Among the various testimonia assembled by Iwakuma and Ebbesen to the twelfth-century school of philosophers known as the Nominales,Iwakuma Yukio and Sten Ebbesen, “Logico -Theological Schools from the Secon d Half of the 12th Century: A List of Sources,” Vivarium XXX (1992):173–210. four record their commitment to the apparently outrageous thesis that nothing grows. My aim in this essay is to explore the reasons the Nominale s had for maintaining this thesis and to investigate the role that the theory which supported it played in the development of late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century debates over the character of the hypostatic union. My investigation concerns onl y one aspect of twelfth-century NominalismSince this group were apparently the first ever to be called ‘nominalists’ I think that we may justifiably capitalize the name of the theory to indicate that we are referring to their version of it. but once this part of their system is understood, we will be better able to characterise the whole and the way in which the views of the Nominales conflicted with those of their opponents. S o long as the testimonia remain few and rather slight such a reconstruction offers our only hope for finding the Nominales and their influence where their name has not been recorded.

The topic of this essay is what I name “Christian dualism,” the idea that God the Creator and creatures comprise an exhaustive and mutually exclusive classification of the contents of reality. I am concerned with one of the most penetrating discussions of this issue to be found in the early thirteenth century, Robert Grosseteste’s treatment of challenges to Christian dualism.

Erfurt Quarto 290 includes two commentaries on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Timothy B. Noone established the attribution to Richard Rufus of Cornwall of the commentary that appears on folios 1–40,T. Noone “An Edition and Study of the Scriptumsuper Metaphysicam, bk. 12, dist. 2,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 1987). chiefly on the basis of a thirteenth-century ascription to Richard Rufus, deciphered by Fr. Leonard Boyle; the aim of this essay is to show that the author of the commentary on folios 46–56 is also Richard Rufus. Since the manuscript itself was copied before 1250, both commentaries are clearly early. Noone calls the commentary on folios 1–40, the Scriptum, but that seems misleading since Noone also claims that what we have is a record preserved by its auditors, a reportatio (p. 65). And in medieval scholarly practice, a reportatio is distinguished from a scriptum, which is a written version corrected by the author and meant for publication. In order not to prejudice the question whether this commentary is reportatio or a scriptum, we will call it the Dissertatio in Metaphysicam Aristotelis, taking the term ‘Dissertatio’ from the work’s incipit (Vat. lat. 4538, fol. 1ra): “Placet nobis nunc parumper disserere de quadam propositione quam dicit Aristoteles in ‘Veteri Philosophia.’” Rufus cites the Dissertatio as the work of a secular author,Gál, G., “Commentarius in Metaphysicam Aristotelis cod. Vat. lat. 4538, fons doctrinae Richardi Rufi,” Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 43 (1950):214–15. so it must have been written before he became a Franciscan in 1238. The shorter, more primitive commentary found on folios 46–56 probably dates from around 1235, but the basis for that claim will be stated at the end of this paper.

Some names, specifically the proper names by which people are called, are considered “a mess” by at least one prominent contemporary philosopher.Although I quote from a number of Rufus’s works, there are two on which this paper is primarily based, both written when Rufus was a master of Arts in Paris, before 1238. I refer to the first as the Urmetaphysics. The second is a two-part treatise which Professor Wood has called the Contra Averroem. The Urmetaphysics is Rufus’s first commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, only very recently discovered by Professor Wood. It is to be distinguished from his second Metaphysics commentary which I refer to as th e Main Metaphysics Commentary. The Contra Averroem is comprised of “De ideis” and “De causa individuationis,” of which “De ideis” deserves a special mention. Discovered by Professor Timothy Noone, it w as first transcribed by Noone and Wood in 1990. Recently, Professor Noone has kindly sent me a revised transcription, for which I am very grateful. This transcription is quoted here.With the exception of “De ideis,” all quotations from Rufus are based on transcriptions made or revised by Professor Wood. Citations will indicate the relevant folio numbers of the manuscript or manuscripts on which the transcription is based. The manuscript itself, when first referred to, will be identified by the name of the city in which the library which houses it is located, the abbreviated name of the library, and its codex number.“All in all, proper names are a mess and if it weren’t for the problem of how to get the kids to come fo r dinner, I’d be inclined to just junk them” (David Kaplan, “Dhat,” Syntax and Semantics, vol. 9, ed. Peter Cole; repr. in Contemporary Perspectives in the Philosophy of Language, ed. P. French et al. (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1979, pp. 383–400, p. 386). Looking at the matter from the perspective of medieval philosophy, we might say that the reason such names are semantically ill-behaved is that the act of naming from which they d erive is not one of adequate naming. Moreover, supposing that all manner of beings, including people, are “things,” we might let adequate naming be governed by the following principle: an agent adequately names a thing if and only if, knowing its proper nature, she bestows a name on the thing by considering that nature. Obviously, on this principle, the acts of naming from which people in our societies derive their names are not acts of adequate naming.

