Intellectual self-knowledge in Latin commentaries on Aristotle’s De anima from 1250 to 1320: Qualitative and quantitative analyses

Abstract: In this dissertation I present qualitative and quantitative analyses of intellectual self-knowledge in the Latin commentaries of Aristotle’s De anima from 1250 to around 1320. The study contains a historical overview of the preceding doctrines of self-knowledge that are relevant to the selected commentaries, two central chapters where the doctrines of intellectual self-knowledge are analysed, and a final chapter where two studies exemplify what kind of further studies and results the presented analysis can facilitate. The dissertation shows how central doctrines on intellectual self-knowledge can be identified across two different types of questions, focusing on the possibility and process of self- knowledge, and the considerations on whether and how it is possible to have a science of the soul. It has been shown how all included commentators reject an Augustinian model of essential self-knowledge and support an Aristotelian model where self-knowledge takes place by actualization of the possible intellect in the reception of an intelligible species. It has also been shown how such discussions include considerations such as the place of the human intellect in relation to other types of intellects, how problems of the imperceptibility of the intellect are solved, and what kind of knowledge about the soul intellectual self-knowledge might provide. The two detailed studies in the last chapter highlight a complex case of three different views on self-knowledge in the latest commentator in the corpus, John of Jandun, and preesents an argument that literal commentaries need not be neither boring nor superficial in comparison with the contemporary question commentaries through a reading of parts of the commentary by Simon Magister. The texts of the tradition are connected in an interrelated network, and by modelling elements of that network in the reading of the texts, it is possible to register, represent, and analyse the material in ways that would otherwise be impossible or impracticable. A comparison of texts is realized through a registration of the doctrines of a text, their context, use, and how they are related internally. This has provided a powerful tool for revealing numerous quantitative tendencies, groups, and connections within the material, including clusters of texts and commentators that would be opaque and inaccessible to even the most attentive reader. To reach such results I have developed models for registering and representing the data, and methods for analysing the registrations quantitatively. The dissertation thus paves the way for further studies by presenting methodological innovations within the traditional discipline of history of philosophy, and by opening up a significant, representative, and mostly unknown part of the Aristotelian commentary tradition of the 13th and early 14th century on the subject of intellectual self-knowledge.