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426 to its attention so acutely by the pragmatists. Let us therefore hope that 'at their early convenience' these external-relation-realists may supply us with their solution of this problem.

The work before us is an extremely valuable contribution to the history of mediæval philosophy, and Mandonnet has the good fortune to treat one of the most interesting periods in this history. The word Averroism at once suggests the excellent treatise of that master, Renan, Averroës et l’Averroïsme. In broad outline the subject is there laid down in masterly fashion once for all. We learn who the real Averroes was and what he taught; by "we" I mean those of us, and they form quite the majority of students of philosophy, who have not the leisure to read Averroes's commentaries in the original Arabic, or even in Hebrew or Latin translation. Renan also gives us a sketch of what Averroes meant for the Jewish rationalists of the middle ages, for the Christian Scholastics of the thirteenth century, and of the treatment he received in the time of the Renaissance in Italy, at the hands of the Averroists of Padua on the one hand, and the Humanists on the other. In all these matters Renan's presentation is masterly, but investigation and research in mediæval philosophy has not been at a standstill since the middle of the last century, when the first edition of Renan's book appeared. A great many details have been unearthed and brought to light on nearly every part of the Averroes problem, and not least on the history of Averroism in the University of Paris in the thirteenth century, perhaps the most interesting phase of the subject.

It is well known by this time that the second half of the thirteenth century was the most agitated period in the philosophical world of mediæval Christian Europe. With the rapid introduction of the great treatises of Aristotle hitherto unknown to the Scholastics, a new world of thought and speculation opened before the eyes of those who till then had been accustomed to slake their thirst for knowledge of the human and the divine by rehearsing Porphyry's questions about the nature of universals and Augustine's speculations concerning