Marco Signori

Cet article analyse les premières occurrences du terme coaequaevus dans la pensée latine médiévale, avant la diffusion de la doctrine théologique des quatre coaequaeva au xiii e siècle. Avant cette date, le terme se rencontre dans deux contextes principaux : celui du platonisme latin et de l’École de Chartres, d’une part, et celui de la traduction d’œuvres du péripatétisme arabe, d’autre part. L’article présente l’hypothèse que le lien de Gundissalinus avec l’École de Chartres puisse expliquer le recours à ce terme dans ses traductions arabo-latines de textes philosophiques.

Albert the Great makes wide use of Arabic scientific and philosophical sources, in both his autonomous theological works and his commentaries on Aristotle’s corpus. This contribution aims to explore a set of ten Arabic arguments for the incorporeal nature of the human rational soul that Albert quotes in extenso in at least four important works of his: i) De homine (written around 1242), ii) De anima (1254–7), iii) De natura et origine animae (post 1254–7), and iv) the second, possibly inauthentic part of Summa theologiae sive de mirabili scientia Dei (post 1274). While alternatively attributed by Albert to both Avicenna and Algazel or to the sole Avicenna, the ten proofs constitute in fact a largely verbatim quotation of a lengthy excerpt of the psychological section of al-Ġazālī’s Maqāṣid al-falāsifa [The Intentions of the Philosophers] (Latin Summa theoricae philosophiae). In tracing the variations and additions provided by Albert with respect to al-Ġazālī’s text, and the specific role played by the proofs in their new Albertinian contexts, this contribution will add some fresh material to the well-known historical transmission of Arabic psychology to Latin Scholasticism.

This contribution explores in detail the presence and the context of two quotations of the philosopher and theologian Abū Ḥāmid al-Ġazālī (Algazel for the Latin world) in Albert the Great’s late Summa theologiae sive de mirabili scientia Dei. The two quotations, which concern the notion of the soul as “abridged letter” or “copy” [nusḫa muḫtaṣara, chartula brevis] on which all pieces of knowledge are potentially transcribed, occur in two significant textual points of Albert’s Summa. Two different aspects of al-Ġazālī’s simile are addressed in the article: the consideration of the soul as a book, which has extremely wide biblical and literary echoes, and the consideration of the soul as a place, also with regard to the already Aristotelian, and then Albertinian notion of locus intelligibilium. The feature the two passages by Albert share is the acknowledgment of Algazel as a source of primary importance, capable of corroborating with his authority both a Christian theological doctrine and the littera itself of Aristotle’s De anima, in a culturally momentous philosophical-theological, and Islamic-Christian, cooperation. Thanks to a focused analysis on further contexts of reception of the same Ġazālīan image, which bear witness to its peculiar memorability and its differentiated usages, the article argues in conclusion in favour of a more attentive and in-depth study of philosophical similes such as the one here discussed.