STEFANO CAROTI, Hugolinus ab Urbeveteri, „Questiones super Physicamˮ, III, 1–3 (avec quelques souvenirs personnels)

SUMMARY

In the first three questions on the third book of his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, Hugolinus ab Urbeveteri deals with a very important topic in the late medieval debate on semantic and natural philosophy: the nature of motion. To endorse a parsimonious ontology — according to which motion is no different from the moving thing and the successive acquisition or loss of a form or of space (forma fluens) — one has to face William Ockham’s semantic analysis of expressions such as «motus est» and the reduction of ontology to permanent beings. These three quaestiones bear witness to the intellectual effort utilized to avoid either the Scylla of realism or the Charybdis of the more radical outcomes of Ockham’s criticism.