Abstract
The English Dominican Robert Kilwardby (1215?–1279) divided his career in between Paris and Oxford. First as a student and then as a master at the Faculty of Arts in Paris in the period 1231–1245, he produced the earliest comprehensive group of commentaries of the arts syllabus that came down to us, with comments on the subjects of grammar, logic, and ethics. After 1245, approximately, he moved back to England where he entered the Dominican Order, studied and then taught theology at Oxford and began a promising institutional career, which had however negative effects in his academic production – almost inexistent after this date. In 1261, he was elected Provincial of the Order in England and in 1272 was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, duty he performed until his designation as Cardinal of Porto and Santa Rufina. As a philosopher, Kilwardby is best described in his systematic attempts to find middle ground between the thoughts of Aristotle and Augustine, on matters as diverse as sense perception and the nature of matter. In case of irresolvable conflicting views, as it is the case of intellectual cognition, Augustine is preferred since he is more enlightened than Aristotle in spiritual matters (as Kilwardby himself repeated). Kilwardby is well known as the author of an important encyclopedic work, the De ortu scientiarum, which constituted one of the most copied introductions to knowledge in the medieval period. He died in Viterbo, at the Papal court, in 1279, in the mist of the controversy surrounding his participation as the head of the so-called 1277 Oxford Prohibitions. This event, identified as an attack against his Dominican Brother Thomas Aquinas, in particular against his thesis of the unicity of substantial form, contributed largely to the negative way Kilwardby was seen by his and our contemporaries: as a conservative neo-Augustinian, fighting the progress of Aristotelianism and Thomism. Whether he fits into this picture is a matter open to dispute, and recent scholarship has significantly contributed to revise this historical view: his early commentaries on Aristotle are clear statements to the high-level of Aristotelian scholarship he was capable of, namely by attempting to provide solutions to apparently contradictory accounts in different Aristotelian texts, for instance, about the nature of truth. It may however explain the poor circulation of some of his more philosophical works, with the exception of his Commentary to the Prior Analytics, which was published under the name of Giles of Rome.
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Silva, J.F. (2020). Robert Kilwardby. In: Lagerlund, H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Medieval Philosophy. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1665-7_447
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