With the eight hundredth anniversary of the arrival of the Dominicans in Oxford in 1221 it is timely to have Robert Kilwardby OP added to this OUP series of Great Medieval Thinkers. Kilwardby's own Oxford career must have been a generation later, in the middle of the century, with his election as provincial of the English Dominican Province to follow in 1261 and appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1272.
Kilwardby wrote the usual commentary on the Sentences, though his has some unusual features. He was also the author of an encyclopaedic work, the De ortu scientiarum. His probable or disputed authorship of other surviving writings is discussed in brief in the introductions to this study, with a useful comparative table of the various attempts to determine which are really his. A list of printed editions is included in the Bibliography.
One of Kilwardby's most important legacies was his commentary on textbooks of the Arts course. His commentaries on grammar are among the oldest of their kind to survive. His commentaries on Aristotle, both the logica vetus and the logica nova were also important. The commentary on the Prior Analystics seems to have been especially influential. That on the the Posterior Analytics may postdate that of Robert Grosseteste but was certainly one of the earliest to be attempted as the new universities began to include them in the syllabus.
The author explains that his original intention was to set Kilwardby's ‘major findings’ in ‘contrast’ with those of his contemporaries, but the space-limits of the series in which it appears did not allow that. He has therefore written a discussion of Kilwardby's own thought, intended for a non-specialist readership and with a restricted set of references to the texts and what he describes as a ‘minimum’ secondary literature. Where there is a translation he cites it, including the Latin where necessary for clarity and where there is no published version for reference.
This self-imposed limitation may make it rather less easy for the newcomer to judge from this study how important Kilwardby (1215-1279) was in a generation of contemporaries as well-studied as Albertus Magnus (d.1280), Aquinas, and Bonaventure, who both died in 1274. These scholars all knew one another and worked in a university world where academe was already showing signs of being competitive and well-connected.
The main body of the book consists of a detailed analysis of Kilwardby's thinking, treated in a sequence of topics. There are chapters on ‘Being’; ‘Being Logical’; ‘Knowing’; ‘Behaving’; ‘Believing’; and ‘Incarnating’, each with a prefatory note explaining Silva's own approach. Silva has sought to show what Kilwardby thought and why, what he took from the standard authorities and how he made it his own. The strength of this analysis lies in its clarity on the points of modern as well as medieval philosophical importance Kilwardby raised, and on which he often took a distinctive view.
