The Professional Philosopher

Beginning with the studies of Mandonnet, there had emerged a significant philosophic current which Thomas Aquinas criticized and which was deeply influenced by an Islamic interpreter of Aristotle, Averroes. The importance of this writer and his followers has been underlined even by two scholars linked to modernism, Ernest Renan and, in Italy, Bruno Nardi, whose studies on the philosophy of Dante have brought to light the variety of Scholastic positions and sources, contemporaneous with but autonomous from the research of the French school. In the last decade of the 20th c., the study of ‘Latin Averroism’ has focused on, in addition to the doctrinal elements already widely studied, two aspects which are central to interpreting medieval philosophy (or, more accurately, the philosophy of the late Middle Ages) in its entirety. To the followers of Latin Averroism we owe in fact the recognition that philosophy is an intellectual activity different from the meditation on the doctrines of the faith and a separate path which can lead to the happy life; this philosophic concept of life, linked to the study of the Nichomachean Ethics of Aristotle, was diffused in lay environments and thinkers beginning with the end of the 13th c., as the research of Alain De Libera and Rüdi Imbach have shown. On the level of a comprehensive understanding of medieval thought, this idea encourages us to pay attention to the concrete ways in which philosophy was practiced, non only in a Christian context, but in all the Mediterranean cultures that had to come to terms with Greek philosophic sources. In this way, we have come to recognize that in the one thousand years of the Middle Ages the study of philosophy has been practiced in different cultural contexts and that the classical heritage reached the Latin world through various historic deviations and vicissitudes (in the Middle Ages this process was defined as translatio studiorum). The handbook of Alain De Libera himself exemplifies this interpretative tradition.