Examination of the Islamic sources of inspiration behind Danteʼs imagination raises a debate over the extent of this influence and on the poetʼs personal opinions regarding historical facts, philosophy, theology, mysticism, courtly poetry and divine love, as well as Danteʼs reception within the ferment of subsequent history down to this day. Contemporary attitudes towards Danteʼs relationship to Islamic culture diverge sharply into opposing views.
The subject of this article is Latin reception of Averroes’s treatise De substantia orbis, with special regard to the commentary practice in the late Middle Ages. Numerous philosophical problems were taken up in these commentaries following Averroes’s lead. The most controver-sial among them were these concerning divine attributes, i.e., infinite power, efficient and final causality, and, consequently, God's ability to create out of nothing. Three different commentaries were therefore chosen to exemplify the key differences be-tween the doctrinal approaches of the commentaries on the De substantia orbis. The first two of them-composed by Fernand of Spain and Maino de’ Maineri-represent the Averroistic approach, adopting and developing Averroes’s ideas; the third commentary-composed by an anonymous author in Erfurt around 1362-represents the non-Averroistic approach referring to the questions raised in the De substantia orbis in order to propose orthodox solutions being far from these adopted in the treaty by Averroes himself. The article aims at scrutinizing the problems of infinite power of God and divine causali-ty as they have been taken up by Latin philosophers from the late XIIIth to the second half of the XIVth century by elucidating the key differences between the two lines of inquiry and highligh-ting the variety of approaches to Averroes’s De substantia orbis.
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