Speculum animae: Richard Rufus on Perception and Cognition

“Garrulus sum et loquax et expedire nescio. Diu te tenui in istis, sed de cetero procedam.” These are the words of Richard Rufus of Cornwall, a thirteenth-century Scholastic and lecturer at the Universities of Paris and Oxford. Rufus is apologizing to his readers: “I am garrulous and loquacious, and I don’t know how to be efficient. I have detained you with these things a long while, but let me now proceed to another topic.” This apology introduces the third part of the Speculum animae, a preliminary modern edition of which we publish here. In this short treatise, Rufus presents a unique Aristotelian theory of perception, describes what is and is not intelligible, and finally proves to his own satisfaction the immortality of the rational soul. To us this would hardly seem the place to apologize for being long-winded; indeed, we might wonder how Rufus could accomplish such an ambitious task in such a short treatise. We would certainly not accuse him of excessive verbosity. But Rufus was a man of exceptional humility, who once referred to himself as the least of the lesser (Franciscan) thinkers of his time.¹

Despite Rufus’s humility, he was no minor figure in the development of Scholastic philosophy. A teacher at the Universities of Paris and Oxford (fl. 1231–1256 A.D.),² he is the author of the earliest known, surviving lectures on several of Aristotle’s major texts, including the Metaphysics, the Physics, De generatione et corruptione, and De anima³ (the last of which will be discussed at length in this introduction). In fact, Rufus was one of the very first lecturers to teach the libri naturales at Paris after a ban on such instruction was effectively lifted in 1231 A.D. His works were influential not only among his contemporaries, but also among later authors, particularly John Duns Scotus. Roger Bacon, though a harsh critic of Rufus, acknowledged Rufus’s influence and fame decades after his death, albeit among what Bacon termed the “vulgar multitude.”⁴

The Speculum animae is one of Rufus’s later works. He begins the treatise by posing the following question: “In what way is the soul all things?” This refers, of course, to a familiar doctrine Aristotle establishes in the De anima—that the soul is, in some way, all things (430b20–21)—and Rufus is here seeking to clarify it. But this is, in fact, only the first of five questions addressed in the Speculum. The five questions Rufus posits and answers in this treatise are, in order:

1. 1. In what manner is the soul all things?

2. 2. In what manner do a sensible and the sense, or an intelligible and the possible intellect, become one?

3. 3. What is predicated and of what is it predicated?

4. 4. What is intelligible?

5. 5. What is the cause of the immortality of the soul?

In this short work, therefore, Rufus addresses apparently diverse topics including perception, understanding, logic, and the nature of the soul. But, in fact, the Speculum is principally a summary of Rufus’s theory of human perception and understanding. Like other medieval theories of perception and understanding, Rufus’s theory centers around the notion of species, a kind of form that is received in the soul when a person senses something or grasps something intellectually.⁵ In this, and in other aspects of the theory, Rufus was heavily dependent on Aristotle and St. Augustine. Rufus was working in a philosophical tradition based on Aristotle’s categories that had been accepted for centuries in the West. But in his lifetime, the Aristotelian corpus was enlarged to include Aristotle’s psychology and more generally his natural philosophy and metaphysics, together with the commentaries of Averroës (Ibn Rushd). As is well known, this philosophical tradition was respected and continued not just by Rufus but by many authors after his time.

So what makes Rufus’s theory unique, and why does it deserve our special attention? His account has a number of subtleties, but the main feature that distinguishes it...