Main description:

This book considers the introduction of materialist and physiological reasoning into late medieval discourse on the soul in the work of Peter of Abano (d.1316). In this, it adds a new component to our understanding of this important period in the history of medicine and of thought about human nature. Peter was an influential physician and philosopher whose activities spanned from Paris to Padua to Constantinople, where he played a vital role in the appropriation of Greek and Arabic medical and natural philosophical sources in the Latin West. Peter was profoundly influenced by the expansive conception of medicine he found in these sources, especially in Galen and ibn SA"nAu (Avicenna). Matthew Klemm argues here that Peter makes ambitious use of these ideas, amplifying fundamental concepts of medical theory in order to develop an unusually materialistic conceptualization of human capacity and action. To develop this thesis, the book offers a close reading of Peter's two major works, the Conciliator, a systematic reconciliation of competing theories of medicine and philosophy, and the Expositio Problematum Aristotelis, a massive commentary on the pseudo-Aristotelian Problems.
Both works derive from years of teaching and were completed in the early fourteenth century. At the same time it situates Peter's discussions in the broader intellectual context around 1300.