ND   JMC : History of Medieval Philosophy / by Maurice De Wulf

386. Leading Scotists. -- FRANCIS OF MAYRON (fl. 1325) was the first -- and the worst -- of those misguided Scotists who destroyed the master's metaphysics with a crop of subtle and chimerical entities that provoked the attacks of Thomists and Ockamists; he was the most characteristic and influential of the immediate followers of Scotus, and by his exaggeration of his master's principles he got the title of Magister Acutus Abstractionum.{1} Besides him we may mention, among the principal Scotists of the fourteenth century, the Franciscans ANTONIO ANDREAE (Doctor Dulcifluus, fl. 1320), JOHANNES CANONICUS (fl. 1320), JOHN DE LA RIVE, GERARD ODO, JOHN OF BASSOLES, one of Scotus's favourite pupils, JOHN DUMBLETON, NICHOLAS OF LYRE (fl. 1349).{2} WALTER BURLEIGH (Galterus Burlaeus, called Doctor planus et perspicuus, 1275-1342), a secular cleric, wrote commentaries on Aristotle, in which he defended a sort of realism resembling that of St. Thomas. He is the author of a number of Tractatus Philosophici often attributed to St. Bonaventure.{3} ALEXANDER OF ALEXANDRIA (fl. 1314), author of Commentaries on Aristotle's Metaphysics (260, p. 382, n. s), professed pure Scotism; and the same may be said of LYCHETUS OF BRESCIA, who commentated the Opus Oxoniense towards the end of the fourteenth century, and of NICHOLAS DE ORBELLIS (fl. 1455), whose commentary on the Sentences was adopted as text-book in the Franciscan schools of the fifteenth century.

The Scotist school was never so widespread as its more powerful rivals.{4}


{1} His supposed actus Sorbonicus is a legend (Chartul., ii., p. 273).

{2} LABROSSE, Oeuvres de Nicolas de Lyre (Études Franciscaines, 1908); Bibliographie de Nicolas de Lyre (ibid., 1907).

{3} Dissert. de Scriptis seraph. doctoris, in t. x. of the Quaracchi edit., p. 26.

{4} Among the promoters of the study of St. Bonaventure in the fifteenth century was BERTRAM OF ALEN, who wrote an explanatio of the "Itinerarium Mentis in Deum" under the title of "Liber de investigatione Creatoris per creaturam" (ibid., p. ii, and t. v., p. xxvi).

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