ABSTRACT
The theories of light that were in circulation in the European universities of the thirteenth century have received surprisingly little scholarly attention from historians of medieval philosophy. Yet the nature of light poses important metaphysical puzzles for medieval thinkers, and analogies to light are a leitmotif of thirteenth-century philosophical psychology. This study investigates light’s role in enabling vision of colors, focusing on the 1240s–50s, a pivotal moment in the Latin Scholastic reception of Islamic natural philosophy. It takes a contextualizing approach, examining how three interconnected Greco-Islamic theories of light—those of Aristotle, Avicenna, and Averroes—were received at the University of Paris in the mid-thirteenth century, in the writings of Albert the Great, Bonaventure, and Thomas Aquinas.
