DANTE E LA FILOSOFIA - Testo pubblicato nel sito dell'Università della Terza Età di Trieste (original) (raw)

2022, uni3trieste.it uploads

This is the speech given in December 2015 at the round table conference "Eredità e creatività nella Commedia di Dante" organized by the University of the Third Age of Trieste. The short essay intends to outline the salient features of Dante's programme at the philosophical level that we find announced in the “De vulgari eloquentia”: to take in the best of what others provide by mixing it with one's own commitment. As Ruedi Imbach noted (“Dante, la philosophie et les laïcs”, 1996), Alighieri is a lay philosopher addressing a lay audience. Thus, he is part of a broad cultural movement active in Florence and Bologna between the 13th and 14th centuries. Faced with a culture traditionally dominated by clerics and monks who in their language (Latin) considered themselves the custodians of knowledge, Dante claims everyone's right to wisdom, including the laity, that is the “non litterati”, men and women. This implies the primacy of ethics over speculative philosophy, with a clear break with Aristotelian tradition. And it involves a political anthropology which, rejecting the curialist theory of a “plenitudo potestatis” of the Pope, attributes to man “duo ultima”, namely two distinct and self-sufficient ends: on the one hand, the ultramundane felicity announced by Christ and, on the other, the felicity of this life, attainable (according to the teaching of the Nicomachean Ethics) through the practice of moral and intellectual virtues. Therefore, divine revelation and reason are, respectively, sufficient in principle to achieve these two ends, even if in fact, because of their greed, men need two different and independent guides: the Roman pontiff and the emperor. See: https://www.uni3trieste.it/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Dante-e-la-filosofia.pdf