Dominic Gondissalvi and Aristotle

The thought of Aristotle and the Arab or Jewish Neoplatonists was first circulated by compilers such as Dominic Gondissaivi (died in 1151), the archdeacon of Segovia, who, in addition to his translations, wrote works such as De Divisione philosophiae, composed based on Al-Farabi and the Definitions of Isaac Israeli. In it, he reverses the traditional order of the trivium and quadrivium, replacing it with that of the Aristotelian encyclopedia: physics, which studies moving and material beings; mathematics, which studies the same beings, abstracting from their matter and motion; and theology, which studies immobile beings such as God and angels. As for logic, it is an instrument that precedes philosophy. He outlines the plan for studying Aristotle’s physical and metaphysical books according to Al-Farabi: the former proceeding from the Physics to the treatise On the Soul, passing through the treatises On the Heavens and On Animals; the latter dealing successively with essence and its accidents, the principles of demonstrations, incorporeal essences, their hierarchy, and divine action. This plan is entirely new in the West, according to which, it should be noted, theology as the study of the unmoved mover is intimately linked to physics as the study of moving bodies, where the study of the soul, as the form of the organized body, is a part of physics: an image of the universe antithetical to the Platonic-Augustinian image which, on the contrary, considered God and the soul in their own and entirely supernatural existence.

The same inspiration is found in De Immortalitate animae, where Dominic, formally criticizing and rejecting the Platonic proofs of the immortality of the human soul because they are too general and because they would also apply to the souls of brutes, accepts only the proofs based on Aristotelian premises which contain, not general principles, but the specific characteristics of the subject studied: but the main one of these proofs is, as we know, the independence of the intellect from the body, which leads to imagining an impersonal immortality, quite different from the continuation of the individual destiny of the soul.