Hardly anything seems more ordinary than the extended, concrete bodies populating the world of experience. Yet in explaining their manifest properties, physicists must appeal to entities radically unlike the bodies of our experience. Medieval Aristotelians too struggled to resolve tensions between the characteristics of the bodies we experience (corporeality), and the principle that accounts for the way bodies are (matter). This panel uncovers key difficulties that theorists of the High Middle Ages encountered when deploying Aristotelian notions of body to account for the bodies we experience. It thus offers a new window onto the fraying and reweaving of medieval paradigms of the physical world in the thirteenth century. The first three papers examine tensions within medieval paradigms of corporeality. Neil Lewis will explore medieval attempts to fit ‘body’ into the Aristotelian categorial scheme by distinguishing body as substance and quantified body. David Cory will examine the emergence of a ‘dual explanation’ of physical phenomena in terms of materiality and corporeality. Nicola Polloni will show how this duality raised questions about matter’s (un)knowability, putting its physical function into tension with its metaphysical limitations. The last two papers treat two cases, concerning bodily properties, that challenged Aristotelian paradigms among thirteenth-century Christian and Islamic intellectuals. Therese Cory will examine how Parisian theorists sought to integrate light into their paradigm of corporeality. Emma Gannagé will examine how the post-Avicennian medical tradition handled the problem of bodies exhibiting secondary qualities (magnetism or healing properties) beyond those manifested by all bodies in common.
