## 1. Life and Works



Little is known about Lefevre's family and early
training. He came from Etaples, on the coast of Picardy, and by
the early 1490s he was teaching in the College du Cardinal
Lemoine in Paris. In an unusually long teaching career of nearly two
decades, he became the college's most revered teacher, elevating
it out of relative obscurity. His reputation as a philosopher was
cultivated in the classroom and in countless editions of philosophical
works; any account of his thought must first place this diverse body
of work within the context of his life.



Lefevre's early publications are punctuated by his three
journeys to Italy. Colleagues mentioned his contact with the great
humanists of fifteenth-century Italy as much as they lauded his
encyclopedic learning. He undertook these journeys, apparently, to
pursue models of scholarly inquiry which might leaven his teaching in
Paris. In 1491 he traveled to Venice, ostensibly to meet Ermolao
Barbaro, who was famous as an eloquent translator of Themistius, the
fourth-century paraphrast of Aristotle. (Barbaro was in Rome at the
time, so Lefevre changed his travel plans to include Rome and
Florence.) On his return, he published his first work in print,
*Totius philosophiae naturalis paraphrases* (1492). In these
600 octavo pages, he presented students with short epitomes and
digested paraphrases of Aristotle's *Physics*, *On the
Heavens*, the minor works of natural philosophy (i.e., *Parva
naturalia* or *Little Naturals*), and *On the Soul*.
The next few years were immensely productive, and with the help of
colleagues and students, Lefevre published similar epitomes for
the standard university course on logic (1496b), Aristotle's
*Metaphysics* (1494a), and the *Nicomachean Ethics*
(1494b).



In the 1490s, Lefevre also published works for the university
class room which went beyond Aristotle, notably in mathematics
(Oosterhoff 2018). For astronomy, he wrote an important commentary on
the standard introduction, John of Sacrobosco's *Sphere*
(1495). In print, arguably Lefevre's most original
contribution to any field was a systematic treatise on music theory
(*Elementa musicalia*) which he published with three other
works: an edition of the *Elementa arithmetica* of Jordanus
Nemorarius (13th century), his own popular introduction to
the *Arithmetica* of Boethius, and an arithmetical game,
*Rithmomachia* (1496a; see also Oosterhoff 2013, Moyer 2012).
These mathematical works served pedagogical uses, first of all,
helping students through an often-neglected part of the Paris
*cursus*. But they also served philosophical aims of
Lefevre which became more evident in works unrelated to the
university curriculum. Consider three examples: in 1494 he published
Ficino's Latin translation of most of the Hermetic Corpus, along
with his own brief annotations; in 1498, he printed the first edition
of the *Works* attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite, in Latin
translation, along with an extensive commentary; and in the mid-1490s
he composed *On Natural Magic* (*De magia naturali* ),
which circulated in manuscript (Lefevre [MN]). Inspired partly
by Ficino's *Three Books on Life* (*De triplici
vita*), this treatise incorporated Pythagorean, cabbalistic, and
Presocratic themes, for example in a section on "Pythagorean
Magic" (Copenhaver 1977; Mandosio 2013). His reflections on
magic especially included numerological excurses.



By 1500, Lefevre had begun to produce more philologically
oriented editions--typically he placed the newer translations
alongside the traditional medieval versions, with his own commentary
and occasional emendations informed by his modest command of Greek.
The earliest example of this method was his three-fold edition of
Aristotle's *Nicomachean Ethics* (1497), which included
the medieval Latin version along with the translations of Johannes
Argyropolus and Leonardo Bruni. This approach also defined
Lefevre's ground-breaking editions of the Psalms (1509),
the letters of St Paul (1512), and Euclid's *Elements of
Geometry* (1517a).



He returned to Italy in 1500, meeting the famous humanist printer
Aldus Manutius in Venice and attending Roman celebrations of the papal
jubilee. At a monastery near Padua, he copied out some of Ramon
Lull's *Blaquerna*, and in Rome he found a treatise on a
miniature astrolabe; he published both in Paris (1505 and 1500
respectively). On his return, perhaps stimulated by the Greek editions
of Aldus, Lefevre's Aristotelian program took on new
dimensions, with fuller editions and translations than those of his
earlier handbooks. The most significant of these was probably a large
folio Latin edition of Aristotle's *Organon*, with a full
suite of detailed commentaries. Another unusual publication combined
Aristotle's *Politics* and the pseudo-Aristotelian
*Economics* with 700 sentences taken from Plato's
*Republic* and *Laws*, digested as the
*Hecatonomia* (1506).



After his final trip to Rome in 1507, Lefevre's interest
in philosophy receded into the background, as he retired from teaching
at the College du Cardinal Lemoine. Philosophy did not
disappear entirely, however. In 1514, he finally published the
*opera omnia* of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, the fruit of many
years spent gathering together manuscripts; and in 1515 he published
Argyropoulos's translation of Aristotle's
*Metaphysics* together with the translation of Cardinal
Bessarion, which Pico had given him in manuscript in 1491. But his
primary energies were now focused on biblical studies; and, as one of
the most prominent intellectuals of the day, Lefevre was drawn
reluctantly into several controversies. When the Paris faculty of
theology charged his friend Johann Reuchlin with Judaizing in 1514, he
wrote a plea to Rome for help from the like-minded Giles of Viterbo,
Vicar General of the Augustinian Order. Then, Erasmus of Rotterdam
sought to take the aging pedagogue down a notch by criticizing his
work on the Pauline epistles for shaky Greek. In 1517 Lefevre
found himself at the heart of another academic culture war: the debate
over the Three Maries, in which he took the skeptical view that the
three figures of that name in the New Testament were not, as tradition
held, the same person. The final, devastating controversy began in
1521, when his patron, Cardinal Guillaume Briconnet, invited
him to lead an experiment in diocesan reform at Meaux, near Paris. The
Paris faculty of theology, already concerned about
Lefevre's incursions into the field of theology, found
the experiment smacked too much of Lutheranism--which they had
already condemned in 1520. In a few years the experiment at Meaux
disintegrated, and in 1525 Lefevre fled to Strassburg. The
following year Francois Ier recalled Lefevre
to France. He tutored the royal children and served as chaplain at the
court of Marguerite de Navarre, the king's sister, for the final
decade of his life (Reid 2009).


## 2. Epitome as Philosophical Style



Lefevre's reputation rested on the manner in which he
introduced philosophy in commentaries, paraphrases, and
editions--in other words, on a *style* of philosophical
epitome. The late sixteenth-century critic of Aristotelianism
Francesco Patrizi observed that Lefevre was the first to read
Aristotle without scholastic *quaestiones*, and historians
frequently cite Lefevre's desire, following the
translations of Aristotle by Leonardo Bruni, to



> 
> 
> draw up and taste the purest waters from the very spring of
> Aristotle's works (*Nunc ergo O iuvenes ex Aristotelico
> opere, ceu ex proprio fonte purissimas haurite, delibateque
> aquas*),
> 
> 
> 



as he exhorted students on the title-page of his 1503 edition of the
logical works (see Bianchi 2007: 57n19; Schmitt 1988). He hoped to
return to the source itself, convinced that this would cure philosophy
of its ills--he described mathematics and the "ancient
wisdom", for example, as medicines which would prepare
students' minds properly to approach philosophy (Lefevre
1496a: h7v). He denounced the more innovative elements of traditional
university logic such as *sophismata* and instead suggested
that students should read his own shorter handbook on logic (1496b) to
learn just enough before moving on to more profitable studies. Instead
of addressing specialized topics or staking out a position within a
university "school", Lefevre favored handbooks
which introduced a discipline through brief explanations of terms and
basic concepts, ostensibly leaving students with a conceptual
vocabulary and enough time to read Aristotle on their own.



Lefevre's textbooks often deployed several genres in the
same volume (Lines 2007). Most visually striking are the synoptic
tables before each introduction, which at a glance supply a roadmap to
the whole work. The table was followed by a paraphrase of the work,
chapter by chapter, in an effort to reorganize the sinewy contours of
Aristotle's works in simpler form. Usually Lefevre
prefaced paraphrases with *notae*, which encapsulated his
judgement on the most interesting or important insights in the
chapter; these might be added to philological, historical, or topical
remarks. Another genre Lefevre occasionally used was the
dialogue, which not only catechized young students in philosophical
doctrine, but also demonstrated how teacher and pupil should engage
with each other. Finally, when he published an edition of an
Aristotelian treatise, Lefevre also wrote a more traditional
commentary. Again, he normally proceeded chapter by chapter through
Aristotle's text, keeping "literal" comments on
philological questions and obscure phrases separate from
*notae* on literary, doctrinal, or methodological issues raised
in the work.



In aggregate, this range of epitomizing formats or genres defined a
Renaissance philosophical style, which Lefevre's works
remodeled for northern universities. Kessler has argued that when
Lefevre met Barbaro and Poliziano in Italy, he also encountered
a new Aristotle: Barbaro had promised his students that he would make
all of Aristotle accessible to them (Kessler 1999). This was not
Aristotle taken piecemeal, but instead as an author to be digested in
his entirety, systematically and compendiously. In his paraphrases
Lefevre thus presents an encyclopedic Aristotle. Poliziano, who
was lecturing on Aristotle when Lefevre visited Florence in
1491, stands out as a possible precedent for the philological side of
Lefevre's encyclopedic enterprise (Celenza 2010).
Poliziano promised to explain both facts and words, *res et
verba*, in Aristotle, giving the account of a
"grammarian", which would represent Aristotle better than
the "philosophical" comments of his university
competitors. This approach to the philological commentary can to some
extent be traced in Lefevre's literary notes and
interpretive comparisons. The idea that Poliziano was a central
influence, however, needs to be treated with caution, since Poliziano
(as far as we can tell from his surviving *praelectiones*)
focused on what knowledge of Greek could reveal about
Aristotle's meaning, word by word, with little concern for a
synoptic vision of Aristotle's works, whereas Lefevre
aimed to reconstruct Aristotle systematically, as a whole, laying
emphasis, furthermore, on his coherence with Christian teaching.


## 3. Aristotle's Method and the "Schools"



Lefevre saw his concordist and source-based approach to
philosophy as a way to steer clear of the late medieval philosophical
"schools", which modern scholarship has often divided
between realists (Thomists and Scotists) and nominalists (Ockham and
others). But, as Hoenen (2003) observes, late medieval scholars often
saw themselves as occupying a place in a given tradition, following
Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, or other leading philosophers; yet
this does not mean that a Scotist was a "realist" in all
fields of study, and a philosopher's view on universals does not
systematically predict his views on other doctrines. Rather, a school
of thought is identified by a *processus* or method, of which
particular figures such as Albert the Great or Duns Scotus were
historical exemplars.



Lefevre's central claim was that Aristotle himself should
be the exemplar of method, not any "Aristotelians". He
exhorted students to read Aristotle's own works, rather than to
make a career out of studying commentaries on them. His first
contribution to logic was a short epitome of the major logical
operations found in Peter of Spain's *Summule logicales*,
which he prefaced by entreating students not to get caught up in
*exponabilia*, *insolubilia*, and *sophismata*,
which "should be rejected from philosophy", but instead to
pass through them quickly, as if scouting in a barbarian land (1496b:
a1v; Rice 1972: 39). In his 1503 edition of Aristotle's logical
works, Lefevre presented an emended text of the standard Latin
translations of Boethius, with a brief commentary. The textual work
was necessary, he said, because previous generations, 



> 
> 
> although they dealt with logic, did not actually make use of logic,
> but of certain factious and extraneous matters, which should be
> condemned rather than refuted. (1503a: a1v; Rice 1972: 88)
> 
> 
> 



The result was that books of logic had become full of errors,
"novelties" (*novitia*), and "lifeless
matters, like so much hay" (ibid.). In contrast, the commentary
in his corrected edition would be brief and would explain
Aristotle's meaning, instead of that of his commentators.



Lefevre's textbooks were designed to help students gain
access to Aristotle by quickly familiarizing them with the elementary
definitions of each discipline and setting these in a larger schematic
framework. In a comment on Aristotle's *Politics*, he
stressed that the integrity of different disciplines requires
identifying the components proper to each--for example, the point
in geometry, the monad in arithmetic, or the letters which make up
words in grammar (1506: a2v). This respected Aristotle's own
methodical admonition not to make the mistaken assumption that
conclusions from one discipline could be applied to another--his
prohibition of *metabasis*. Similarly, from his earliest
writings, Lefevre insisted that each discipline should follow a
distinctive kind of reasoning: thus



> 
> 
> logic should be left to deal with logical matters, mathematics with
> mathematical matters, and divine discipline with metaphysical matters.
> (Lefevre 1492: b4v; Rice 1970: 12)
> 
> 
> 



Lefevre's textbooks often divided disciplines into their
constituent parts, sometimes visually simplified in synoptic tables;
the goal of such tables was to provide students with swift access to
the individual elements, as well as to the more general headings, of a
given discipline--a vision of methodical philosophy popularized
by Peter Ramus later in the sixteenth century (Ong 1958; for an
overview of recent literature, see Hotson 2007: 16-37).



The fact that each discipline had its own form of reasoning did not
mean they could not be compared or did not point to an ultimate unity.
According to Lefevre, Aristotle also taught that disciplines
bore an analogical relationship to one another--the distinctive
method of each discipline was the starting-point to this higher
knowledge. Frequently he (and his students after him) alerted readers
to what they believed were "traces" (*vestigia*) or
"analogies" (*analogiae*) which could help them to
find the deeper unity beneath apparently diverse phenomena. In his
earliest introduction to natural philosophy, Lefevre claimed
that there was a



> 
> 
> kind of secret analogy lying hidden and underneath the whole of
> Aristotle's philosophy, without which philosophy is inanimate
> and lifeless, like a body without the sense of touch. (1492: b2r; Rice
> 1970: 6)
> 
> 
> 



Though he regularly draws attention to analogies, Lefevre does
not systematically describe this "secret analogy".
Instead, he often uses analogy to compare the constituent parts of
different disciplines (Oosterhoff 2018: 77-85). More
circumstantial evidence suggests that members of his circle at least
toyed with the idea that analogy could be a more universal science. A
student of his, Beatus Rhenanus, included in his course notes several
theses concerning how "analogy is the science of
sciences", that "Aristotle claims he finds the secrets of
the sciences by analogy", and "what is known by analogy is
known more firmly than by demonstration" (Beatus
Rhenanus's *Cahier d'etudiant*,
Bibliotheque humaniste de Selestat, MS 50, 253r). This
fascination with analogies may explain why Lefevre appreciated
mathematics so much, since ancient number theory focused on the ratios
(*proportiones* in Latin, *analogia* in Greek) between
numbers. For him, *analogia* sometimes had the ancient Greek
meaning of a proportion or ratio between two mathematical objects; at
other times, it reflected analogies between the subjects of lower and
higher disciplines, as when he argued that mathematical reasoning
provided



> 
> 
> certain steps, ... especially if one knows the method
> (*modus*) of analogies and uplifting exercises
> [*assurrectiones*]. (Lefevre 1517a: a2v; Rice 1972:
> 380)
> 
> 
> 



He then praised mathematics as a model for such a method:



> 
> 
> What, I ask, can give quicker, more abstract, purer analogies for
> rising to divine matters ... than mathematical learning?
> (ibid.)
> 
> 
> 



In other cases, he based analogies on structural similarities between
the elementary parts of an area of study (e.g., Lefevre 1497
a3r, where he discusses the analogies of elementary parts of
disciplines). 



