Per un'ermeneutica della testimonianza in Pietro Giovanni Olivi

[Autom. eng. transl.] There are few studies on testimony as a source of knowledge in the medieval sphere. In the middle age the testimony was not explicitly thematized as an epistemic modality, but all the authors make use of the argumentum ab auctoritate, in most cases understood and used on the same level as the rational argumentation and that of the resulting evidence experience. It is the very organization of medieval teaching that highlights the importance of the transmission of knowledge through the use of witness. Keeping firmly the Olivian perspective according to which all human knowledge is produced by the abstraction of our intellect, which can therefore draw on the fundamentum of objects, from which all cognitive experience starts, only through the experience of conscience, in which only the knowledge that the 'soul has of its own being and existence is intuitive for modum sensus experimentalis and in which the independence of the human soul from the object and its self-sufficiency to produce knowledge was reaffirmed, we try to highlight how the testimony can be a form of authentic knowledge.