Date/Time
Date(s) - 12 Sep 2017
5:30 PM - 9:30 PM
Location
Columbia University Faculty House
Category(ies) No Categories
The first meeting of the Columbia University Seminar in the Renaissance (a University Seminar, run out of the University Seminars Office in Faculty House) will be held on Tuesday, September 12, 2017, at 5:30 pm in Faculty House Dinner and Further Discussion with the Speaker, $30, by check only, at 7 pm – RSVP to Barbara Vinck by Wednesday September 6.
Peter Carravetta, Stony Brook University
“Dante as philosopher of the polis: free will and the public sphere”
Abstract:
I am interpreting Dante as a political philosopher who addresses the necessity to conceive of the faculty of judgment as an autonomous region of being which can be steered one way or the other toward the pragmatic and ethical sphere (“uses” of science, and good or evil deeds, in Purgatorio 16 & elsewhere), and/or toward a proper grasp of the autonomy of the politicalsphere (separation of powers on earth, in Monarchia). In both cases Dante places the human agent squarely on this material world, disclosing early but clear signs of what later will be called secularization (temporality of consciousness as opposed to atemporality of mind), and paves the way for a notion of civil (or civic) commitment that requires choice, and relational, intersubjective free will. This does not ignore or exclude the role of ideality and spirituality, but grounds them, so to speak, in the actual concourse of peoples. Paper ends suggesting (though not developed here) that Dante has furrowed a path explored further in the next century by Valla and, in different ways, by both Pico and Machiavelli, making him a de facto initiator of Humanism, and key figure in Early and Late Modern Thought whose ideas reach, directly or indirectly, all the way to Montesquieu and Kant.