PASCALE BERMON, Sapientia. Wisdom and Moral Philosophy According to Robert Holcot (d. 1349)

SUMMARY

This contribution examines the definitions of wisdom that appear in the first two lessons of Robert Holcot’s In Sapientiam. The Dominican master writes in his famous commentary that he does not retain the theological and peripatetic definitions of wisdom, but prefers the definition given by moral philosophers. Holcot’s notion of philosophia moralis is compared here with its occurrences in the divisions of philosophy and curricula of the first half of the thirteenth century. The interest in non-peripatetic ancient sources manifested by this “classicizing friar” (Beryl Smalley) seems to suggest his work was a continuation of that of his near medieval predecessors, at the very time of the first humanism.