Alain de Libera is a historian of philosophy specialising in medieval thought. His research has focused on medieval philosophy, with particular emphasis on logic, philosophy of language, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and medieval psychology. He has also made major contributions to the study of the transmission and transformation of Greek and Arabic philosophy in the Latin West, notably through his work on Latin Averroism and medieval Neoplatonism.
A further important area of his scholarship is the history of medieval theology and its intersections with philosophy. His publications have addressed Thomas Aquinas, the Rhineland mystical tradition, especially Meister Eckhart, and the relations between scholasticism, mysticism, and theories of intellect and cognition.
Much of his recent work forms part of The Archaeology of the Subject, a multi-volume project, several volumes of which have already appeared, devoted to reconstructing the long and discontinuous history of the concepts of subject, self, agency, and thought from Antiquity through the Middle Ages to modern philosophy.
He also directed the section on “Latin, Logic, and Language” in the Vocabulaire européen des philosophies, whose English-language edition appeared as Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon.
