L'universalità della dottrina ilemorfica. Un confronto con il pensiero di Pietro di Giovanni Olivi

The ilemorphic doctrine has its earliest origin in the thought of Aristotle, according to whom every becoming entity is an ilemorphic compound that must be conceived as a synolus of matter and form. The Aristotelian doctrine was highly valued by Scholastic and, despite the various interpretations given to it by different Masters, it remained a common and distinctive doctrine throughout the medieval philosophical tradition. The result is a series of dissimilar interpretations, but the main difficulty, which united and divided the great Masters, lies in the question: is the ilemorphic structure universal or not? This contribution intends to answer this question starting from the thought of the Franciscan Pietro di Giovanni Olivi, who enters the debate as a de- fender of the universality of ilemorphic composition, managing to keep his distance from those ultrarealist conceptions, thus excluding the hypothesis of an a priori uniqueness of matter, and supporting the existence of different materials as the expression of a single potential matter.