Parts and Wholes in Brito’s Questions on Boethius’ De divisione

Radulphus Brito, who taught the arts in Paris in the 1290s and early 1300s, is the author of two very different sets of questions on Boethius’ De divisione. Obviously, the relationship between parts and their whole is the central issue in those questions, but discussions of mereology are also found in his question commentaries on a number of other works belonging to the philosophical corpus that was lectured on at the time. Thus, there are relevant questions in his commentaries on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Physics, Categories and De anima, on Porphyry’s Isagoge, Ptolemy’s Almagest and Boethius’ De topicis differentiis, and even a sophisma of his must be taken into account. In this essay, the two sets of questions on De divisione are first introduced, and then an analysis of all types of totality discussed by Brito in his various works is presented.