Logic's God and the natural order in late medieval Oxford: The teaching of Robert Holcot

Summary

Recent students of late medieval intellectual history have treated Oxford theologians' Sentences lectures from the 1320s to 1330s as revealing the interface of the theological, logical, and scientific thinking characteristic of a historically momentous ‘New English Theology’. Its conceptual achievement, historians generally concur, was the casting off of the speculative (ultimately Neoplatonic) metaphysics of such thirteenth-century authors as Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon; its methodological novelty made it akin to twentieth-century analytic philosophy and seminal for the early Scientific Revolution. Yet the metaphysically cast thirteenth-century sciences of perspectiva and astrologia persisted among scholars long into the early modern period. To show how this apparent paradox may be dissolved, this article details the intersection of thirteenth-century metaphysics and fourteenth-century analysis in the lectures of a controversial and influential proponent of the Oxford theology of the 1330s.

This article first took shape as a paper commissioned for a conference on Science and Theology in medieval Islam, Judaism, and Christianity held at the Institute for Research in the Humanities of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in April 1993, organized by Professor David Lindberg, and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities; a revised version was presented to the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa in June 1995. I am grateful to David Lindberg and to these institutions, as well as to William J. Courtenay, Francesco del Punta, the University of Iowa, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, for supporting this research.

This article first took shape as a paper commissioned for a conference on Science and Theology in medieval Islam, Judaism, and Christianity held at the Institute for Research in the Humanities of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in April 1993, organized by Professor David Lindberg, and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities; a revised version was presented to the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa in June 1995. I am grateful to David Lindberg and to these institutions, as well as to William J. Courtenay, Francesco del Punta, the University of Iowa, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, for supporting this research.

Notes

This article first took shape as a paper commissioned for a conference on Science and Theology in medieval Islam, Judaism, and Christianity held at the Institute for Research in the Humanities of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in April 1993, organized by Professor David Lindberg, and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities; a revised version was presented to the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa in June 1995. I am grateful to David Lindberg and to these institutions, as well as to William J. Courtenay, Francesco del Punta, the University of Iowa, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, for supporting this research.