Ziang Chen

This paper explores economic theories of Gerald Odonis (d. 1348) and John Buridan (d. ca. 1360), focusing on their views on economic value, money, and usury in their commentaries on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Both philosophers critically engage with Aristotle’s ideas, reshaping economic thought during a transformative era marked by intense socio-economic changes and crises. Odonis, influenced by Franciscan traditions, argues that money is a social construct established by legal and political authority. He defines value primarily in terms of human need and societal necessity, suggesting a dynamic, skill-based valuation of labour rather than value of intrinsic worth. On usury, Odonis shifts from a liberal attitude in his earlier works towards moral condemnation, highlighting its injustice and harmful social consequences. Buridan further refines these ideas, emphasising the necessity of stable currency as essential to just economic exchange. He critiques arbitrary political interventions and advocates for currency grounded in precious metals to ensure economic stability. Addressing objections concerning economic value, Buridan argues that value is based on communal rather than personal need. Drawing from Aristotle and Seneca, he differentiates between necessary and apparent needs, highlighting that both the impoverished and wealthy experience poverty due to persistent desire. Ultimately, economic value, according to Buridan, is determined by apparent rather than necessary need. Futher, Buridan permits interest charges under genuine loss or risk-sharing conditions, reflecting a practical approach to late medieval economic morality.

This paper studies the discussions on the definition and moral axiology of lying by two fourteenth-century Franciscan theologians, Francis of Meyronnes and Gerald Odonis, placed against the both broader context of late medieval scholasticism in general and the Franciscan moral theology in particular. Augustine’s doxa on mendacity largely dominated the late medieval intellectual landscape, but his teachings were challenged by alternative definitional and axiological schemes of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Both Meyronnes and Odonis, in their Decalogue and Ethics commentaries respectively, defended the Augustine’s intention-centric definition of lying and his rigorist condemnation of lying as a sin, but they also fully engaged with Aristotle’s arguments, and explored the notion of mendacity as a deviation from the virtuous mean, and the idea of mendaciousness as a habitual vice. They presented, each in his own way, an Aristotelianised re-reading of the fundamental tenets of Augustinian doctrines.

Le franciscain Guiral Ot inclut, dans son commentaire sur I Corinthiens, des questions discutées aussi dans son commentaire sur l’ Éthique et dans ses questions parisiennes sur les Sentences (1327-1328). Cet article fournit une tabula quaestionum des commentaires de Guiral Ot sur I Cor. et sur l’Épître aux Galates, ainsi que l’édition de deux questions, l’une tirée du commentaire sur l’ Éthique et l’autre des questions sur l’ Éthique et sur les Sentences. Une analyse révèle que les lectures sur I Cor., données à Toulouse entre l’automne 1323 et le printemps 1326, ont suivi la composition du commentaire sur l’ Éthique, également rédigé à Toulouse, probablement pas avant l’année universitaire 1322-1323.