Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/297

 From this time forth the Franciscans begin to use the Arabic commentators.

The more accurate study of Aristotle in mediæval scholasticism begins with Albertus Magnus (1206-1280), the Dominican friar who first really perceived the importance of careful and critical versions of the text, and thus introduced a strictly scientific standard of method. He studied at Padua, a daughter university of Bologna, but became a Dominican in 1223. His methods were followed and developed by his pupil, St. Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), who arranged his work on the lines already indicated in Albertus' commentary on Aristotle's Politics, lines which became the regulation method in Latin scholastic writers, and he was at pains to get new translations made directly from the Greek, which was now freely accessible; a new translation direct from the Greek was made by William de Moerbeka at the request of St. Thomas. But there is a significant change from the time when Albertus delivered his lectures: in the work of Albertus the commentator chiefly used was Ibn Sina, but in that of St. Thomas there is a free use of Averroes (Ibn Rushd), although St. Thomas shows that he is perfectly well aware of the peculiar doctrines held by this latter philosopher, and guards himself carefully from them.

St. Thomas frequently enters into controversy with the Arabic commentators, and especially attacks the doctrines (i.) that there was a primal indefinite matter to which form was given at creation (cf.