Introduction

Godfrey of Fontaines was born around 1250. He studied the liberal arts at Paris during the second regency of Thomas Aquinas (1269–72) and then studied theology under Henry of Ghent and Gervase of Mt. St. Elias at the Sorbonne from around 1274. He taught as a regent master in the Faculty of Theology from 1285 to 1298–99 and again around 1303–4, before his death ca. 1306–9. Like Henry of Ghent, Godfrey of Fontaines produced his most important work in metaphysics, epistemology, and moral theology in the form of quodlibetic questions. Unlike Henry, however, Godfrey was a close adherent of Thomas Aquinas and, perhaps as a result of an education in the Faculty of Arts under Siger of Brabant, a more sympathetic reader of Aristotle. Thus, not only was Godfrey a firm opponent of Bishop Tempier's 1277 condemnation, but some of his most distinctive positions were established in dialogue with, and in opposition to, arguments set out in Henry's quodlibets.

Godfrey's approach to the issues raised by Book IX of the Ethics exemplifies much that is characteristic of his thought: direct engagement with Henry of Ghent, a close reading of Aristotle, and an attachment to Aquinas. In his tenth quodlibet, delivered in 1294–95, he sets out the problems presented by the passage in Ethics IX in which Aristotle appears to suggest that a virtuous individual's act of self-sacrifice is motivated primarily by desire to secure the greatest good for himself.