BOUJU, Theophraste, Sieur de Beaulieu. Corps de Toute la Philosophie divisé en Deux Parties. La premiere contient tout ce qui appartient à la Sapience, à Scavoir, la Logique, la Physique & la Metaphysique. La seconde contient tout ce qui appartient à la P

BOUJU, Theophraste, Sieur de Beaulieu. Corps de Toute la Philosophie divisé en Deux Parties. La premiere contient tout ce qui appartient à la Sapience, à Scavoir, la Logique, la Physique & la Metaphysique. La seconde contient tout ce qui appartient à la Prudence, à scavoir, la Morale, l'Oeconomique & la Politique. Le tout par demonstration & auctorité d'Aristote, avec esclarcissement de sa doctrine par luy-meme. Paris: Charles Chastellain. 1614.

Folio: title-page printed in red and black, with engraved vignette, 1037, [47]; 480, [35] pp., errata leaf; engraved head-pieces, tail-pieces and initial letters; small hole (burn?) in pp.21-24 with loss of a few letters, minor adhesion damage to pp.491-2, some light staining to first and last few leaves. Contemporary blind stamped vellum (lacks ties), somewhat soiled and rubbed, partly split on front joint. First edition.

Scarce. Includes Greek texts from Aristotle, with French commentary, and constitutes an early French-language complete philosophy course. Bouju (dates not found) was almoner to Henry IV. [Bouju] is writing an ordinary philosophy textbook in French (for those not comfortable or not educated in the Latin of the schools). ... Théophraste Bouju, in a work whose title page announces that all of it has the authority of Aristotle, rejected the Aristotelian four elements, discarding the sphere of fire and, as a consequence, argued against the radical heterogeneity of the sub-lunary and supra-lunary spheres. However, he safeguarded the de facto immutability of the heavens. .... Bouju was a Thomist in many respects .... [he] also kept some Averroist elements. Bouju asserted that place is movable per se in what he called 'lieu de situation' and per accidens in what he called 'lieu environnant'. .... The discussion of ideas in Bouju's Philosophy is fairly standard. Enumerating the four Aristotelian causes, Bouju adds an account of 'exemplary causation'. Ideas are routinely identified with exemplars, either Platonic ideas or ideas in God's mind, and the question discussed is, whether in serving as models for creation, ideas as exemplars cause the things that imitate them in some fifth way. Further, the physician has an idea of health, the architect in building a house tried to make it like the one 'he has in his mind', and so on. Bouju is echoing a well-established Scholastic-Aristotelian tradition, in which ideas are either the forms in God's mind according to which he makes things, or the exemplars in artificers' minds when they make their artefacts. Ideas as exemplars, however, are not strictly psychological. They are forms which are in general, not particular, patterns to be followed in this or that case, rather than particular mental events (Bouju 1614 I:297-8). Roger Ariew, Descartes and the Last Scholastics, and in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy.