- Lived:
- c. 1200–1280 · born Lauingen, Swabia (Germany); taught across Germany and Paris; died Cologne
- Tradition:
- Medieval scholasticism — the Dominican Aristotelian; "the Universal Doctor"
- The Big Idea:
- Faith has nothing to fear from knowledge — so digest all of it: make the whole of Aristotle, and the whole of nature, intelligible to Christian Europe, and check the books against your own eyes.
- In their words:
- "Experiment is the only safe guide in such investigations."
- If you remember one thing:
- The only medieval thinker called "the Great" in his own lifetime spent that lifetime on two projects — translating an entire pagan science into his own civilization, and teaching a quiet, overweight student the rest of the world had written off. Both worked.