Is there a connection between theology and philosophy? Between grammar and astronomy? If so, what is it? Today, it would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that these disciplines are connected only insofar as they are all taught at schools. This is not how the ancients saw things. In fact, the ancients saw these as an organized and coherent whole. How did they classify and organize the sciences? Two important classifications were written down in the twelfth century: one by Hugh of St. Victor and one by Domingo Gudisalvo.

Let's spend a few weeks looking at a Gundisalvo's 1141 Classification of the Sciences. Gundisalvo's classification was influenced by (his own) recent translation of Arabic texts and commentaries into Latin and Castillian. Here is a pdf file of Gundisalvo's Classification of the Sciences that I photocopied from Grant, E., A Source Book in Medieval Science. Cambridge: Harvard University Press (1974).

Oh, and here is a bio of Gundisalvo from wikipedia: Dominicus Gundissalinus, also known as Domingo Gundisalvi or Gundisalvo (c. 1115 – post 1190), was a philosopher and translator of Arabic to Medieval Latin active in Toledo. Among his translations, Gundissalinus worked on Avicenna's Liber de philosophia prima and De anima, Ibn Gabirol's Fons vitae, and al-Ghazali's Summa theoricae philosophiae, in collaboration with the Jewish philosopher Abraham Ibn Daud and Johannes Hispanus. As a philosopher, Gundissalinus crucially contributed to the Latin assimilation of Arabic philosophy, being the first Latin thinker in receiving and developing doctrines, such as Avicenna's modal ontology or Ibn Gabirol's universal hylomorphism, that would soon be integrated into the thirteenth-century philosophical debate.