William of Conches c. 1090 – c. 1154
William of Conches was a French scholastic philosopher and grammarian and one of the leading lights of the School of Chartres in the twelfth-century renaissance. He taught grammar, logic, and natural philosophy at Chartres and Paris and served for a time as tutor to the future Henry II of England. His Philosophia Mundi and the more mature Dragmaticon Philosophiae offered a Christian-Platonist natural philosophy that took very seriously the new astronomical and medical learning then arriving from the Greek and Arabic worlds and insisted on the legitimate use of reason in inquiring into the workings of nature.
Key facts
- Nationality
- French
- Era
- Medieval
- Movements
- Medieval, Scholasticism, Christian
Selected quotes
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Attributed to William of Conches:
“Nature is the workshop of God.”
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Attributed to William of Conches:
“What we cannot know fully, we should still try to know in part.”
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Attributed to William of Conches:
“The world is intelligible because it is the work of intelligence.”
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Attributed to William of Conches:
“Reason and faith are friends, not enemies.”
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Attributed to William of Conches:
“Even the heavens move by causes that may be inquired into.”