preliminary lists of contents in manuscripts; texts of manuscripts; later quotations) that supports the hypothesis according to which the Medieval Latin translation of the metaphysics of Avicenna’s Kitāb al-Šifāʾ is rooted in its Arabic background when it conveys an account of treatise V of the work (called “Versio Latina”) alternative to the one that can be found in the majority of codices and in current printings (“Versio Vulgata”). It is argued (i) that the Versio Latina is probably more original than the Versio Vulgata, for doctrinal and philological reasons; (ii) that the Versio Vulgata might respond to a deliberate intention to make the content of treatise V more compliant with the account of universals provided by Avicenna himself in the logic of the Šifāʾ and, in general, with the traditional pre-Avicennian ways of expounding the doctrine of universals; (iii) and that the Versio Vulgata was likely the product of Avicenna’s school, rather than of Avicenna himself, as the result of shared concerns and theoretical debates that prompted the decision of modifying Avicenna’s original text through the intervention, in all likelihood, of al-Ǧūzǧānī. Two further issues are conclusively discussed: (iv) how precisely the Latin translation relates to the Arabic background of the Versio Latina, (v) and whether the Versio Latina can be taken as the outlook of treatise V intended and licensed by Avicenna, or it also conveys elements of later, non authorial modifications.
Oriens, 2020
The separated intellects play a crucial but notoriously controversial role within the Neoplatonic systems of al-Fārābī and Avicenna. While both thinkers provide an array of proofs to support the existence of such immaterial substances, the most enduring of these is based on a metaphysical rule of Avicenna's metaphysics known as the "rule of one" (qāʿidat al-wāḥid): that from the One, only one proceeds (lā yaṣdur ʿan l-wāḥid illā l-wāḥid). The following paper explores the various ways in which Avicenna defended this principle and traces their reception in the post-classical period, thereby showing how vigorously the question of emanation was debated among scholars of the later medieval period.
Avicenna and Aquinas’s De Principiis Naturae, cc. 1–3
The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review, 2012
Aristotle, Metaphysics 5.1.1012b34-1013a16: "We call a principle. .. (3) that from which, as an immanent part, a thing first arises, e.g. as the keel of a ship and the foundation of a house, while in animals some suppose the heart, others the brain, others some other part, to be of this nature. (4) That from which, not as an immanent part, a thing first arises, and from which the movement or the change naturally first proceeds, as a child comes from the father and the mother, and a fight from abusive language.. .. (6) That from which a thing can first be known; for this also is called the principle of the thing, e.g., the suppositions are the origins of demonstrations." 577