Joël Lonfat, D.Phil.
Medieval Philosophy
Born and raised in the south of Switzerland (Valais), a space without University influence, Joël Lonfat had soon decided to leave his French-speaking home county to move to Geneva and start his studies in the city of Calvin.
After a small detour in the Chemistry department where they decided they could do without him and he had to agree, he was soon drawn to Philosophy. Learning and studying under and with Jonathan Barnes, Alain de Libera, Kevin Mulligan and Curzio Chiesa, he was quickly finding his way into the abstract and epistemology and eventually into the ‘silent years’: the Middle Ages.
But silence can only reign where we let it and so, between shedding light on the intricacies of the analogy of being and the reception of Averroes in Latin Medieval thought, the finer workings of the history of text and producing critical text editions as an editor, translator and commenter became more and more important. It is therefore without surprise that he successfully defended a doctorate in philosophy on Giles of Rome's De plurificatione intellectus possibilis.
While the 'usual' way of philosophers to contextualise and question still remains a large part of his work, he still dedicates a good part of his time to text editing and the production of critical text editions (e.g. Richard Brinkley's Summa Logicae together with Laurent Cesalli, Université de Lille, France).
Joël Lonfat lives currently in Valais (Switzerland).
For more detail and to follow the blog, please refer to Mediaevaliter.com
Current Projects:
- Giles of Rome and its treaty on the multiplication of the intellect
- The place and influence of the Anonymous of Giele in the discussions on the intellect in the end of the 13th Century
- 13th Century university policy and the condemnations of 1270 and 1277
- The critical edition of Richard Brinkley's Summa Logicae
Current Topics of Research:
- The early life of the universities: the scholars between politics and power
- Epistemology at the end of the 13th Century: on the unicity/multiplicity of the intellect
- Theory of the supposition in the Middle Ages: the case of Richard Brinkley
- Modern Thomism: from metaphysics of being to metaphysics of meaning
Contact
Blackfriars Hall, 64 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LY, United Kingdom
joel.lonfat (at) bfriars.ox.ac.uk