A *method* in the sixteenth century was a way of approaching a
given discipline--according to the Paduan school, for example,
one properly approached natural philosophy through the logical method
of *regressus*. But Lefevre believed that this kind of
prioritizing of logic over other disciplines undermined the
distinctive modes of reasoning proper to each discipline. In the
sixteenth century, one of the many uses of the word *methodus*
was to indicate a short cut, perhaps a compendious textbook, by which
a student might approach a discipline (Gilbert 1960: 59-60).
Indeed, there is some evidence of this usage in Lefevre's
own circle. Guillaume Gontier, his student and amanuensis, explicitly
referred to Lefevre's collection of introductions on
logic as a "method", telling readers that



> 
> 
> by this extremely brief method [you] will swiftly land at the port of
> the disciplines. (*hac methodo etiam quam brevissima ad
> disciplinarum portus ocissime appelere*, 1496b: d6r-v)
> 
> 
> 



In 1502, Bruno Amerbach informed Johannes Amerbach in Basel that he
was attending the "*cursus Fabri*". He assured his
worried father, who preferred him to study with the Scotists, that the
bare text of the Fabrists, "without commentary" (*nihil
comentarii*), would profit him in examinations (Hartmann 1942:
146; Renaudet 1953: 404-406). Among Lefevre's
students, his manuals with their epitomes, paraphrases, and short
descriptive notes defined philosophical study at the College du
Cardinal Lemoine, and he began to be treated as an exemplar of
method.



Although Lefevre's introductions were intended to
facilitate direct access to Aristotle and other authorities, bypassing
the "schools", they were themselves reproduced, studied,
and commented on, becoming, in effect, an alternative to the
"schools". The most commonly reproduced version of
Lefevre's *Paraphases philosophiae naturalis*
included, for example, Josse Clichtove's extensive commentary;
Lefevre's introductions to logical and mathematical works
were likewise accompanied by similar super-commentaries. The circle of
"Fabrists" might be seen, in this sense, as an unwitting
humanist *via* on the Renaissance philosophical roadmap.


## 4. Philosophical Themes



Lefevre's place on the map of late medieval and
Renaissance philosophy is difficult to pinpoint in a single key
doctrine or even a single work. He never composed his own synthetic or
systematic overview of philosophy. Nor did he write large commentaries
on select, individual questions, as did major university philosophers
of the preceding centuries such as Jean Buridan or Paul of Venice. The
following themes thus represent more the state of current research
than a synoptic perspective on all Lefevre's
philosophical positions.


### 4.1 Logic



In logic or dialectic, Lefevre belongs to a tradition going
from Lorenzo Valla, Rudolph Agricola, and Juan Luis Vives to Peter
Ramus--in 1508 Lefevre also published the
*Dialectica* of the Byzantine *emigre*
humanist George of Trebizond. These figures sought to diminish the
hold of scholastic logic on philosophy and replace it with a clearer,
simpler logic that would respect the ordinary meanings of words and
how they point to things in the world. The standard logical curriculum
was roughly organized around two phases in the reception of
Aristotle's works. First, the "old logic"
(*logica vetus*) comprised several works inherited from late
antiquity, primarily Boethius's translations of and commentaries
on Aristotle's *Categories* and *On
Interpretation*, as well as Porphyry's *Isagoge* (for
a complete list of available works, see Ebbesen 1977: 105). From the
twelfth century on, a second group of works were either newly read
after long neglect, such as Aristotle's *Prior
Analytics*, *Topics*, and *Sophistic Refutations*,
or were newly translated from Arabic sources, most importantly
Aristotle's *Prior Analytics* (Marrone 2010: 66; Ashworth
2010: 161). Together this second group made up the "new
logic" (*logica nova*), which in turn became the source
of handbooks or textbooks known by the late fifteenth century as the
"logic of the moderns" (*logica modernorum*; see de
Rijk 1962-67). In fact, late medieval university students
encountered these subjects through the textbook tradition, usually
Peter of Spain's *Summule logicales* (*Little
Logicals*). The first part of the *Summule* dealt with the
"old logic" of the *Categories*, on universals and
Aristotelian categories. But humanist philosophers like Lefevre
reacted especially against the *logica modernorum*:
Lefevre's short *Logical Introductions to
Suppositions, Predicabilia, Divisions, Predicaments, Enunciations,
... Fallacies, Obligations, and Insolubilia* (1496b) was
meant to give students a brief alternative to the *Summule*,
instead of making it the focus of study.



In 1503, Lefevre published an edition, with introductions,
paraphrases, and commentary, of Aristotle's logical works.
Rather than, as Valla had done, reconstructing the "old
logic" of Aristotle, Porphyry, and Boethius and ignoring the
"logic of the moderns" (*logica modernorum*) with
its *categoremata*, *sophismata*, and
*insolubilia*, Lefevre tried to clarify the sources of
the "old logic" (Vasoli 1968). He called logic a
*disciplina disserendi* (1503a: 2r, 228v), similar to
Agricola's earlier redefinition of dialectic as the *ars
disserendi*, later taken up by Ramus (though Lefevre
probably did not read Agricola's book, first published in 1515;
see Agricola 1515, as cited by Mack 1993: 346). Like Agricola before
him and Ramus later on, Lefevre divided logic into three parts:
*proloquia*, judgement, and invention. The first part, using
the works of the *logica vetus*, classifies things in the world
according to substances and their various qualities by considering how
propositions (*proloquia*) are formed. The second and third
parts belong to the *logica nova*: in the area of judgement,
the *Prior Analytics* teach how to organize statements into a
valid argument; in the area of invention, the *Topics* and the
*Sophistic Refutations* teach how to find the subject matter to
form an argument. Lefevre's terminology of
*proloquia*, judgement, and invention (Lefevre 1503a:
228v), though traditional, says much: Agricola had used it, and Ramus
would also take it up. Where Agricola had focused on invention, Ramus
would emphasize judgement. In contrast, Lefevre thought the
first part of logic--categorizing the world according to the
language of substance, quality, and the other *proloquia* of
Porphyry's *Isagoge* and Aristotle's
*Categories*--needed the most attention, if we judge by
where he most carefully and thoroughly introduced his sources. For
example, instead of offering a complete paraphrase of the
*Topics*, as he did for the *Categories* and the
*Prior* and *Posterior Analytics*, Lefevre
supplied only scholia "*ad litteram*" in a format
which was unusually brief, even for him.



