already made famous by Dante in the tenth Canto of his Paradise, as a teacher of "odious truths (invidiosi veri) in the rue de Fouarre in Paris (leggendo nel vico degli strami), may be one of these Averroists intended by Thomas Aquinas, and having had access to the Mss. of the National library, Renan consulted the De anima intellectiva, of Siger and discovered there traces of Averroism. But it was left fer Baeumker and especially Mandonnet in the work under review to reveal to us the man Siger and his philosophical work.
A great deal of discussion has been raging around the name of Siger, in which not only the philosophers have taken part, but also literary historians and Dante scholars. He has been confounded with another Siger mentioned in mediæval documents—Siger of Courtrai, and made into an adherent of Thomas Aquinas, or at least a convert to Thomism, instead of an opponent. The events of his life, and particularly his last years and the mode of his death, have also been the subject of great difference of opinion. As to his works, no one had examined them seriously until Clemens Baeumker, the learned professor of the University of Strassburg (then of Breslau), in 1898 published the Impossibilia of Siger with a critical analysis of its contents and an introductory discussion of the events of Siger's life, as he was enabled to construct them from the scattered and fragmentary notices of mediæval documents. The following year (1899) came the first edition of Mandonnet's work on Siger, which contained an elaborate study of Siger's life, personality, and doctrine, with the historical and philosophical background completely sketched in—all this based upon a rich store-house of erudition drawn from the Scholastic literature of the time, from the documents of the University of Paris as published by Denifle and Chatelain (Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis), and last but not least from the works of Siger himself,—as many as could be discovered in the European libraries. These works of Siger, with the exception of the Impossibilia published by Baeumker the year before, were given in an appendix. This was the first time that Siger was characterized as a result of an examination of all his extant works, and the result was very significant. Mandonnet reached a number of conclusions different from those of Baeumker. On the strength of a statement of Tocco, the biographer of Thomas Aquinas, Baeumker and others assumed that Siger was implicated in the attacks of William of St. Amour upon the mendicant orders in the years 1252-59. Mandonnet, I think, makes out a good case against Tocco, showing that his knowledge of the earlier activities of his hero is far from precise or trustworthy, and as the name of Siger
