Rate My Professor Pieter Buellens

Pieter Beullens is an assistant professor on the tenure track at the Institute of Philosophy, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and a member of the De Wulf-Mansion Centre for Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy. He studied classics and philosophy at the universities of Antwerp and Leuven. His research focuses on the transmission of Aristotle's works in the Latin West during the 13th century, with particular emphasis on medieval Latin translations by William of Moerbeke. Beullens co-edited the critical edition of Aristotle’s De historia animalium in Moerbeke’s translation, published in two volumes as part of the Aristoteles Latinus series (Leiden: Brill, 2000; Turnhout: Brepols, 2020). He is the author of the reference monograph The Friar and the Philosopher: William of Moerbeke and the Rise of Aristotle’s Science in Medieval Europe (Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2023), which applies concepts and tools from translation studies and digital humanities to analyze these translations. Currently, he is editing the Latin medieval translations of Aristotle’s De inundatione Nili and Sextus Empiricus’s Adversus mathematicos.

As Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant project “Fluidity in the Medieval Aristotle: Readers and Readings of the Greek-Latin Translations” (FitMA, 2025-2029), Beullens investigates textual fluidity and reader modifications in medieval manuscripts of Aristotle's translations. The project aims to produce critical editions of De anima by James of Venice, De generatione et corruptione by William of Moerbeke, and Simplicius’s commentary on De caelo. His recent publications include “Robert Grosseteste and the Fluid History of the Latin Nicomachean Ethics” in Revista Española de Filosofía Medieval (2023), “Robert Grosseteste’s Translation of Simplicius’s Commentary on Aristotle’s De caelo” in Mediterranea (2023), “The Elementary Particles: A Computational Stylometric Inquiry into the Medieval Greek-Latin Aristotle” in Mediterranea (2024, with Wouter Haverals and Ben Nagy), and “The Shackled Muse: Medieval Latin Translators and Poetry in Greek Philosophers” in Cihannüma (2024). Beullens supervises PhD projects on annotations to Aristotle’s De anima and natural philosophy in the Latin Middle Ages, contributing to the understanding of Aristotle's reception and the history of medieval science and philosophy.