American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

ONLINE FIRST

published on March 14, 2019

Lukáš Novák

How Pure a Potency? Prime Matter in Post-Mediæval Thomism

In their Philosophiae ad mentem Scoti cursus integer Bartolomeo Mastri and Bonaventura Belluto describe the great variety of Thomist views on the nature of the “pure potentiality” of matter. This paper confronts Mastri and Belluto’s report with actual Thomist texts, to find that the variety is much greater than the Scotists’ report suggests and their classification of many authors unreliable. The detailed survey of the various versions of Thomism is set against an attempt to analyse the general nature of the Thomist-Scotist dispute over the pure potentiality of prime matter.