KILWARDBY, ROBERT. — English Dominican, born in the county of Leicester ca. 1200, died at Viterbo on 11 September 1279. He entered the Order between 1240 and 1245, when he was, or had already been, master of arts in Paris. From 1248 to 1261 he held the Dominican chair at Oxford; thereafter he was provincial for England until 1272, when he was appointed archbishop of Canterbury. In 1274 he took part in the Council of Lyons. He was appointed cardinal bishop of Porto and S. Rufina on 12 March 1278.
As a teacher in the Faculty of Arts, he wrote commentaries on Donatus, Priscian, Boethius, the Prior and Posterior Analytics, the Sophistical Refutations, the Physics, the De anima, and the Metaphysics of Aristotle; as a theologian, he commented on the Sentences and on several books of the Bible. But he is also the author of treatises such as the De ortu et divisione scientiarum, the De unitate formarum, the De tempore, and others. K., taken as a whole, remained faithful in his work to pre-Thomistic Augustinian and Avicennian scholasticism. In the De ortu (ch. 31), he admits with Avicbron a common matter in all created beings, corporeal and incorporeal, and attributes to universals a physical existence as generic forms of this matter.
On 18 March 1277 he induced the masters of Oxford to censure as harmful thirty theses, ten of which were notoriously defended by s. Tommaso, particularly those concerning the origin of the human soul and its simplicity. In reality, Thomistic doctrine injured an old theory that was widespread among English theologians, as
Roger Bacon attests (Comm. natural., IV, 3, 1). Following the remonstrances of his confrere Pietro di Conflans, bishop of Corinth, K. was induced, in a lengthy letter to him, to defend the English thesis, declaring the Thomistic one «fatta positio vel imaginatio phantastica». He Egidio di Lessines (v.).