In logic, Lefevre therefore bestowed his greatest energies on
the first *pars proloquendi* of logic. The notion of
*proloquium* sometimes had, for him, its more basic sense of
"introduction" (e.g., 1503a); but he also used the term in
its more technical sense of an axiom or proper principle of
demonstration. In the *Posterior Analytics* I, Lefevre
glossed Aristotle's account of principles for a demonstration as
dealing with *proloquia* (1503a: 189v; see also 187r). He thus
emphasized the *logica vetus* precisely because he hoped to
ground the certainty of knowledge in trustworthy starting points. In
contrast, he believed that the *logica modernorum* or more
rhetorical portions of the *Organon* such as the
*Topics*--the part most properly called
dialectic--encouraged sophistic debate, i.e., developing
arguments out of uncertain premises. Aristotle considered dialectic to
be merely "probable" in its reasoning; as Lefevre
put it, rather than finding certain knowledge (*scientia*),
which deploys syllogisms and enthymemes, topical dialectic is useful
for directing "opinions" by means of less certain
techniques as well, such as induction and example (*Libri
logicorum*, 1503a: 229v). Aristotle had said the subject of the
*Topics* was "exercises, colloquies, and the disciplines
according to philosophy". For Lefevre, this meant the
*Topics* were more appropriate for entertainment: 



> 
> 
> *exercises*: we ought to understand these to be school
> contests, done as a literary game; *colloquies*, as happens
> during our conversations, dining together, and when we engage one
> another in this way, discoursing for the purpose of recreation or
> usefulness; *disciplines according to philosophy*: these are
> the sciences which make up the various parts of [Aristotle's]
> own philosophy. (*Exercitationes, conflictus gymnasticos, qui in
> ludo litterario fiunt, intelligere debemus. Colloquia: ut cum
> confabulando aut convivando aut in huiusmodi congressionibus ocurrit
> quicque, aut recreationis, aut alicuius utilitatis gratia,
> disserendum. Discipline secundum philosophiam: sunt scientie que
> partes sunt ipsius philosophie*, 1503a: 229v)
> 
> 
> 



Lefevre, thus, did not emphasize the roots of logic in the
rhetorical structure of ordinary discourse, as Agricola or Valla might
have done (Nauta 2009). Instead, he focused on the "starting
points", *principia*, or *proloquia* which ground
reasoning. The importance he assigns to *proloquia* seems to be
connected to his pedagogically sensitive introductions, intended to
convey clear, immediate learning of the foundational principles of any
discipline or art. The utility of this method also appears to be
rooted in metaphysical assumptions about universal harmony and
analogy. In his annotations on Hermes Trismegistus, Lefevre
stressed the harmonious structure of creation, reflected in the
symmetry between macrocosm and microcosm (Lefevre 1505b). As
discussed above, such a harmonious structure justified making
inferences from one domain to another. 


### 4.2 The Question of Universals



Since the nineteenth century, Lefevre has often been thought of
as a nominalist of some sort. The evidence is of two kinds. Because he
wrote a short introduction to the topics found in Peter of
Spain's *Summule logicales*, Prantl (1870:
4:278-280) implied that he had sympathies with the genre, which
Vasoli (1959: 233) expanded into "traces of a nominalist
formation". Vasoli also quoted Renaudet, who had cited the
student notes of Beatus Rhenanus, which recorded
Lefevre's view that the nominalist position on universals
was "*vera et pulchra*" (Vasoli 1959: 226; Renaudet
1953: 131). Yet Lefevre's actual position is much more
ambiguous. One indication is his short *Introductiones* to
logic, intended to help students *bypass* "new"
terminist approaches to the discipline. Moreover, although he
appreciated certain nominalist positions, this hardly shows that he
believed universals to be simply a matter of convention. Instead, he
sought a *via media*, as he so often did. For example, in his
notes on Porphyry's *Isagoge*, Lefevre observed
that there are two extreme errors when speaking about
Aristotle's category of substance:



> 
> 
> some consider things by themselves, completely ignoring notions and
> reasons; others only care for notions and reasons, and entirely flee
> from things themselves and considerations of things. Neither the
> former nor the latter can ever genuinely understand Aristotle and
> other authors. (*Quidam enim res solas considerantes, notiones
> rationesque prorsus abnuunt; alii solas notiones rationesque curantes,
> res ipsas rerumque considerationes penitus refugiunt. Et neque hi
> neque illi poterunt unquam sincere Aristotelem ceterosque auctores
> intelligere*, 1503a: 22r-v)
> 
> 
> 



Instead, those who "penetrate analogies" realize that
disciplines deal with different subjects: logicians address words and
names, as if looking at things through a mirror; natural philosophers
address things themselves.



By pursuing a *via media* on the problem of universals,
Lefevre followed Boethius, the first of the Latins to set the
terms of the medieval debates on the topic--as Lefevre put
it,



> 
> 
> the whole Latin school owes as much to Boethius as rhetoric owes to
> Cicero. (*cui [Boetii] latine philosophie schola tantum debet
> quantum Tullius rhetorice*, 1503a: 6v)
> 
> 
> 



This tradition began with the prooemium to Porphyry's
*Isagoge*, in which he explicitly refused to discuss whether
genus and species depend on thought alone, are incorporeal or
inseparable, as a realist interpretation of universals would have
it--that discussion should be left, he said, to a "greater
work". The medieval tradition followed Boethius in reading the
*Isagoge* as an introduction to Aristotle's
*Categories*, and took Porphyry's skirting of the
ontological status of genera and species as an invitation to explore
universals. Boethius himself adopted a moderate realist position on
universals in his second commentary on the *Isagoge*. There he
argued that the mind abstracts universals from concrete reality:
abstraction involves gathering or collecting the likeness
(*similitudo*) of concrete, individual things. Boethius claimed
that, understood in this way, universals have a certain kind of
separate, incorporeal reality:



> 
> 
> genus and species subsist in one way, they are grasped by the
> intellect in another way, and they are incorporeal, but they are
> joined to sensible things and subsist in sensible things. But they are
> grasped by the intellect as subsisting in themselves and not having
> their being in anything else. (quotation from Marenbon 2003: 30; see
> also Nauta 2009: 38).
> 
> 
> 



Lefevre was sensitive to the divergence between Porphyry and
Boethius. He highlighted Porphyry's approach to universals in
the *Isagoge*, namely



> 
> 
> these questions about Platonic genera and species, about the matter of
> ideas....
> 
> 
> 



But Lefevre followed Porphyry in turning such questions out of
logic, for



> 
> 
> as you see Porphyry teach, the place for dealing with these should be
> sought elsewhere, namely metaphysics. (*Et he questiones de
> generibus et speciebus platonicis, que ad materiam idearum pertinent
> .... Sed discutiendi locus (ut scite Porphyrius ammonet) alio ex
> loco metaphysica scilicet est expectandus*, 1503a: 2r)
> 
> 
> 



A few pages later he described how Boethius differed from Porphyry on
this issue, saying that:



> 
> 
> It is to be assumed that Boethius considered the notion and concept,
> whereas Porphyry considered the thing and subject itself. (*Igitur
> notionem rationemque Boetius, rem autem ipsam et ipsum subiectum
> considerasse, ponendus esset Porphyrius*, 1503a: 6v)
> 
> 
> 



Thus, for Lefevre, the moderate realist position regards
universals as distinct concepts or notions (*rationes* or
*notiones*; similar terminology is discussed in de Libera 1996:
48).



But is this "moderate realist" position
Lefevre's own? Resolutely emphasizing the
*auctores* themselves, he rarely deploys his own authorial
voice to argue for a "Fabrist" position. In his notes on
Aristotle's *Categories*, however, dealing with the key
category of substance, Lefevre presents a rare quasi-treatise,
a short dialogue on universals between two students of the ancient
academy of Chrysippus (entitled in the margin "*Disceptatio
de universali*", 1503a: 23v). In the course of an amiable
debate, the disputants use Aristotle's distinction between
primary and secondary substance to consider the status of universals
such as species or genus. One youth presents the view that universals
are what particular classes of things share; the other youth argues
that universals are, in fact, what those who reason *say* they
share--universals, in other words, are decided by convention. The
position that stands, at the end of the dialogue, looks something like
Boethius's moderate realism. The youths agree that there is
something conceptual that is "added" to the qualities of
both the thing and the word signifying that thing.



