Richard Rufus’s De anima Commentary: The Earliest Known, Surviving, Western De anima Commentary

Abstract

Richard Rufus of Cornwall was educated as a philosopher at Paris where he was a master of arts. 1 In 1238, after lecturing on Aristotle's libri naturales, Rufus became a Franciscan and moved to Oxford to study theology, becoming the Franciscan master of theology in about 1256 and probably dying not long after 1259. 2 Rufus's conversion to Franciscanism was marked by a desire to distance himself from Aristotle and other wordly philosophers. As a Franciscan, Rufus to some extent repudiated his own earlier views; occasionally he referred to them as the opinions of a "secular master." In his later career, Rufus used the technical terminology of philosophy sparingly -preferring not to use phrases like 'agent intellect' or 'intellectus adeptus'. And even before Rufus became a Franciscan, he gave an increasingly sympathetic hearing to non-Aristotelian and Platonic views, as is plain from his Contra Averroem (CAv). 3 As a Franciscan, Rufus twice lectured on Peter Lombard's Sentences, first at Oxford in about 1250 where he was the first bachelor of theology to lecture there on Lombard, and then at Paris. 4 Rufus's philosophical works are preserved at Erfurt, in two codices purchased by Amplonius de Berka in about 1400: Quarto 290 and QuartoThe National Endowment for the Humanities has generously underwritten the publication Rufus's De anima commentary. The edition will be prepared in 2002-2003 and will appear in the Stanford edition of Rufus's works.1. Thomas Eccleston, De adventu Fratrum minorum in Angliam c. 6