As its modern edition appears in the Synthese Historical Library, Adam Wodeham’s Tractatus de indivisibilibus does not appear to belong to any one discipline. With regard to its intended audience, the notice of the book appearing on the back cover states that “This book is an important contribution to the history of philosophy.” But it continues, “It will be of interest to all medievalists, particularly to those concerned with medieval science, philosophy, and logic. Theologians and historians of mathematics will also find it useful.”Adam de Wodeham, Tractatus de indivisibilibus. A Critical Edition with Introduction, Translation, and Textual Notes, ed. Rega Wood (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988). In its medieval context as well, Tractatus de indivisibilibus had ambiguous disciplinary status. It begins with the question, “Whether charity or [any] other incorruptible form is composed of indivisible forms.”Wodeham, Tractatus de indivisibilibus, p. 33. Such a reference to charity signals a connection to the Sentences of Peter Lombard, Book I, dist. 17. In introducing his answer to this question, however, Wodeham states, “Because this difficulty is the same for all composite divisible things, whether intensive or extensive, which are of one and the same species or homogeneous, therefore I will briefly inquire indifferently concerning the former and the latter.”Wodeham, Tractatus de indivisibilibus, pp. 34–35. Here and elsewhere, I occasionally modify Rega Wood’s translation in the interests of exactness. The solutions Wodeham then proposes to the questions he asks rely nearly always on logic.

Gregory of Rimini (1300–1358) occupies an important place in the fourteenth-century indivisibilist controversy, offering by far the most sophisticated accounts of both infinity and continuity to emerge from scholasticism.I refer to Gregory’s Sentence commentary [= S], ed. A. Damasus Trapp et al., Spätmittelalter und Reformation: Texte und Untersuchungen, 6–(Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1979–). On Gregory’s life, see S, 1:XI–XVII. The Sentence commentary is based on lectures Gregory delivered in Paris during the academic year 1343–1344. As is well known, Gregory holds that a continuum is composed of an actual infinity of parts.On this, see Anneliese Maier, Die Vorläufer Galileis im 14.Jahrhundert: Studien zur Naturphilosophie der Spätscholastik, Storia e Letteratura: Raccolta di Studi e Testi, 22 (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1949), pp. 172–73, 176–77; John E. Murdoch, “Infinity and Continuity,” in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, ed. Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg, (Cambrige: Cambriige University Press, 1982) pp. 572–73; J. M. M. H. Thijssen, “Roger Bacon (1214–1292/1297): A Neglected Source in the Medieval Continuum Debate,” Archives internationales d’histoire des sciences 34 (1984): 25–34 (p. 31); Thijssen, “Het Continuum-Debat bij Gregorius van Rimini (1300–1358),” Algemeen Nederlands Tijdscrhift voor Wijsbegeerte 77 (1985): 109–19; A. W. Moore, The Infinite, The Problems of Philosophy: Their Past and Their Present (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 51–54. Less well known, however, are Gregory’s motivations for accepting this view, and indeed how precisely he understands it.