Iohannes Blund : Tractatus De Anima

The Tractatus de Anima of John Blund was a discovery of Father Daniel Callus, but he did not live to complete the edition. The treatise was written c. 1200, and is the earliest known philosophical work by an Oxford Master.

It grafts the new learning derived from Avicenna and Aristotle onto older stocks.

Its great interest is that it enables us to study the way in which the first generation of scholars used the translations of Greek and Arabic philosophical and scientific texts which had just become available in Western Europe. The edition was completed by Dr R. W. Hunt, Keeper of Western Manuscripts at the Bodleian Library, Oxford.