PWL International Seminar #3

PWL INTERNATIONAL SEMINAR #3

“Intellectual Happiness in XIV-century Bologna: Reading Gentile of Cingoli and Related Texts”

MATTEO STETTLER

ONLINE | May 28 | 8 PM (CET)

Abstract

This presentation examines the rediscovery of philosophy as a way of life in Dante’s Italy, engaging critically with Pierre Hadot’s thesis that the medieval university and the rise of Scholasticism led to the decline of ancient philosophy as a spiritual practice. Against this narrative – which Hadot himself partly retracted later on in his career – the article builds on the intuition of Maria Corti to show that the ideal of “intellectual happiness” (felicitas intellectualis) – the contemplative life ideal celebrated in Book X of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and revived by thirteenth-century Parisian masters of arts such as Boethius of Dacia and Siger of Brabant – did not remain confined to Paris but was successfully exported to Italy, particularly to the studium of Arts and Medicine at the University of Bologna between the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.

Through a detailed analysis of the Bolognese master Gentile of Cingoli’s prologue to his commentary on Martin of Dacia’s Modi significandi and a series of related texts, the article identifies four key topoi of this protreptic literature: (1) the condemnation of those who pursue sensory pleasures; (2) the claim that only the philosopher deserves to be called a human being; (3) the conviction that the highest attainable happiness consists in speculative activity; and (4) the idea that such activity is an emulation of the divine life. As we shall see, all these themes reveal striking parallels with the Parisian model of “intellectual happiness” as articulated by Boethius of Dacia in his De summo bono.

Bio

A perspective postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Philosophy (Ifilnova) of the NOVA University of Lisbon, Matteo Stettler previously held a position as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Bologna, working within the PRIN 2022 project ‘TeLPh. Teaching and Learning Philosophy in the Regnum Italiae (1250–1450).’ In this context, he worked on the transcription and study of medieval texts survived in manuscript form from the Bolognese studium of the arts of the 13th–14th centuries, including works by Italian Aristotelian commentators like Gentile da Cingoli. To date, he has co-authored two critical editions of such texts: one containing a series of sermons in praise of logic and philosophy transmitted by the Ms. Sevilla, Biblioteca Capitular y Columbina 56-1-6 (co-edited with Stefano Pelizzari, in the series Flumen Sapientiae, Aracne Editore), another of Gentile of Cingoli’s Reportationes super libro sex principiorum (co-edited with Costantino Marmo, in the same book series). He earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Deakin University (Melbourne, Australia), where he investigated the Aristotelian strand of philosophy as a way of life, namely the model of the contemplative life as the happy life, from antiquity to the Middle Ages. Shortly after, he earned Module C of the ‘Diplôme Européen d’Études Médiévales’ (DEEM) at the Fédération Internationale des Instituts d’Études Médiévales (FIDEM). While completing his Ph.D., Matteo also served as Adjunct Instructor at the Lorenzo de’ Medici Institute of Florence, Italy, where he taught the undergraduate course “The Pursuit of Happiness” (PHI220). In addition to the above-mentioned critical editions, his research has resulted in a substantial body of work, including articles in peer-reviewed international journals such as Philosophy and Social Criticism, Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum, Foucault Studies, and Aevum. He has contributed several essays to edited volumes, including forthcoming publications with Brill and Oxford University Press. His translation work includes the recent Brill volume Philosophy, Theory or Way of Life? Controversies in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance (2024), the forthcoming Italian translation of Pierre Hadot’s writings on conversion (La filosofia come conversione) for Edizioni ETS, and an upcoming English translation of Hadot’s 1971 essay ‘Conversio’ for Philosophy Today.

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