Abstract

Medieval scholars will welcome these two latest volumes in the splendid critical edition of the nonpolitical works of William of Ockham by the Franciscan Institute of St. Bonaventure University. The first completes the set of Ockham’s major logical works that began with the publication of his monumental summa logicae in 1974 and was followed in 1978 by the second volume in the philosophical series, containing the commentaries on Porphyry and Aristotle’s Praedicamenta and Perihermenias, together with the famous tract on predestination and God’s knowledge of future contingents. Known as the Expositio aurea super artem veterem, this second collection was still available in modern photo-reprints of earlier editions, but the Expositio super libros elenchorum, unlike the popular Summa logicae, was never printed before and this last of Ockham’s commentaries on Aristotle’s logical Organon appears here for the first time in other than manuscript form. Though less important than the other commentaries Ockham did on Aristotle at the Franciscan study house in London during the interim between his completion of the lectures on the Sentences and his summons to the papal court at Avignon in 1324, this work, which antedates his commentaries on the Physics, is not without interest. It illustrates, for instance, how Ockham understood "science" and the subject thereof, to say nothing of the light it throws on how he interpreted the various classical fallacies listed by Aristotle to which he continually refers throughout his other writings. Like the other volumes of this edition, this also contains an excellent analytic index that might well serve as a model for improving other critical editions of medieval works as research tools.