Towards a New Methodology for Natural Philosophy: Latin Averroism Revisited

The reception of Aristotelian philosophy with Averroes’s commentaries in the thirteenth-century Latin world promoted a new way of understanding natural philosophy and its method. A very special case among the readers of such commentaries, mostly found at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Paris, are the so-called averroistae. What these averroistae actually were is still a matter of discussion in current scholarship, whereas there is kind of consensus regarding the main exponents of this philosophical movement, namely Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia. The aim of this paper is to shed light on this topic by providing a re-definition of Averroism in the 13th century. To do this, I will analyse some of the most important works of the aforementioned authors in an attempt to clarify the specificity of their philosophical program.