Quaestiones super librum Posteriorum (review)

Walter Burley. Quaestiones super librum Posteriorum. Edited by Mary Catherine Sommers. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2000. Pp. x + 214. Cloth, $34.95.

In his monumental Le Système du Monde, Pierre Duhem notes that it is difficult to link the fourteenth-century scholastic Walter Burley to any particular school on account of his eclecticism. Indeed, throughout much of the twentieth century, Burley has been discussed by historians more as the constant opponent of his contemporary William of Ockham than as a thinker in his own right. It was no doubt initially easier to determine what Burley rejected than what he accepted. This situation, however, has changed over the past few decades as more of Burley's work has appeared in good editions. Thanks to the editorial skills of such medievalists as Philotheus Boehner, Edward Synan, and Stephen Brown, a clearer picture of Burley's place in the history of philosophy is beginning to emerge. The latest contribution to the text material for Burley studies is this fine edition of a commentary on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics.

Burley commented twice on the Posterior Analytics. His expositio is typical of those "Averroistic" commentaries that proceed through a division and line-by-line analysis of the text. As in the similar thirteenth-century commentaries of Robert Grosseteste and Thomas Aquinas, the exposition is largely aimed at providing an interpretation of the text, although the commentator occasionally gives his own views. The commentary edited in Sommer's edition is a series of quaestiones in which division and analysis are replaced by a series of questions arising out of the text. Here Burley's own philosophical views play a larger role, as he is able to both determine the order of the issues addressed as well as consider a range of objections to his positions. This latter commentary, then, is the more important for understanding Burley's contribution to the understanding of Aristotelian demonstration. Among the topics Burley here considers are the scientific status of the theory of demonstration, the possibility of science, the scope of scientific knowledge, the nature of causal knowledge, and the relationship of the various sciences. He also provides an extensive consideration of the problem of predication in Aristotelian science as part of his treatment of the demonstrative middle term. These topics are treated in twelve questions that correspond to a range of topics taken from both books of Aristotle's text.

The primary challenge facing the editor is the collation of the two extant manuscript witnesses. The text is complete in only one manuscript, found in a collection of logical works produced by Oxford scholars sometime before 1307. The other manuscript source, containing only ten questions, is found in a somewhat eclectic collection of scholastic texts of about the same period. Working primarily from the complete manuscript, the editor is able to critically establish the text, citing in her apparatus additions and variations from the incomplete source. Paragraphs of the Latin text are numbered for easy reference and cross-references to other parts of the text, as well as to other ancient and medieval works, are given. An Index Fontium to the Latin text is provided as is an Index Verborum that usefully provides phrase context for each indexed term. The editor prefaces the edition with introductory material on Burley's life and work, the nature and collation of the manuscript sources, and the content of the Quaestiones. A useful bibliography of primary and secondary sources is also provided.

This edition is certainly a welcome addition to the source material for fourteenth-century philosophy. Further, its appearance will extend appreciation for Burley's influence on late medieval thought in both logic and natural philosophy. Taking the historian of philosophy beyond the polemical relationship with Ockham, it provides important evidence for Burley's significance as an original thinker.