This paper provides an up-to-date inventory of the works of Nicole Oresme (ca. 1320–1382). For each text, we present the incipit and the explicit, its (approximate) date, the list of manuscripts, and, whenever possible, editions and translations. We also inventory self-references contained in Oresme's writings and discuss specific problems concerning their titles, attributions, and textual transmission. Oresme's works are classified into nine groups, for each of which we offer preliminary remarks to situate the group in the context of Oresme's career. The two appendices provide detailed information about two texts of possible Oresmian attribution.
Cet article porte sur les Questions sur les Météorologiques de Nicole Oresme, l’un des rares textes encore inédits de ce philosophe. Dans la première partie, il est question de la tradition manuscrite du commentaire d’Oresme, et en particulier de la découverte d’une autre rédaction, fort différente et antérieure à celle qui a été répertoriée. Dans un second temps, il s’agit de clarifier la place occupée par les deux rédactions de ces Questions dans la chronologie des écrits d’Oresme issus de son enseignement à la Faculté des Arts de Paris. Finalement, la dernière partie porte sur les problèmes que posent les attributions des Questions sur les Météorologiques rédigées au xiv e siècle, notamment en ce qui concerne les textes d’Oresme, d’Albert de Saxe et de Thémon Juif, tous trois actifs à l’Université de Paris.
This paper explores the scholastic debate about antiperistasis, a mechanism in Aristotle’s dynamics described in the first book of Meteorology as an intensification of a quality caused by the action of the contrary one. After having distinguished this process from a homonymous, but totally different, principle concerning the dynamics of fluids that Aristotle describes in his Physics, I focus on the medieval reception of the former. Scholastic commentators oriented their exegetical effort in elaborating a consistent explanation of an apparently paradoxical process like the intensification of a quality by the opposite one. From the fourteenth century onwards, most of the commentators resorted to the theory of the multiplication of species, according to which each entity acts through the emission of simulacra of the objects (species) that spread spherically in the medium. When these rays encounter an obstacle, such as a contrary quality, they are pushed back towards their source. The reflection of the species determined by the surrounding and opposite quality produces a concentration of the first one, which is therefore intensified. Another distinctive feature of the scholastic interpretation of Aristotle’s antiperistasis is the convergence between the discussions on inorganic and organic matter, physical and medical discourse. This convergence found its most significant expression in the adoption of the model described in the first book of Aristotle’s Meteorology to the biological context of Hippocrates’s Aphorisms I, 15. Following Galen’s exegesis of this passage, medieval commentators established a link between physics and medicine substantially extraneous to Aristotle’s theory.
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