Aristotelians, Platonists, and the Missing Ockhamists: Philosophical Liberty in Pre-Reformation Italy

Abstract

Sherlock Holmes Once Solved A mystery because a dog did not bark. Similarly, to understand the relatively wide freedom enjoyed by philosophers in pre-Reformation Italy, we have to understand as much what was there as what was not. The absent Ockhamists are critical to the tale. But more central are the Aristotelians, and, more specifically, Aristotelians of an Averroistic stamp, who were unquestionably there.Despite their doctrine of the unicity of the intellect, their consequent rejection of personal immortality as philosophically tenable, their denial of creation, and their determination to divorce philosophical discourse from the requirements of faith which provoked several condemnations at Paris and Oxford in the later thirteenth century, Averroists thrived in Renaissance Italy.

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