Robert Grosseteste on transcendentals

In 1996 Jan Aertesen stated that the core of Medieval Philosophy – starting from the Summa de Bono (c. 1225) by Philip the Chancellor – is the doctrine of the transcendentals. This chapter will verify if Grosseteste belonged to the tradition of transcendental thought. After a brief discussion of Aertsen’s thesis, it will focus on some elements of the transcendental theory before and during Grosseteste’s time. In particular it will trace the elements of this doctrine in the twelfth century then those in the first treatises on transcendentals in the thirteenth century. We will then outline five features of the transcendental theory before we discuss Grosseteste’s elaboration of those five characteristics. That is the list of the transcendentals, the introduction of ‘truth’ among them in the thirteenth century, the analogical nature of transcendental names, the primacy of ‘good’ among them and finally considerations about the differences among the transcendentals. This chapter concludes that even though Grosseteste did not develop a systematic account of transcendentals, he did however possess the core ideas of it courtesy of his Neoplatonic sources