Background
De Wulf, Maurice Charles Joseph was born on April 6, 1867 in Poperinghe, Belgium.
De Wulf, Maurice Charles Joseph was born on April 6, 1867 in Poperinghe, Belgium.
University of Louvain.
1894-1939, Professor of Medieval Philosophy, Institut Supérieur de Philosophic at Louvain. 1920-1927, Professor of Medieval Philosophy, Harvard University.
One of the most distinguished historians of medieval philosophy in the early part of the century. In keeping with the character of Louvain’s Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, he focused sharply upon medieval philosophy, rather than, say, medieval thought. He provided his philosophical colleagues, and generations of students of philosophy, with clear and accurate accounts of the medieval texts and the medieval philosophical culture on the basis of which they were attempting to reconstruct Thomistic and scholastic thinking in contemporary language, and for a contemporary readership. He envisaged medieval philosophy as a more or less homogeneous and, from the thirteenth century, more or less Aristotelian enterprise. Later historians, influenced by Gilson and others, discern great diversities among medieval philosophers, and have uncovered a much greater element of later neo-Platonism than was hitherto realized. De Wulf was highly regarded in his own time, and his historical studies are still worth reading, but he has to some extent been superseded.