Teaching Aristotle in Early Fourteenth-Century Paris. John of Jandun’s Commentaries on Aristotle

Abstract John of Jandun, known as the ‘prince of the Averroists’, was active as teacher of arts for more than ten years, as shown by a number of writings dating from 1307 to 1321. The first part of his life, as teacher and commentator at the arts faculty in Paris, is full of interest. In fact, we may consider him as one of the great arts masters of the beginning of the fourteenth century. John commented on the great majority of Aristotle’s works. Moreover, he wrote independent treatises and a big number of questions and sophismata (at least ten). In this article I will study the character and teaching methods of his commentaries, in order to understand the evolution from simple teacher to the famous and arrogant master he became rather quickly, thus, in order to see the person behind the texts. Limited to John of Jandun’s commentaries on Aristotle’s works on natural philosophy, the article is an exercise in intellectual history, studying the way in which a particular person, in a particular institutional and historical context, can give us not only an insight in this (in our case remarkable) individual, but also in the context in which he evolved.