St. Thomas Aquinas Quaestiones De Anima by James H. Robb (review)

770 BOOK REVIEWS Au risque de paraitre injuste envers le Stagirite, nons avons surtout souligne le cote lacunaire, a nos yeux, de sa philosophie. II faut reconnaitre cependant que sa conception du premier Moteur ne manque pas d'une certaine grandeur.•• We make the same admission. At the risk of appearing unjust toward Simon Decloux, we have especially noted what in our eyes is the lacunary side of his comparison between Aristotle's philosophy and that of St. Thomas. It must be recognized, however, that his study does point, at certain times, to a relationship between the Stagirite and the medieval theologian, and even shows how one prepares for the other.64 Univeraity of FribO'Urg FribO'UTg, Switzerland M.-D. PHILIPPE, 0. P. St. Thomas Aquinas Quaestiones De Anima. A newly established edition of the Latin text with introduction and notes. By JAMES H. RoBB. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1968. Pp. 282. $9.00. Students of St. Thomas will welcome this new edition of the Quaestiones disputatae De anima. It is intelligent and well produced. However, they will want to know the textual basis for this new edition. In the strict sense of the term this is not a critical edition. For this we will have to await the patient work of the Leonine editors with their new exhaustive methods. The present text is basically that contained in Oxford manuscript Balliol 49, which is of Parisian origin and contains pecia indications throughout. In other words, the present edition represents the university tradition collated with three other manuscripts of the same tradition: Paris, Bibl. lat. 14547, Paris, Bibl. Nat. lat. 15352, and Vatican, Bibl. Vat. lat. 786. Of the sixty manuscripts known to the editor, fifty have been examined and forty-one are said to be based on university exemplars. The other nine belong to a different tradition which contains " rather marked differences." This second tradition is not given a name or source; however these manuscripts could possibly constitute the " conventual " tradition, meaning the text preserved in religious houses and copied by religious. This phenomena has been encountered elsewhere, notably in Gauthier's magnificent edition of the Super Ethicam. The Leonine editors have repeatedly pointed out that the university tradition is by no means the best. University stationers were not as interested in a faithful text as they were in money. 88 P. 184. .. See pp. 190, 204, 205, 209, 219. BOOK REVIEWS 771 With them it was a business. Of the nine non-university manuscripts only three have been selected for collation in the apparatus: Vatican, Bibl. lat. Ottob. 2Hl, Vatican, Borg. 15, and Bruges, Bibl. de Ia Ville 491, plus one incunabulum. The author knows of sixty extant copies of the De anima. In actual fact, the Leonine editors know of ninety-one. Mere numbers do not mean much except as an indication of the diffusion of the text. But the thirty-one additional MSS still need to be analyzed and divided into groups. It might even be possible to establish a stemma for the entire collection. The whole point of a stemma is to eliminate codices that are simply duplicates or to eliminate new errors that have crept into a copy (eliminatio codicum) so that they can be disregarded in the actual reconstruction of the authoritative text. This eliminatio codicum has for its ultimate purpose the relation of extant manuscripts and the reconstruction of the original exemplar or something close to it. Dr. Robb has not given the reader an evaluation of the individual codices listed. So it is impossible to make a judgment about this matter. The main point here is that thirty-one codices remain to be examined and that the whole collection needs to be broken down into groups. Dr. Robb realizes in part this grouping when he indicates the agreement of MSS OVB by the letter g in the non-university tradition. A more serious question in the introduction is the dating of the Questiones De anima. The author's thesis is that the questions were delivered and written during the " spring of 1269 " (p. 27) and therefore a product of St. Thomas's second Parisian regency (passim). It is true...