> 
> 
> For when I give the name "man" and look at the thing
> itself, I do not properly name the thing itself, or the species, or
> the universal, simply and without addition. Instead, I do so with an
> addition, namely of the universal, by reason. (*Proinde cum hominem
> nomino et rem ipsam respicio, non proprie rem illam aut speciem aut
> universalem appello et simpliciter et sine addito, sed cum
> addito--scilicet universalem, ratione*, 1503a: 23v)
> 
> 
> 



This moderate realism resurfaces in Lefevre's account of
Aristotle's category of quantity, to choose just one example. In
the *Categories*, Aristotle primarily recapitulated the
commonly held ancient distinction between discrete number and
continuous magnitude. Lefevre's commentary, however,
recalls that Aristotle further divided number into two kinds: counting
number (*numerantia*) and counted number (*numerata*).
The distinction was taken from *Physics* IV.10, 219b5-10;
but Lefevre uses it in the context of Aristotle's
*Categories* to suggest that numbers have extramental existence
as universals--not merely as a product of mental abstraction, as
Aristotle held. For Aristotle, when we experience
"counted" numbers (two ice creams, two legs), we abstract
from those experiences a "counting" number
("2"), which exists only abstractly. For Lefevre,
this picture is not quite complete, because it does not take account
of how people share the experience of counting--while they may
apply "counting numbers" to countable objects in the same
way, there is a concept or "reason" (*ratio*)
shared by different minds. So he offers a third category:



> 
> 
> Hence, there are counting numbers, counted numbers, and numbers
> [themselves]. Counting numbers are minds applying numbers to things;
> counted numbers are those things to which the mind properly and
> suitably applies numbers; and numbers are those discrete concepts of
> counting. (*Unde sunt numerantia, sunt numerata, sunt numeri.
> Numerantia sunt anime numeros suos rebus applicantes. Numerata sunt ea
> quibus anima numeros apte accommodeque applicat. Numeri sunt discrete
> ille rationes numerandi*, 1503a: 27r).
> 
> 
> 



With this third category of reasons or concepts (*rationes*) of
counting, similar to Boethius's view of universals as real
notions, Lefevre can suggest that number has extramental
reality in some sense. He affirms this point a few lines later,
repeating the ancient view of number as multiples of the primordial
"unity". There is something shared between the unit
"1" in the counting mind and the unit "1" of a
single palm of counted length. This underlying shared unity indicates
that "true numbers [i.e., 2, 3, etc.] are gathered and composed
from units" in a way that belongs not merely to the mind or to
the physical world (*Unde fit ut non sola in mente sufficiat unitas
ad numerandum, perinde ac unus palmus ad dimetiendum id quod etiam
multorum fuerit palmorum, sed sunt veri numeri ex unitatibus
coacervati compositique*, 1503a: 27r).



Lefevre's language of numbers as composed of units is
commonplace, but it serves a realist interpretation of
Aristotle's category of discrete quantity. As discussed in the
next section, the category of quantity and the language of measuring
occupied a central place in Lefevre's approach to
Aristotle's natural philosophy.


### 4.3 Natural Philosophy



As we have seen, in his first published paraphrases (1492),
Lefevre reorganized natural philosophy under the influence of
Ermolao Barbaro's translations of Themistius's
*Paraphrases of Aristotle*. His own epitomes were of the
*Physics*, *On the Heavens*, the *Parva
naturalia*, and *On the Soul*. As with other disciplines,
it is difficult to identify a cohesive, distinctive set of Fabrist
"doctrines" in these works, because the explicit goal was
to digest Aristotle himself faithfully, not to identify and counter
potential rivals. Characteristically, his paraphrase of the
*Physics* begins with a diagram of the terms basic to
Aristotelian natural philosophy: the elements; the four causes;
nature; the many kinds of motion; and problematic terms such as place,
vacuum, the infinite, and time. The paraphrase itself proceeds to
reorganize Aristotle's doctrines into opinions, conclusions, and
arguments--and, very occasionally, questions and
doubts--which closely follow the contours of Aristotle's
own work.



Nevertheless, distinctive emphases do surface. In these paraphrases,
Lefevre is most distinctive when framing natural philosophy
within its *goals* rather than its constituent parts. This
attention to the larger philosophical role of particular disciplines
has led some scholars to dismiss him as "safely wrapped in
clouds of mysticism" (e.g., Guerlac 1979: 31). In fact, he is
careful about methodological distinctions. At the end of his account
of Book 1 of the *Physics*, for example, he refuses to answer
the question whether all things are produced from one or many forms.
Lefevre is clearly tempted by this topic to discuss the
Christian creator, but he determinedly remains within the boundaries
of natural reason:



> 
> 
> this belongs to first philosophy; let it wait until the right time to
> study it. (*primi philosophi est, et in illud tempus id querendum
> differatur*, Lefevre 1502a: 20v)
> 
> 
> 



This methodological restriction is intended to keep students from
applying limited tools (such as logic or natural philosophy)
indiscriminately and thus confusing instead of clarifying knowledge.
But reflections on natural philosophy can offer traces of the divine,
and philosophy is not doing its job if it does not draw students to
reflect on these too.



An example of the higher goals of natural philosophy are found in
Lefevre's *Dialogue on the Introduction to the
Physics* (*Dialogus Physice introductionis*), which is
intended to present basic terms and convince students of the value of
this discipline. A discussion of the physical elements leads him to
consider at length the chain of nature--and the teacher in the
dialogue, at the student's request, self-consciously
"digresses" on the chain of being in order to suggest that
the highest activity of humanity, the highest part of nature itself,
is to contemplate "heavenly realities". Then the
discussion of final causes leads Lefevre to sum up the point of
the exercise:



> 
> 
> This, my son, is the end of philosophy; this is the whole endeavor of
> Aristotle and the philosophers: to prepare us, from the correct notion
> of sensible things (as from rather distant likenesses of external
> things), to enter the intelligible world, and hence, insofar as they
> can lead us, to know our blessed place. (*Hic fili nostre
> Philosophie finis; hic totus Aristotelis et Philosophorum conatus: ex
> recta rerum sensibilium cognitione (ut ex eternorum quibusdam
> remotissimis simulacris) mundi intelligibilis nobis parare introitum,
> et hinc nos utcumque possunt ducere, nostrum scilicet felicem regionem
> cognoscere*, Lefevre 1502a: 124r [wrongly foliated
> 123])
> 
> 
> 



But to attain this happy goal, the student of philosophy first must
wade through the details of natural philosophy.



Lefevre's natural philosophy is also distinctive for its
attention to mathematical examples. In his *Dialogues on
Physics* he displayed far more autonomy from Aristotle than he did
in shorter introductions and paraphrases; and in the *Introductory
Dialogue on Difficult Physics* (*Dialogus difficilium
physicalium introductorius*) he began squarely with the problem of
quantity. While never departing dramatically from the Aristotelian
discussion of matter, weight, rarefaction and condensation, and the
intension and remission of qualities, at each step, Lefevre
offers points, lines, and ratios as examples. An interlocutor marvels
that he has learned to "philosophize about qualities through
quantities" (*per quantitatem de qualitate philosophor*,
Lefevre 1502a: 146v).



