From the Circle of Alcuin to the School of Auxerre: Logic, Theology and Philosophy in the Early Middle Ages

Front Cover
Cambridge University Press, 2006 M03 16 - 232 pages
This study is the first modern account of the development of philosophy during the Carolingian Renaissance. In the late eighth century, Dr Marenbon argues, theologians were led by their enthusiasm for logic to pose themselves truly philosophical questions. The central themes of ninth-century philosophy - essence, the Aristotelian Categories, the problem of Universals - were to preoccupy thinkers throughout the Middle Ages. The earliest period of medieval philosophy was thus a formative one. This work is based on a fresh study of the manuscript sources. The thoughts of scholars such as Alcuin, Candidus, Fredegisus, Ratramnus of Corbie, John Scottus Eriugena and Heiric of Auxerre is examined in detail and compared with their sources; and a wide variety of evidence is used to throw light on the milieu in which these thinkers flourished. Full critical editions of an important body of early medieval philosophical material, much of it never before published, are included.
 

Contents

sources for early medieval philosophy
12
Logic and theology at the court of Charlemagne
30
Problems of the Categories essence and the Universals
67
The circle of John Scottus Eriugena
88
33
97
67
106
Early medieval glosses on the problems of the Categories
116
Conclusion
139
Glosses to the Categoriae Decem
173
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