Antonius Trombetta within the Context of the Franciscan Tradition in Padua

Abstract

The article is devoted to Antonius Trombetta who was a philosopher and  theologian from Padua and represented the tradition of Paduan franciscan Scotism between the 15^th and 16^th centuries. The article considers briefly the history of the Franciscan convent in Padua and the biography of Trombetta, reconstructed by scholars. It also treats the main spheres of Trombetta’s activity. Firstly, Trombetta participated in metaphysical discussions with thomists from Paduan university about priority and supreme status of physic or metaphysics and, correspondingly, about the appropriate methodology of cognition. Secondly, Trombetta took part in controversies with averroists around the question of the status of human intellegent soul. The University of Padua was the center of the second wave of averroism, which proved the unity of material intelligence for all mankind. Contrary to this statement, Trombetta defended the individuality of the human soul in general and of human thinking in particular. The most significant from a historical and philosophical point of view was the participation of Trombetta in the third discussion. It dealt with the so-called formalist movement within the Scotistic philosophy after the Duns Scotus. The followers of Duns created within the framework of scholastic literature the genre of “Treatises on formalities”, that is, on ontological units, which make up the individual unity of things. Trombetta wrote one of the first comments to the authoritative text of this tradition – the “Treatise on formalities” by Antony Sirekt, and as a commentator he was perceived in the next century and a half as one of the classics of the formalist tradition.