Aurélien Robert

It is well known that during the Middle Ages the Eucharist was not only a theological question but also a philosophical one. Recent studies have shown the semantical and ontological problems concerning the status of substances and accidents after the transsubstantiation. Here the paper focuses on the gnoseological problem of the Eucharist. How do we know that the substance has changed after the consecration of the host? Moreover, how do we manage to know substances in general if sometimes it changes without apparent modifications in the accidental features apprehended by our sense faculties? The aim of this paper is to show that a new dilemma appeared at the end of the 13th century between the sceptical consequences of the dogma of transsubstantiation and the necessity to abandon or at least to interpret differently the sacrament. Wyclif chose the second option while most of the theologians and philosophers tried to adapt their theory of knowledge, especially the Franciscans, to which a large part of this paper is devoted. This paper tries to assess the different solutions to this problem of the knowability of substances.

When contemporary philosophers look at the medieval debate on intentionality, they usually have in mind what we call “Brentano’s thesis”. Indeed, Brentano ascribes to some medieval philosophers the thesis according to which objects of thought have a special kind of being that explains how can our thoughts be about this or that kind of things. Here, we decided to focus on the debates among the so-called “Latin Averroists”, because they clearly show that the medieval question on intentionality cannot be reduced to the well-known theory of intentional beings. More precisely, we endeavored to understand an apparently strange question that appeared in the faculties of arts in France and in Italy in the 14th century: to which category do intentions in the mind belong to? In Aristotelian terms: are they substances or accidents? The problem is the following: if they are accidents, how can they represent something else that an accident? If they are substances, what does it mean to affirm that we have substances in the mind, even intentional substances? After a detailed analysis of the responses one can find in Siger of Brabant, Angelo of Arezzo, Matthew of Gubbio, John of Göttingen, Anthony of Parma, Bartholomew of Bruges and John of Jandun, we try to show that only a very few philosophers adopted the formal identity thesis , according to which the object in the mind is formally identical with the object known outside the mind. This shows that a lot of medieval philosophers didn’t limit intentionality to intentional being or formal identity, but also considered other explanations of how the human mind can think about objects for which no representation can be found in the mind.

Contrary to what is generally said about the reception of Epicurus in the Middle Ages, many medieval authors agreed on his great wisdom, even if he made some philosophical and theological errors. From the 12th century to the 14th century on can find several "Lives of Epicurus" in which the best sayings of Epicurus are gathered from ancient sources (Seneca, Cicero, Lactantius, etc.). In this paper, we follow these quite unknown sources about Epicureanism in the Middle Ages. We try to show that if Epicurus was considered as a wise man in the MIddle Ages, Epicureans are condemned because after the Revelation of God's word, Christians can only accept Epicurus's ascetic ethics, not his errors about the eternity of the world, the mortality of the soul et the subordination of happiness to pleasure.

La querelle sugli universali si presenta come un dibattito prevalentemente ontologico che rimette in gioco l'idea stessa di sostanza ed è un realismo ontologico che non mette per forza in discussione ogni cosa, ma contempla tutta la realtà delle specie e dei generi naturali della sostanza. Gli uomini sono legati tra di loro per convenientia e questo come una semplice similitudine essenziale tra di loro e le loro essenze individuali, secondo la linea espressa da Giovanni di Pietro Olivi , Riccardo di Mediavilla , Vitale di Four , o come parte di una realtà comune, come espresso dall'altra linea rappresentata da Matteo d'Acquasparta . Anche se la loro posizione può essere definita concettualista, la loro teoria della conoscenza è ontologicamente neutra, dal momento che la ragione non consente di stabilire precisamente la natura dell'universale

Dino del Garbo, médecin actif dans les premières décennies du xiv e siècle, est surtout connu pour son commentaire au poème de Guido Cavalcanti Donna me prega. La présente étude propose l’édition d’une question quodlibétique sur la capacité de l’imagination à altérer le corps, disputée à Bologne ou Sienne dans les années 1320. Nous examinons le contexte médical et philosophique dans lequel s’inscrit cette question, en montrant notamment comment le débat s’est progressivement cristallisé autour de l’opposition entre un modèle avicennien et un modèle aristotélicien des rapports entre l’âme et le corps. L’analyse de ce débat permet d’éclairer d’un jour nouveau la glose de Dino del Garbo à Donna me prega et aussi, de manière incidente, le poème lui-même.

The paradigmatic examples of what we call nowadays ‘mere Cambridge changes’ are relational properties. If someone is on the left of a table at t − 1 and on the right of this table at t, the table does not undergo a physical change, but it has nonetheless new relational properties. What kind of relation lies behind this kind of change? Should we abandon the definition of identity as a set of permanent properties through time? This concern with identity and change was already present in Aristotle's Physics 5 and 7 and medieval commentators tackled the problem with some important refinements due to their metaphysical discussions about the nature of relations. John of Jandun's discussion of this topic, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, is particularly interesting. First, he defines self-identity as a relation of reason, which means for him that it is not a real relation. Second, he distinguishes two kinds of relational changes: those involving real relations and the acquisition a qualitative propert...