Abstract
On October 1, 1919, at the University of Strasbourg, which the Third Republic of France had reclaimed from the wreckage of the German Empire in the aftermath of la Grande Guerre, Étienne Gilson assumed his responsibilities as professor of the history of philosophy. In 1921, the faculty of letters at Strasbourg began publishing a series of monographs to which G. contributed his Études de philosophie médiévale, which the printer for the university issued as the third in the series on September 30, 1921. On June 11, 2019, nearly a century after G. finished his Études, James Colbert, the emeritus professor of philosophy at Fitchburg State University, published an English translation of the monograph printed at Strasbourg.
The first four chapters, devoted to Thomas Aquinas in reference (1) to the Augustinian tradition of teachings about the human soul and the human body, and (2) to the topic of Latin Averroism, make up what, as of 1921, G. had not already published. It was, moreover, to those essays that Maurice De Wulf, at Louvain, had confined his attention in the notice he published, in February 1922, in the Revue néo-scolastique de philosophie. The remaining chapters are largely concerned with the influence of “la physique scolastique” on what G. had understood to be “le système cartésien.” Those chapters, from 1913 to 1921, had been published as essays in the Annales de philosophie chrétienne, the Revue de métaphysique et de morale, the Revue philosophique, and the Revue néo-scolastique de philosophie.
Of interest to scholars concerned with early modern philosophy must be the contrast that G. documented between René Descartes and William Harvey in the treatment that each accorded to questions about the cardiovascular anatomy of the human body and, within that framework, about the circulation of blood. Also of interest is the Cartesian distinction between abstract geometry and physical geometry that, as G. expounded it, is likely to impress contemporary readers as a rather bizarre hypothesis.
Although C. has produced an excellent translation from French into English, some may wish that in an age in which Latinity is in decline he had also provided English translations of the Latin that G. displayed from primary sources. That being said, the quality of copy-editing for this volume was exceptionally good. Throughout the book, this reviewer found only a single typographical error.