Andrei Marinca: Indivisibilism and Motion in Fourteenth-Century Oxford: A View from the Blackfriars

Invitation pdf

The first half of the fourteenth century in Oxford is widely recognized as a period of vibrant philosophical activity, marked by the emergence of novel doctrines and methods that challenged and reshaped Aristotelian natural philosophy. Yet this standard picture remains unevenly developed. While previous scholarship has devoted considerable attention to two major developments – the defense of indivisibilism against the Aristotelian doctrine of the infinite divisibility of continua, and the rethinking of motion, particularly in relation to variation in velocity – it has focused predominantly on Franciscan and secular contributions. This lecture addresses that imbalance by foregrounding an often overlooked area of investigation: the Oxford Blackfriars studium. Drawing on previously unexplored manuscript material, specifically the Sentences commentaries of the English Dominicans Hugh of Lawton and Arnold of Strelley, I reconstruct the distinctive contribution of the Blackfriars milieu to contemporary debates on indivisibilism, the composition of continua, and the reformulation of Aristotle’s rules of motion.

This event is a part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 949710). The project ACADEMIA: Reconstructing Late Medieval Quests for Knowledge: Quodlibetal Debates as Precursors of Modern Academic Practice is carried out at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech
Academy of Sciences.