Le désir de connaître et la démonstration de la primauté de la philosophie première chez Dominique de Flandre

The desire of knowledge constitutes, as it is well known, the opening ‘theme’ of Aristotle’s Metaphysics . This article focuses on the figure of Dominic of Flanders, one of the commentators of Aristotle’s Metaphysics who much developed this topic. Dominicus deals with it in the second question of the first book of his commentary. What makes the interest of Dominic’s account is its originality, in so far as, according to him, the beginning of Aristotle’s Metaphysics aims to stress the very primacy of Metaphsyics, and not only (as it was in Thomas Aquinas’ commentary), the primacy of science in general. In this sense, the desire of knowledge constitutes for Dominic the most efficacious argument for the primacy of Metaphsyics. However, this is possible only if the desiderium sciendi is related to two other principles: the first is that desirability entails perfection, and the second is that the desirability of an object depends on its intelligibility.