Description:

The history of late medieval thought cannot be aimed at an inevitable decline without committing a clear methodological error. Therefore it is necessary to change the lenses to see the object in its novelty: the thought of John Duns Scotus and the thought of William of Ockham, which open the transition of the fourteenth century. Between Scotus and Ockham stands William of Alnwick whose full autonomy and intellectual greatness this book shows. Alnwick is not Scotus’ pupil but his colleague when they were both following Gonsalvus of Spain’s courses in Paris, and Alnwick is master of John of Reading and Ockham at Oxford.

This book has the merit of illuminating the greatness of Alnwick’s intellectual autonomy through a very thorough and extensive examination into Alnwick’s texts, the tacit or declared sources and the consequent intellectual debate among contemporaries and immediate successors, tat is the entire scene in which Alnwick’s thought acquires its full identity. This scene revolves around the multiple subjects connected to the conceptual knots of science, will and representation from theology to metaphysics. The conceptual knots require, in Alnwick, the construction of an intellectual workshop which is shown throughout the chapters of this book. At least four tools must be included in this workshop: (1) the remodelling of the concept of scientific knowledge; (2) the virtualization of the cognitive state of the human intellect; (3) the fracture between the intellect and the will; (4) the identity between representative intellection and represented object.

*This title is in English with some Latin and Italian content

by Francesco Fiorentino

ISBN: 9781576594803