Volume 93, Issue 2, Spring 2019
Baroque Scholasticism
Lukáš Novák
Pages 271-308
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.