Fennie pray a cost in the news

and there's to all of physical

and bless you all of physical.

He bless you, Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the LMU in Munich, online at

W.W. History of Philosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about Thomas Aquinas

with Scott McDonald, who is

professor of philosophy and Norma K Regan professor in Christian studies at

Cornell University.

Hi Scott, thanks for coming on.

Hi Peter.

We're going to be focusing in this episode on Aquinas's relationship to Aristotle, especially as it bears on Aquinas's theory of knowledge.

But let's start with a more basic question.

Which text by Aristotle did Aquinas actually know and how did he get access to them?

One of the things that makes Aquinas an interesting figure in the history of the reception of Aristotle in the

West is Aquinas is in the first generation of thinkers to have been raised on really the complete Aristotelian corpus.

The bulk of the Aristotelian corpus was translated into Latin and made available in the West beginning about

11.50 and it grew gradually the logical text then what we think of is the basic natural philosophical texts, the physics, and

text of that sort. And the metaphysics and the ethics finally by about 1240 almost everything of Aristotle was

available in Latin and known in say Paris where Aquinas was a graduate student

Albert the Great who was Aquinas was a graduate student. Albert the Great, who was Aquinas' teacher in Paris, was one of the leading first generation Aristotelians.

He was an adult when all of Aristotle became available. So you might say his

formation wasn't on the Aristotelian text, but Aquinas, who was Albert's graduate student really cut his teeth on the Aristotelian philosophy with Albert and had essentially all of the Aristotelian corpus available to him and that's what makes him in a way a paradigm

...