Take, for example, Lefevre's discussion of the intension
and remission of qualities in his *Introductory Dialogue on
Difficult Physics*. This question is interesting because, despite
Aristotle's meager account (*Physics* V.22.26b1-8),
it became a foundational question in medieval natural philosophy.
Moreover, by the fourteenth century, the *calculatores* of
Oxford and Parisian natural philosophers such as Nicole Oresme used
mathematics to clarify their thinking on the topic. The notion of
remission and intension is meant to explain how qualities change
gradually, as we experience them to do. In order to resolve the
problem, it was necessary to ask several questions. Are such qualities
forms? Can different qualities or forms mix together in the same
subject? Does change involve a series of new forms (the succession
theory), or instead is it a changing mixture of qualities, so that a
gray object is a mix of white and dark contraries (admixture theory)?
Or do qualities gradually change as infinitesimal parts are gained or
lost (addition theory)? (For the range of positions, see Kirschner
2000 and Di Liscia 2010.) In the *Difficult Physics*,
Lefevre's view seems to be that qualities are
*not* forms, since he never calls them anything other than
qualities (a view similar to that of Buridan and Oresme; see Kirschner
2000). Moreover, he seems to adopt a version of an addition theory: a
quality is intensified by adding another part or degree of that
quality. Finally, he argues that contraries can be in the same subject
only in a limited way--a certain amount of one quality would
drive out (*expellere*) an excess of the other. Given a scale
of heat from minimum to maximum, say from 1 to 10, one could also
imagine a similar scale for cold from 10 to 1. Maximal cold could not
coincide with maximal heat; but a low heat of 1 would coincide with a
strong cold of 9. Increasing the heat to 4 would expel the cold,
reducing it to 6.



In this example, Lefevre repeatedly claims that he applies
quantitative reasoning to qualities:



> 
> 
> Therefore, you see how to philosophize about dimensions is to
> philosophize about qualities. So also vice versa: to philosophize
> about qualities is to philosophize about dimensions. (*Vides ergo
> quomodo philosophari de dimensionibus est de qualitatibus
> philosophari. Et retro agitur: de qualitatibus philosophari, est
> philosophari de dimensionibus*, 1502a: 145r)
> 
> 
> 



It is not easy, however, to see what exactly "quantities"
mean in this context. Some clarification can be gained from his
argument for why quantities in a subject are limited by their
contrary, which he illustrates with a quasi-geometrical figure
representing the twin scales of hot and cold mentioned above. He
imagines a range of heats in an object, from minimum to maximum heat,
arranged along a line (*a*...*k* in the figure below).
Then, he uses a *reductio ad absurdum*: if the smallest amount
of coldness (*l*) from some other object
(*l*...*u* in the figure below) were to be added to the
maximum heat (*k*), a new degree of heat (*x*) would have to
be added in the original object to create a new maximum.



> 
> 
> *a-b-c-d-e-g-f-h-i-k-x*
> 
> 
> 
> *l-m-n-o-p-q-r-s-t-u*
> 
> 
> 



But (*x*) is impossible. The new maximum (*x*) would be
greater than the previous maximum (*k*), which is absurd--a
maximum cannot be increased. Therefore, he concludes, the amount of
contraries is limited by the absolute maximum degrees of the quality
measured. Qualities and their contraries, consequently, cannot be
intensified in the same object beyond this maximum limit. There are
undeniable quantitative features to this argument, comparable to the
geometrical intuitions that animated fourteenth-century theorists such
as Oresme. At the same time, the qualities of heat and cold are not
reimagined as mathematical objects and are still firmly in the realm
of Aristotelian natural philosophy. Indeed, the point of the example
is to defend rather than undermine Aristotle's account of
contraries (found, *inter alia*, in *Topics* 2). Like
his predecessors, then, instead of making natural philosophy
mathematical, Lefevre used mathematics to clarify and exemplify
Aristotelian physical concepts. (On this example see further
Oosterhoff 2018: 190-199.)



Lefevre's mathematical examples in natural philosophy are
all the more remarkable because he elsewhere disparaged the
*calculatores* who followed in the tradition of Thomas
Bradwardine (Lefevre 1510: 2r; Rice 1972: 227). Clearly, he did
not oppose the *mathematical* nature of the so-called Merton
school's natural philosophy, but rather certain aspects of their
exposition. Lefevre mistrusted the genre for which the
*calculatores* were famous, the *sophismata*; he saw
them as mere logical puzzles, sophistry rather than truth-telling
examples--a prejudice perhaps inherited from Ermolao Barbaro
(Dionisotti 1955). This suggests that Lefevre thought his own
use of mathematical reasoning in natural philosophy was
different--that it was not sophistry, but truly depicted nature.
What then were the sources of Lefevre's mathematical
approach to natural philosophy, if not among the fourteenth-century
*calculatores*? One possibility is the school of Albertists,
who became especially powerful in fifteenth-century Paris, partly in
opposition to the nominalists and *calculatores* whom they
believed had profaned the university (Kaluza 1988). The Albertist
textbook tradition of natural philosophy placed a high value on
mathematics for understanding the physical world (Hoenen 1993:
328-330).



More compelling similarities between Lefevre and the Albertists
can be found in their psychology. After all, both Albertists and
Lefevre expressly valued mathematics because they thought it
provided training in rational abstraction. As Lefevre put it in
his *Introductory Dialogue on Difficult Physics*, the soul is
unique as the medium between "higher and lower" things
because it can rationally measure (*dimetiri*) the bodily world
in abstract terms (1502a: 128v). Albertists valued mathematical
objects as examples of the separate substances the mind can
think--without depending on physical images or phantasms. The
standard Aristotelian picture of intellection began with the senses,
which provide phantasms, taken up by the intellect as singular,
concrete species (intellectual *species*). Commentators
commonly distinguished a second movement of the soul which reflects on
this first activity. In this second moment, the soul produces abstract
and universal notions. But the question then arises: can the intellect
think about separable objects without depending on sensible phantasms?
Albertists believed that it could, inspired by the Neoplatonic
perspective of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Averroes, and the
fifth-century paraphrast Themistius. They subscribed to the doctrine
that the soul can know separate substances without the mediation of
physical images, a position which they defended against the more
standard view that this was not possible, found in early
fifteenth-century polemical works such as Heymeric de Campo's
"Problems between Albert the Great and Saint Thomas"
(*Problemata inter Albertum Magnum et Sanctum Thomam*, Cologne,
1496: 37r-46r) and in basic handbooks on natural philosophy
(Hoenen 1993: 332-333; see also Park 1980). Lefevre does
not explicitly place his account of *On the Soul* within this
Albertist tradition, but he certainly makes room for it. Describing
the objects of the intellect, he notes that



> 
> 
> separable objects are considered in the same way that they exist. For
> if they exist entirely separate from matter, then matter is entirely
> irrelevant in considering them. (*Unde fit ut quomodo res
> separabiles sint, eo modo eas contempletur. Si enim omnino abiuncte
> sint, omnino materiam a sua contemplatione reiicit*, 1502a: 341v;
> see also Spruit 1995: 38-41
> 
> 
> 



In his commentary on this passage, Josse Clichtove explained that
there are four such modes of intellection, the fourth of which
understands



> 
> 
> abstractly and universally ... and here the intellect takes
> nothing from the senses. (*Quartus est modus intelligendi abstracte
> et universaliter ... et hunc intellectus a sensu minime
> accipit*, 1502a: 343v)
> 
> 
> 



He further explained how mathematical objects offer a paradigm case of
such separable intelligible objects.



