FORMALITAS

The aim of this project is to demonstrate the philosophical and historical importance of the “Formalist tradition” in Late-Medieval and Renaissance philosophy. The concepts of identity and distinction are the key components in the “Formalist treatises” that enjoyed vast diffusion during the Renaissance, had roots in Late-Medieval scholasticism, especially in the works of the Franciscan John Duns Scotus, and still played a significant role in textbooks of scholastic philosophy in the 17th and 18th centuries. Some Formalists discussed whether their doctrines constituted a discipline of its own, a “science of the formalities” that would roughly correspond to what to-day goes by the name of “formal ontology”. The rise of a new metaphysical discipline needs to be part of what we know about the intellectual culture of the Renaissance. This project is innovative in its identification and elimination of this gap in our knowledge and in its focus on scholastic metaphysics during the Renaissance.

The main purpose of the FORMALITAS website is to facilitate research into the Formalist tradition. The website contains catalogues of Formalist literature, both such works that have been preserved in manuscript only and such works that were printed during the Renaissance or later. The catalogues strive toward completeness, which in the case of the catalogue of printed material includes all printed editions of Formalist works and, when digitizations exist, their online location. The website further provides a continously updated research bibliography, a list of publications and other news related to the project, and a handy list of useful research links.

Brief Introduction to the Formalist Tradition

The Formalist tradition grew out of discussions concerning the concepts of distinction and identity among John Duns Scotus’s early followers. Duns Scotus himself is well-known for introducing a “formal distinction” into philosophical and theological discourse. Some of his followers added other kinds of distinctions. Francis of Meyronnes (1285–1328) thus operated with a “modal distinction” in his metaphysics of “intrinsic modes” and Petrus Thomae († 1340) gave formulation to a whole system of no less than seven different kinds of distinctions with seven different kinds of identity as their counterparts. Much of the Formalist literature is occupied with interpreting these doctrines. Some of the most influential Formalist authors during the Renaissance were the Franciscans Antoine Sirect († ca. 1510), Étienne Brulefer (1450/55–1496/99), and Antonio Trombetta (1436–1517). Whereas Sirect was an advocate of the system of seven distinctions, Brulefer rather sought to reduce the number of distinctions in accordance with the teaching he found in Duns Scotus. Both Sirect and Brulefer had significant impact on subsequent discussions. Long commentaries were written to elucidate their doctrines. Trombetta’s commentary on Sirect became particularly influential. Here below are seen three rare Paris editions of the Formalist output of these three Franciscan Masters.

The influence of the Formalist tradition stretched far beyond the Scotist school of the Franciscan order. In particular, from the last decades of the 15th century onwards a growing number of authors from other religious orders or without religious affiliation adopted the literary format of the Formalist treatise and started writing treatises on distinctions in accordance with the thought of Thomas Aquinas, Ramon Llull, Giles of Rome, or still others. Most remarkably, the eclectic Jewish philosopher Eli Habillo (fl. 1460s-80s) composed a Formalist treatise that was a part of his preface to his Hebrew translation of the early Scotist Antonius Andreae’s Questions on the Metaphysics. The eclectic Aristotelian from Bologna Alessandro Achillini (1463–1512), the first author in the Catalogue of Printed Texts on this website, wrote a long treatise on distinctions in accordance with the thought of Averroes. Later, Jesuit authors contributed to the genre as well. One may further see the many Early Modern university dissertations, both from Protestant and Catholic milieus, concerning the concepts of identity and distinction as a late continuation of the Formalist literature (these were treatises written by a professor and defended by his advanced students or else printed along with a set of defended theses). Seen below is the posthumously published Formalist treatise by the Neapolitan Thomist Mattia Gibboni from Aquara (also known as Mattia Aquario, † 1591), along with a university dissertation on distinctions written by the Lutheran theologian Marcus Timaeus (1635–1673), as well as a treatise on The Subtle Scotistic Distinction written by the Recollect Franciscan Honorius Cordier (1707–1778), otherwise known for his interests in the thought of Ramon Llull. 

The Scotist tradition itself continued far into the Early Modern period, at which time Scholasticism via the missions of the Catholic religious orders in the New World had become a global phenomenon. Scotist Formalist treatises were produced at least into the 1660s, but the preferred philosophical genre in seventeenth-century scholasticism, also among the Franciscans, was the Cursus philosophicus. Philosophical Courses typically consisted of comprehensive expositions of all the philosophical dsciplines, often in one or several large volumes. There exists a vast printed Cursus literature “ad mentem Scoti” from this period. Topics formerly treated in the Formalist treatises were now usually discussed in either logic or metaphysics, rarely at both places. The two Italian Conventual Franciscans Bartolomeo Mastri (1602–1673) and Bonaventura Belluto (1603–1676) jointly wrote a Scotist Cursus philosophicus. They included one section on distinctions in their volume on logic (the first edition of 1639 is seen below). When Mastri later single-handedly completed the Cursus with two large volumes on metaphysics, he again inserted a long treatment of distinctions. The Irish Observant Franciscan John Punch (1603–1661), a vocal critic of Mastri and Belluto and himself a target of Mastri’s criticism, discussed distinctions in the last disputation of his section on metaphysics. The work was first published in 1643 and republished in 1649 along with Punch’s replies to the criticism he had received from Mastri (the 1649 edition is seen below). A less well-known Scotist from this period, the Conventual Franciscan from Southern France Bonaventure Columbi (active 1630s-1660s), too discussed distinctions in his New Philosophical Course for the Scotists from 1669, also seen here below. He chose to treat the doctrine of distinctions in the section on universals within his presentation of logic.