The Twelfth-Century Renewal of Latin Metaphysics
Gundissalinus's Ontology of Matter and Form
Description
Medieval metaphysics is usually bound up with Scholasticism and its influential exemplars, such as Aquinas and Duns Scotus. However, the foundations of the new discipline, which would reshape the entire edifice of Western philosophy, were established well before the rise of Scholasticism through an encounter with the Arabic philosophical tradition. The Twelfth-Century Renewal of Latin Metaphysics uncovers what rightly should be considered the first attempt to construct a metaphysical system in the Latin Middle Ages in the work of Dominicus Gundissalinus. It was to prove original, powerful, and far-reaching in every way.
Reviews
In this much-needed and insightful study, Nicola Polloni makes intelligible the complex life-work of the translator and philosopher Dominicus Gundissalinus, the first major thinker of the Latin West both to translate and to incorporate into his own writings the diverse Arabic traditions exemplified by the works of Ibn Gabirol, Avicenna, and al-Farabi. The Twelfth-Century Renewal of Latin Metaphysics provides scholars with not only an invaluable historical account of Gundissalinus's translations but also an acute philosophical analysis of the Spanish thinker's own revisionary interpretation of his sources that integrates his newly acquired ideas and doctrines with his Christian inheritance. -- Richard C. Taylor, Marquette University & Katholieke Universiteit Leuven