Affinities with Neoplatonic perspectives raise the question of whether
Lefevre was influenced by the new Latin versions of Greek
commentators, especially Themistius, whose paraphrases of Aristotle
were translated by Barbaro. He was certainly aware of these new texts,
but he did not invoke their authority to take sides in debates. Some
have seen Themistius as a Neoplatonic source of light imagery in
explaining the relation between the active and passive intellect,
based on Aristotle's tantalizingly short comments at *On the
Soul* III.5 (Mahoney 1982). Lefevre did argue for the unity
of the intellect, explaining the active and passive intellects as
"powers" (*potentie*) of the same faculty. He also
used the Themistian image of light to explain how the agent intellect
acts on the passive intellect (1502a: 344v). But he never mentions
Themistius on this topic--and similarities may be due to the
broader medieval commentary tradition, which had had access to
Themistius's paraphrase of *On the Soul* in William of
Moerbeke's translation since the thirteenth century. And
Lefevre's psychology puts him in a tradition, with Ramon
Lull and Nicholas of Cusa, that was hospitable to Platonic views on
universals--such thinkers adopted a psychology especially open to
mathematical metaphors as examples of universal cognition.
Nevertheless, Lefevre never identified as a platonist
(Oosterhoff 2019b).


### 4.4 Moral Philosophy



It was only on Aristotle's moral philosophy treatises--the
*Ethics, Economics* and *Politics*--that
Lefevre wrote full-scale commentaries. In addition to his brief
*Ars Moralis*, an introduction to Aristotle's ethics
(1494b), he devoted considerable energy to making available the recent
translations of Aristotle's *Nicomachean Ethics* by the
Byzantine *emigre* Johannes Argyropolus and the
Florentine humanist Leonardo Bruni, as well as the "old"
translation, now known to be by Robert Grosseteste (1497). Beginning a
tradition of editing philosophical works which would span the
sixteenth century, Lefevre typically encouraged readers to
compare texts, publishing the three translations of the
*Ethics* together in one volume (his own commentary accompanied
the translation of Argyropolus). These editions and commentaries have
been seen as the origin of a distinctively humanist tradition of moral
philosophy (Kraye 1995: 104-105).



Lefevre's engagement with ethics was not limited to the
recovery of Aristotle. Like many other Renaissance philosophers, he
began his treatment of the discipline with an anthropology of man as
microcosm, a "little world" who mirrors or encompasses the
features of the "greater world" or macrocosm. This theme
resurfaced in his paraphrase of the *Physics* and especially in
his *notae* on Hermes Trismegistus. Ethical behavior should be
in intellectual harmony with God and the universe, which should be
mirrored in human intellectual communities--perhaps
Lefevre should be seen as promoting a monastic, rather than
civic, humanism (Stegmann 1973).



His early synoptic introduction to ethics (1494b) closely follows the
major divisions of Aristotle's treatise. Lefevre begins
with a description of the ethical life as one which has to be learned:
virtues are acquired through long habituation rather than being innate
to the human soul. Humanity possesses many kinds of good: exterior
(acquired), interior (given by nature), and useful goods (those
instrumental for pursuing other goods). Virtue is defined as



> 
> 
> the habitus of the soul perfecting itself and directing its work to
> the good. Duty is the action of virtue (*Virtus est anime habitus
> ipsam perficiens atque eius opus bonum reddens. Officium est virtutis
> operatio*, 1507: 3v)
> 
> 
> 



The remainder of the introduction discusses each of the moral virtues
pertaining to the active life (such as liberality and friendship),
followed by the intellectual virtues and then heroic virtue. These in
turn lead to the final topic of contemplative happiness, where
Lefevre presents his conviction that human fulfillment or
happiness is most fully achieved in contemplation of divine
matters--a point of agreement, he believed, between Aristotle and
Christianity.



Lefevre therefore went beyond a mere *ad fontes* search
for the "pure Aristotle". As with other disciplines, his
moral philosophy presented Aristotle as the authority because he was
most useful to Christians. His *notae* to the *Ethics*
are filled with *exempla* carefully selected from the Roman
poets, especially Horace, Virgil, and Ovid. The virtues of the
gentiles regularly presage Christian morality, according to
Lefevre. So, for instance, the Pythagorean and Roman ideals of
chaste virginity are helpful for urging temperance. To illustrate the
excellence of ancient morals, Lefevre quoted Ovid's
*Metamorphoses* 15.367-36, where the waters of the river
Clitorius caused men to flee from wine. Ovid evoked this image in his
discussion of the Pythagorean way of life, leading Lefevre to
reflect on Dama, the virgin daughter of Pythagoras, as well as the
chaste self-sacrifice of Lucretia and the heroic Spartan virgins who
killed themselves after being raped. Observing that the value of
virginity is "not foreign" to Christians, who know the
Virgin birth, Lefevre went on to contrast this with the image
of intemperance and false virginity of the harpies in Virgil,
*Aeneid* 3.214-218 (see *notae* on *NE*
III.10, in 1497: d7v). At times Lefevre even uses such
*notae* to reframe Aristotle entirely. He reorients the
discussion in the last book of the *Ethics*, where Aristotle
begins with the question of whether pleasure is the supreme ethical
goal, by recalling the New Testament image of Jesus Christ rebuking
the scribes and Pharisees for their hypocrisy. Living a good or
"true life", Lefevre asserts, is primarily about
uniting word and deed, for



> 
> 
> the simplicity of the wise is more useful for life than eloquence.
> (*et simplicitatem sapientum eloquentia ad vitam esse
> efficaciorem*, 1497: m7v).
> 
> 
> 



Having reminded his reader of what true pleasure is, Lefevre
then rehearses Aristotle's argument. The strategy is typical of
many of his notes: he alerts the reader to the Christian use or
context of the passage, and then presents the author's meaning.
Rather than bowdlerizing, he generally prefers to frame pagan wisdom
with a Christian structure.



Lefevre most aggressively retooled ancient philosophy for
contemporary concerns, however, when dealing with Plato's
ethical philosophy. Again, he proceeded as an editor. Alongside
Aristotle's *Politics* and *Economics*,
Lefevre presented one of his most enigmatic works, the
*Hecatonomiae* (1506). In seven hundred lines, loosely taken
from Marsilio Ficino's translations of Plato's
*Laws* (600 lines) and *Republic* (100 lines), he
reconstructed something like a Platonic dialogue to complement
Aristotle's works. His purpose seems to have been primarily
pedagogical: to present a Plato safe for student consumption, complete
with occasional marginal admonitions to "beware"
(*caute*) and a list of Platonic opinions which should be
rejected (such as possessing women and children in common). The work
represented those parts of Plato which Aristotle had frequently
discussed in his own moral philosophy and therefore had evidently
found useful, as Lefevre explained in his prefatory letter
(Rice 1972: 156; cf. Boisset 1973). It was, without apology,
"Aristotle's Plato".


### 4.5 Metaphysics



Throughout his commentaries and epitomes, Lefevre often briefly
observes that the findings of a particular discipline have
metaphysical implications, but then leaves this line of thought aside,
typically saying "enough about this, at this point"
(*de hac adhuc satis est*). These implications are meant to be
treated in metaphysics or theology. (Like many Christian philosophers
after Boethius, Lefevre often identifies theology and
metaphysics; Oosterhoff 2019a.) In this sense, then, Lefevre
belongs to a natural theological tradition which sees the
philosophical arts as studying the traces of the divine in the natural
world, and then as steps leading upward to divine matters, as he put
it in his side-by-side edition of the medieval and humanist
translations of Euclid's geometry (1517a: a2r).



