BOEZIO di DACIA. — A scholastic philosopher of the thirteenth century, of whom very little is known. He was neither a Dominican nor a religious nor a priest, but a simple cleric, professor in the faculty of arts at the University of Paris, where, together with Sigeri di Brabante, he taught Averroism. Implicated with the latter in the condemnation of Latin Averroism pronounced by the bishop of Paris, Stefano Tempier, in 1277, he was obliged to appear before the Roman court. Tried and condemned to perpetual detention as a heretic who had recanted, he died in prison before 1284.
According to some, he commented on the whole of Aristotle, but he is known chiefly as the author of various Questions on grammar, logic, and natural philosophy, such as De modis significandi, Sophismata logica, Quaestiones super Topica Aristotelis, Super librum physicorum quaestiones. Grabmann discovered two other treatises, namely De somno et vigilia and De summo bono sine de vita philosophia, in which the study of philosophy is presented as man’s supreme happiness, with the omission, if not indeed the exclusion, of the supernatural aspect of beatitude.