Ilaria Morresi: The division of knowledge between Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages: diagrams on Philosophy from Cassiodorus to the IXth century.

At the beginning of the de dialectica chapter of Institutiones’ book II, Cassiodorus places a diagram with the traditional Aristotelian division of Philosophy into inspectiuaand actualis, probably following a Greek source from the Alexandrinian School. The same scheme is adopted by Isidore in his Etymologies; Isidore, however, also combines it with the Platonic divisio of the same discipline into physica, ethica and logica. It is, therefore, from Cassiodorus and Isidorus that the Carolingian Renaissance primarily received the opposition between the Platonic and Aristotelian schemes, which has been so relevant during subsequent centuries for the classification of the Liberal Arts.The purpose of this paper is to provide a summary of the various schemes for the division of Philosophy which originated in this context. I will primarily consider the second interpolated recension of Cassiodorus’ Institutiones(Δ), the diagrams inserted between Alcuinus’ De rhetorica and De dialectica in a compact group of witnesses of these two works (which later, in the form of marginal glosses, flew into manuscripts of Cicero’s De inventione) and an anonymous treatise De partibus philosophiae, that achieved a great popularity from the IXth century onwards.All of these texts present both obscurities and mistakes, often originated by the attempt at balancing the various branches of Platonic and Aristotelian divisions, but also traces of possibly ancient Greek material. A careful analysis of their manuscript tradition and content will therefore allow us to shed light on a topic that clearly was of remarkable interest during the Carolingian Renaissance.