LIBER

The project LIBER (after the name of the object of research, Liber de causis) proposes to study the fortune of a pseudo-Aristotelian treatise on Western culture from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. The analysis, intended as a historic and doctrinal comparison of the medieval intellectual milieux, will bring new elements in explaining how this treatise, a compendium of both Greek and Arabic tradition, influenced the European culture. Result of fragmentation of the Theology of Aristotle (pseudepigrapha), the Liber de causis was composed in Baghdad in the ninth century from Greek sources (Proclus and Plotinus) and translated into Hebrew and Latin in the twelfth century. The Western readers have considered it as one of the books of Aristotle's Metaphysics and taught it in medieval universities. After the Latin translation of Elements of Theology in 1268, Thomas Aquinas showed Proclus was the source of Liber de causis. However, this change of authority didn’t diminish the interest for the booklet: it is quoted and commented, from Uppsala to Naples, from Oxford to Krakow, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. The projet LIBER is multidisciplinary by its object of study and involves twelve researchers of international renown ; its specificity lies in the dialogue between scholars (Latinists, Arabists, historians of philosophy, logic and theology, philologists and historians) on a topic that, until now, has been restricted to a small corpus of texts and a limited amount of historical information. The texts are mostly unpublished: it consists of 42 unedited commentaries (so far only 8 were known), recently identified in medieval manuscripts by the project coordinator. The project has two major objectives: (1) to identify and make available an European cultural heritage, unknown on a large scale and transmitted only through medieval manuscripts preserved in underused libraries (especially in Poland and Czech Republic) ; (2) to identify and analyse the major doctrines that Greek and Arabic philosophical traditions have bequeathed to the Western history of rationality through Liber de causis. The researches are methodologically divided into two parts: "Handling the knowledge" and "Theses and concepts". The first part will bring together studies made on medieval manuscripts and the history of institutions. Particular attention will be given to the teaching of Liber causis at the Faculty of Arts in Paris in the thirteenth century, in the universities of Central Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and in studia of religious orders. A further study will be conducted on the evolution (temporal and geographic) of literary exegesis of this text. The dissemination of the text will also be studied taking into account the manuscripts of the corpus vetustius of Aristotle’s translations and the explicit quotations in the first two books of the Sentences Commentary by Thomas Aquinas. The authenticity of a commentary attributed to Adam of Bockfeld will be analysed : it might be the first Latin commentary on Liber de causis and the publication of this text is in progress. The second part will focus on the role of the Liber de causis in the history of Western thought. The theory of the self-knowledge by the agent intellect will be studied according to Averroes’ Long Commentary on De anima of Aristotle and various Latin commentaries on Liber de causis. Another analysis will stress the problem of doctrinal changes of the Greek and Arabic themes turned unrecognizable by the Latin translation of the treatise. The first sentence of Liber de causis will be discussed in relation with the realist interpretation of Porphyry’s tree, the theory of plurality of substantial forms, the relation between being and essence in Thomas Aquinas and the ontological priority of the first cause in Duns Scotus and William of Ockham.