Jean-Baptiste Brenet – författare

This book is an essay - with an annotated translation - about the psychology of Averroes, Aristotle’s Commentator, and its influence in Latin philosophy. It specifically addresses his famous doctrine of the intellect, long deemed scandalous, and its critical defence by one of his epigones, the English XIVth century theologian Thomas Wylton, also descended from the great scholastics Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. On new textual bases, the author tackles some of the main noetic questions of Greco-Arabic peripateticism: the relation between soul and body, the status of imagination, the nature of the intellect’s power, the autonomy of the thinker, or the theoretical accomplishment of the individual as conjunction with the “agent” intellect. The author argues that Wylton’s averroism is a conceptually consistent exegesis, an indiosynchratic combination of various elements found in Ibn Rushd’s system, while also, against a depreciatory tradition, contextualizing Averroes and his doctrine in relation to the active field of modern philosophy, within an identical rationality.

Le livre est un essai - accompagné d’une traduction - qui porte sur la psychologie d’Averroès et sa reprise dans le monde latin. Il concerne sa célèbre doctrine de l’intellect, et la défense critique qu’en fit l’un de ses épigones: le théologien anglais du XIVe siècle Thomas Wylton. On y étudie les questions majeures du mind-body problem: le rapport de l’âme et du corps, le statut de l’imagination, la nature de la puissance intellective, l’autonomie du sujet de la pensée, etc.

This book is an essay - with an annotated translation - about the psychology of Averroes, Aristotle’s Commentator, and its influence in Latin philosophy. It specifically addresses his famous doctrine of the intellect, long deemed scandalous, and its critical defence by one of his epigones, the English XIVth century theologian Thomas Wylton, also descended from the great scholastics Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. On new textual bases, the author tackles some of the main noetic questions of Greco-Arabic peripateticism: the relation between soul and body, the status of imagination, the nature of the intellect’s power, the autonomy of the thinker, or the theoretical accomplishment of the individual as conjunction with the “agent” intellect. The author argues that Wylton’s averroism is a conceptually consistent exegesis, an indiosynchratic combination of various elements found in Ibn Rushd’s system, while also, against a depreciatory tradition, contextualizing Averroes and his doctrine in relation to the active field of modern philosophy, within an identical rationality.