VARGAS, ALFONSO (Toletanus). - Augustinian philosopher and theologian, b. at Toledo, c. 1300, d. at Seville on 26 Dec. 1366.
In Paris he commented on the Sentences between 1343 and 1345. In 1353 he was appointed bishop of Badajoz; on 24 Oct. 1354 he was transferred to Osma, and on 18 June 1361 to the metropolitan see of Seville. He had lived almost always in Italy, as a collaborator of Card. Albornoz in the government of the Papal States. On 18 Nov. 1362 he was certainly in Seville, where he zealously devoted himself to the conversion of the Mohammedans. He is one of the most famous scholastics of the 14th century, of the school of Egidio Romano, and closely follows Tommaso di Strasburgo, who was probably his master in Paris. Although of eclectic tendencies, V. nominalism. His Lectura on Book I of the Sentences (Venice 1490) is a reliable guide to knowledge of the doctrinal currents of scholasticism.
He wrote: Quaestiones in tres libros de anima (Florence 1477); De potentiis animae (not yet identified, but listed in the catalogue of Ambrogio da Cori); Tractatus contra iudaeos, mentioned by Giacomo Pérez di Valencia (cf. Opere, Venice 1586, p. 1260). Others add Commentaria in II-IV Sent., but no manuscripts of it are known.