THE CONCEPT OF ‘VIRTUS/POTENTIA REI’ IN FOURTEENTH-CENTURY DISCUSSIONS ON TRANSMUTATION AND REACTION
THE CONCEPT OF ‘VIRTUS/POTENTIA REI’ IN FOURTEENTH-CENTURY DISCUSSIONS ON TRANSMUTATION AND REACTION

Summary/Abstract: In the medieval Latin translation of Aristotle’s De generatione we encounter the term ‘virtus’ in the context of the description of mixed bodies. We read there that the ‘virtue’ of the qualities of elements remain in the mixtum („salvatur enim virtus eorum”). Obviously, Aristotle himself meant here that these qualities remain in any mixtum „virtually”, that is in potentia, yet fourteenth-century Oxford and Paris philosophers gave the notion of ‘virtue’ a different meaning in this context. Walter Burley, when commenting on the above-mentioned passage from Aristotle’s De generatione, clearly presents virtutes elementorum as factors responsible for self-induced qualitative changes within a mixtum. Even though Richard Kilvington in his commentary on De generatione uses the term ‘virtus’ synonimically with the term ‘potentia’, as it seems, in his discussions on transmutation and reaction in elementary bodies these terms are used to represent such factors as well, which can be quantified and calculated. In the article I reconstruct the meaning of the terms ‘virtus/potentia rei’ in the context of fourteenth-century natural philosophy on a basis of the texts of Walter Burley, Richard Kilvington, John Buridan, Richard Swineshead, and Nicole Oresme. Also, I allude here to the issue of anachronistic interpretation of medieval ideas and concepts by the historians of science.

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