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WALTER BURLEY’S EXPOSITIO VETUS SUPER LIBRUM PORPHYRII AN EDITION Walter of Burley (1275/76— 1344/45)1seems to have written two or three commentaries on Porphyry’s Isagoge and a series of general questions on the same book.2The latest commentary was meant to be the first part of a collection which should include commentaries on the whole O rganon? What has survived is, as far as I know, only a series of four commentaries on the Ars vetus (i. e. on the Isagoge, on the Categories, the Liber sex principiorum and the De interpretatione). Burley completed the last one of these (on the De interpretatione) on 5 August, 1337, so the others were presumably written within the one or two years before that date.4 These late commentaries super 'As we know from the colophon of his late commentary on the De interpretatione (e.g. ms. Vat. lat. 2146, f. 87rb), on 5 August, 1337, Burley was in his 62 n d year, i. e. he had not already reached the age of 62. So he must have been bom between 5 August, 1275, and 6 August, 12 76. The last record of him is dated 19 June, 1344, as is reported by C. Martin, Walter Burley, in: W. A. Hinnebush et al. (edd.), Oxford Studies Presented to Daniel Callus, Oxford 1964, pp. 194-230, pp. 229 sq. ^For the quaestiones, cf. Wroclaw, Biblioteka Uniwersytecka, ms. IV. Q. IV, ff. 114 r-129r (or, according to another hand, lOOr-llSr). The first four questions are about logic in general; only the second half of the work is concerned with Porphyry’s text (qq. 5-8): Utrum universale sit subiectum in libro Porphyrii Utrum sint quinque universalia et non plura nec pauciora - Utrum universale habeat esse extra animam - (Supposito, quod sic:) Utrum universale sit alia res ab individuo. I’d like to thank H.-U. Wohler, University of Dresden, for providing me with copies of these quaestiones. They will soon be edited elsewhere. ’The prologue to the commentary on the Isagoge begins: “Quia de dictis in logica quoddam compendium intendo compilare, videnda sunt primo tria circa logicam in communi.” Super artem veterem Porphyrii et Aristotelis, Venice 1497, repr. Frankfurt/M. 1967, f. a2ra. If “dicta in logica” are the authoritative doctrines in the discipline of logic, Burley must have had the plan to comment on all the books of the Organon alike. It seems unlikely to me that he, instead, should have intended the word “dicta” to mean only words and sentences as opposed to syllogisms; only in this case would we be obliged to understand that he had limited his plan to the ars vetus. 4 Further research has to be done about the question, whether one or another of Burley’s extant commentaries on the Analytica priora, on the Topics and die Sophistici elenchi was eventually meant to be a part of the compendium. The long commentary on the Analytica posteriora which is preserved in several manuscripts Franciscan Studies 59 (2001) 237 238 W a l t e r Bu r l e y artem veterem, including the one on the Isagoge, were edited in print several times at the end of the 15th and in the first half of the 16th century, and they are well known today because of the reprint of the Venetian edition of 1497 (Frankfurt/M. 1967). This edition has more printing errors than the preceding ones, but in addition it contains Burley’s Tractatus de universalibus. Misleadingly, this additional text has been inserted by the editor into the commentary on the Isagoge, between the comments on Porphyry’s prologue and the chapters on the main part of the book. So the commentary itself is to be found on ff. a2ra-a3vb and ff. blrb-c3va of this edition only. Another (?) commentary is ascribed to Burley in two manuscripts of the University library of Wroclaw. I don’t know anything about it except the description given by M. Markowski in his Repertorium.5 The third commentary, which I am going to edit here, is shorter than the other two. Only one manuscript is known to preserve it. There it is followed by...

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