This talk will explore the relation of the notion of body to the Aristotelian categorial scheme as expressed in the distinction between body as substance (corpus substantia) and quantified body (corpus quantum) employed by thirteenth and fourteenth-century thinkers. The focus will be on the early thirteenth-century thinker Robert Grosseteste, an important figure in the history of science and the first in the Latin West to write a commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, where this distinction makes one of its earliest appearances.