Such a reconstructive project could especially be open to creative,
synthetic impulses. Rice (1970) brilliantly captured
Lefevre's project by suggesting that what Ficino had done
for Plato, Lefevre intended to do for Aristotle. Drawing on a
long-standing medieval topos that Plato was the closest of ancient
philosophers to Christian truth, Ficino had interpreted him as broadly
in line with Christian teaching, all the while drawing on the natural
philosophy, medicine, and mathematics of his day to present him as a
healer of souls (Celenza 2007: 86). Early in his work on Aristotle,
Lefevre similarly presented Aristotle as all things in all
disciplines, even theology:



> 
> 
> in his logical works he was most subtle and rational, in the
> *Physics* a worldly philosopher, in the *Ethics*
> entirely prudent and active, in the *Politics* a lawyer, and in
> the *Metaphysics* a priest and theologian. (*Fuit namque in
> logicis rationalis subtilissimus, in physicis mundanus philosophus, in
> ethicis totus prudens et activus, in polyticis iurisconsultus, in
> metaphysicis sacerdos atque theologus*, Letter to Germain de
> Ganay, *In Aristotelis Ethica Nicomachea introductio*, 1494b:
> a2r; Rice 1970: 138)
> 
> 
> 



Lefevre's Aristotle, like Ficino's Plato, knew
something of the Christian God. In his introduction to the
*Metaphysics* (1494a: d1v), he suggested that Aristotle had
prayed to the *ens entium*, begging for mercy. This emphasis on
the coherence of Aristotle's works throughout the arts cycle and
his agreement with Christianity sustained the scholarship of
Lefevre and his students for decades.



It also meant that Lefevre could find in Aristotle the basis
for the concord of all knowledge. He thus held together two
potentially divergent approaches: his editorial efforts to
"purify" Aristotle accompanied his efforts to find a pious
metaphysical framework for philosophy, including elements that clearly
belonged to Neoplatonic traditions. At first, Lefevre's
encyclopedic projects extended to the Neoplatonic texts revived by
Ficino and Bessarion, among others. In 1494, as mentioned above, he
published Ficino's important translation of the writings
attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, along with his own short
*argumenta*. Around the same time, he published *De magia
naturali*, which drew on Ficino's medical cosmology in the
*Three Books on Life*, as well as Giovanni Pico della
Mirandola's cabbalistic interests. But by 1505 his optimism
about the fruitfulness of this esoteric approach had lessened. As
Pantin (1988) has shown, Lefevre's 1505 edition of the
Hermetic corpus includes, among its additions, more cautions against
unorthodox readings than the previous edition, just as he would do the
next year when recompiling Plato's *Laws* and
*Republic* in his *Hecatonomiae*.



In 1514 he produced a major edition of Nicholas of Cusa, arguably the
most original philosopher of the fifteenth century--and one
certainly influenced by Plato. But Lefevre had his own take on
the history of Platonic philosophy, which allowed him to see Nicholas
and the twelfth-century Victorines, among others, as representatives
of a distinctively *Christian* form of philosophy (Oosterhoff
2019a and 2019b). He defended a longstanding tradition, particularly
strong in France (where Dionysius the Areopagite was regarded not only
as St Paul's Athenian convert, but also as the original
bishop-martyr who had brought Christianity to France). He explained
the similarities between Dionysius and late ancient Platonists such as
Iamblichus and Proclus as thefts on the part of the pagan
philosophers. To Lefevre, Dionysius stood for a Pauline and
fundamentally Christian form of insight, beyond both positive and
negative theology. Later Platonists had drawn on this tradition for
their most profound teachings, while suppressing their source. In his
edition of Dionsyius's *Divine Names*, Lefevre
adduced Nicholas of Cusa's "*scientie divine
ignorantie*" ("science of divine ignorance") as
a faithful reading of Dionysius, suggesting that Dionysius was the
source of Nicholas's recognition that both positive and negative
statements about God fall short, since finite words cannot capture an
infinite reality (1499: 58v-61r). Therefore, in
Lefevre's eyes, Nicholas of Cusa was a modern
representative of this authentic Christian philosophy (Meier-Oeser
1989: 36-61).


## 5. Legacy



Lefevre's editions of Neoplatonic works became important
in their own right, long after his encyclopedic repristination of
Aristotle had been supplanted by handbooks like those of the Lutheran
Aristotelian Philip Melanchthon. His expanded edition of the Hermetic
corpus (1505b)*--*with the *Crater Hermetis* of
Ludovico Lazzarelli and another book in addition to the fourteen
treatises known to Ficino--became the most widely adopted text,
reprinted all over Europe, along with his annotations. Similarly, his
edition and commentary on Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite was read
throughout the sixteenth century, and his edition of Cusanus remained
the standard *Opera omnia* up to the twentieth century.



As discussed above, Lefevre regularly mentioned
"analogy" as a way to relate truths in different domains.
While it seems that he never fleshed out the details of this method,
his obsession with providing trustworthy steps to a unified,
methodized, and above all pedagogically useful philosophy is perhaps
his most lasting legacy--one which would be taken up in debates
over method and textbooks throughout the sixteenth century (Schmitt
1988). The fascination of Lefevre and his students with
analogies and mathematics offers a glimpse of the early motivations to
find a "universal method" that later bloomed in debates
over universal arts (Rossi 2000: 29, 39; Ong 1958: 76). Timothy Reiss
first identified Lefevre and his circle with the early swell of
philosophical interest in the quadrivium in the sixteenth century
(Reiss 1997). Oronce Fine in particular extended
Lefevre's mathematical legacy (Pantin 2009). By the early
seventeenth century, some authors would put forward a method which was
strongly mathematical and which purported to unify not only arithmetic
and geometry but all disciplines under a *mathesis universalis*
(Rabouin 2009). Lefevre could be said to have inaugurated the
genre of printed philosophical textbooks in which such positions
emerged (Oosterhoff 2018).



Lefevre's students--with whom he had always worked
closely--took up his project and developed it in several
directions. They frequently published his works, especially in
Strassburg and Cologne. In Paris, as Rice (1970) noted, several
figures associated with Lefevre set up on philosophical
projects rooted in his teaching: most notably, Josse Clichtove and
Charles de Bovelles. Clichtove, who wrote many commentaries on
Lefevre's editions, became an important figure in the
Paris faculty of theology. Bovelles deserves particular attention for
his concerted effort to develop a fresh philosophical synthesis, which
shared with Lefevre core themes such as the dignity of mankind
as the mirror of nature, human freedom, the distinctiveness of our
intellectual faculties, and the importance of mathematics in modeling
philosophical perspectives (Faye 1998). Lefevre's effort
to provide students with handbooks in all fields of knowledge can be
compared to Ramus's philosophical reforms.



His students and successive generations of scholars carried forward
Lefevre's conviction that a renewal of philosophy should
begin with new translations and philological work. Around 1516, his
student Gerard Roussel retranslated Aristotle's *Nicomachean
Ethics* from the Greek; he also wrote a long, philosophical
commentary on Boethius (1521), picking up the Pythagorean and
mathematical interests which had also motivated Lefevre's
reform of university philosophy. Another student, Francois
Vatables (later the first Royal Professor of Hebrew at the
College Royal) similarly retranslated large parts of the
Aristotelian corpus. Though he did not study directly with
Lefevre, Symphorien Champier fashioned his idiosyncratic
introduction to philosophy, the *Janua* (1498), by liberally
excerpting from his works. Later in the century,
Lefevre's sustained and wide-ranging effort to make
Aristotle eloquent was taken over by humanist translators of the
philosopher such as Denys Lambin, Adrien Turnebe, and Joachim
Perion. Lefevre influenced the history of philosophy as
much through the deep relationships he cultivated with his students as
through his ambitious use of the new technology of the printing press
to reinvent the university philosophy curriculum.