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Chapter 1 IntroduCtIon A. Behold, I have prayed to God. R. What then wouldst thou know? A. All these things which I have prayed for. R. Sum them up in brief. A. God and the soul, that is what I desire to know. R. Nothing more? A. Nothing whatever. Augustine, Soliloquies, translated by C. C. Starbuck, in: Augustine, Basic Writings of Saint Augustine. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by W. J. Oates, New York: Random House, 1948, Vol. 1, I.7, 262. I cannot think of a more fitting way to begin this book than by quoting this passage from Augustine. With the support of an authority of such stature, devoting a study in the history of philosophy to the soul seems to need little justification. Augustine ’s words are, indeed, apt to describe the situation in the period under discussion in this book, the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. After studying the commentary tradition on Aristotle’s De anima — the most obvious place to look for philosophical discussions on the soul in that period —, Augustine’s remark no longer seems to be the exaggeration it seemed to me to be when I first read the passage.1 The soul is one of the most important philosophical subjects in the later Middle Ages. I am not referring here to the idea that the soul is one of the most important things to gain knowledge about, although it certainly was perceived as such by all the commentators on the De anima. Rather, I mean that for a study of the soul in the later Middle Ages one had to draw upon, and combine, so many disciplines and discussions, that it became a focal point for some of the most important philosophical controversies.2 With the immortal, and somehow immaterial, 1 Although the most obvious source, the commentaries on the De anima are by no means the only source for philosophical discussions on the soul. The commentaries on Peter Lombard’s Sententiae in particular contain a wealth of interesting discussions on the topic. A recent siePM colloquium, organized by P. J. J. M. Bakker, M. B. Calma and R. L. Friedman, was devoted entirely to the material in these commentaries: “Philosophy and Psychology in Late-Medieval Commentaries on Peter Lombard’s Sentences”, Nijmegen, 28–30 October, 2009. 2 For a series of examples of how psychology was influenced by the other artes, medicine and theology — and vice-versa —, see P. J. J. M. Bakker, S. W. de Boer and C. Leijenhorst (eds.), Psychology and the Other Disciplines. A Case of Cross-Disciplinary Interaction (1250–1750), Leiden [etc.]: Brill, 2012. 2 ChaPter 1: introduCtion human intellective soul as the noblest among its objects, the scientia de anima became much more than just another part of natural philosophy. The unicity or plurality of substantial form, the correct description of the processes of generation and corruption, the structure of the soul in terms of its essence and powers, the possibility of self-knowledge in this life and perhaps the next, all these topics and many more were discussed in the commentaries on Aristotle’s De anima. 1.1 SubjeCt matter The subject matter of this book is, in short, the history of psychology in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. But although this description is convenient because of its brevity, it should immediately be qualified in three respects. First, because it contains an anachronism. The word ‘psychology’, although derived from the Greek, does not occur in any ancient Greek text. Aristotle’s famous treatise on the soul is simply entitled Περὶ ψυχῆς, On soul, and he never combines the terms ‘ψυχή’ and ‘λόγος’. The same applies to the Latin commentary tradition, in which the science that studies the soul is simply referred to as the scientia de anima. In fact, it is only in the sixteenth century that the term seems to have been used for the first time.3 The earliest use of the word ‘psychology’ is found in a catalog reference to a work by Marko Marulić (1450–1524) entitled Psichiologia de ratione animae humanae liber I, supposedly written c. 1520. The work itself, however, has not been found. The first available work in which the word occurs is Johannes Thomas Freigius ’s Catalogus Locorum Communium, a text that is prefixed to his Ciceronianus (1575).4 But these are still only isolated occurrences. The term only becomes widespread in the eighteenth century when Christian Wolff (1679-1754) uses it in the title of two of his...

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