Boethius Sentence Examples
The controversy between nominalists and realists arose from a passage in Boethius' translation of Porphyry's Introduction to the Categories of Aristotle, which propounded the problem of genera and species, (1) as to whether they subsist in themselves or only in the mind; (2) whether, if subsistent, they are corporeal or incorporeal; and (3) whether separated from sensible things or placed in them.
The Roman age thus ends in the West with Boethius, Cassiodorus and St Benedict, and in the East with Priscian and Justinian.
In England the 9th century closes with Alfred, who, with the aid of the Welsh monk, Asser, produced a series of free translations from Latin texts, including Boethius and Orosius and Bede, and the Cura Pastoralis of Gregory the Great.
It was also the site of one of the earliest printing-presses, and copies of the stannary laws and of a translation of Boethius issued from the Tavistock press in the reign of Henry VIII.
We come now to what is in many ways the most interesting of Alfred's works, his translation of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, the most popular philosophical manual of the middle ages.
It takes form as a body of doctrine drawing its premises from authority, sometimes in secular matters from that of Aristotle, but normally from that of the documents and traditions of systematic theology, while its method it draws from Aristotle, as known in the Latin versions,' mainly by Boethius, of some few treatises of the Organon together with the Isagoge of Porphyry.
It was according to tradition in a tower which, previous to 1584, stood near the church of the Annunziata that Boethius wrote his De consolatione philosophiae; the legal school of Pavia was rendered celebrated in the 11th century by Lanfranc (afterwards archbishop of Canterbury); Petrarch was frequently here as the guest of Galeazzo II., and his grandson died and was buried here.
Cousin's collection, besides giving extracts from the theological work Sic et Non (an assemblage of opposite opinions on doctrinal points, culled from the Fathers as a basis for discussion, the main interest in which lies in the fact that there is no attempt to reconcile the different opinions), includes the Dialectica, commentaries on logical works of Aristotle, Porphyry and Boethius, and a fragment, De Generibus et Speciebus.
Boethius, who early in life formed the ambitious plan of expounding and reconciling the opinions of Plato and Aristotle, continued in the year of his sole consulship (510) to instruct his fellowcountrymen in the wisdom of Greece.