Authors:Maria Tilde Bettetini Abstract: Through some pages of Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas we see some medieval solutions to the platonic drama of a beauty defined by numbers and measures, however with suprasensible roots: how can we say beautiful what cannot be measured' If Beauty is Harmony and Proportion, consequently how can it derive from a suprasensible beauty' How will it be possible to express aesthetic judgments that go beyond measurement' The medieval answers to these questions are far beyond the postmodern uncertainties, maintaining paradoxes. Issue No:Vol. 11
Authors:Ernesto Sergio Mainoldi Abstract: Moving from the problem of defining how medieval speculation conceived the aesthetic dimension of art, this essay purposes an insight into the aspects that describe the peculiarity of the Byzantine conception of beauty and art. Surpassing the noetic perspective established by Platonic thought – shared also by Western medieval philosophy – according to which beauty is an intelligible model subsisting in itself as an autonomous entity, the Byzantine proper vision conceives beauty as a divine energy. The implications of this perspective lead us to investigate its connection with some of the most original achievements of Byzantine speculation, such as hypostatic ontology, theology of deification, eikonic thinking, and especially sophianic gnoseology, which permit us to overcome the dichotomy of the intelligible and the sensible domains of reality. Issue No:Vol. 11
Authors:Fabrizio Amerini Abstract: Talking of “medieval aesthetics” is historiographically disputable. During the Middle Ages, in fact, there is no discipline comparable with the aesthetics as from the eighteenth century we know it. In the medieval period, aesthetic considerations mostly occur in spurious contexts, and are all, so to say, pre-theoretical. They refer to different insights on what is the beautiful (pulchrum) and what relationship holds between the beauty (pulchritudo) and its artistic expression. In the Middle Ages, that is, one can frequently encounters forms we would nowadays call of descriptive aesthetics, occasionally forms of normative aesthetics, rather sporadically meta-aesthetic considerations. Not even a privileged attention is reserved to aesthetics understood as the description of the conditions of pleasure that follow from the perception of the beautiful, despite the theme of dilectum is important in the aesthetic meditations of medieval masters. Aesthetic discussions predominantly concern the relationships between the artist, an object and its representation (especially pictorial). In this essay, I reconsider these relationships by discussing a key point of Thomas Aquinas’s reflection on the beauty: the role played by of the notion of representation in the explanation of the artistic process. Issue No:Vol. 11
Authors:Mohamadreza Abolghassemi Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to study the philosophy of Avicenna (980-1073), in order to identify his thoughts and reflections regarding aesthetics. We will try to analyze several texts in which he treated the notion of beauty. This analysis will allow us to compare the aesthetics of Avicenna with its main origins, namely Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism. Then, the detailed presentation of his aesthetic reflections will show us that his contributions to subjects relating to beauty, perfection, and aesthetic delight bear some originality which, despite the determining influence of Neoplatonism, has its own independent voice. The latter is the case, since these originalities are the results of a hybridization of two great philosophical schools, namely Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism. Issue No:Vol. 11
Authors:Giuseppe Di Giacomo Abstract: The essay proposes a notion of “icon” understood, according to the paradigm born of the Second Council of Nicaea (787 AD), as a visible image of the invisible qua invisible. In this light, the distinctive feature of the icon-image is its ability to manifest the paradoxical identity-difference relationship that links visible and invisible, and, consequently, representable and unrepresentable, immanence and transcendence, eternity and time. By offering itself as the privileged place for the presentation of an absence and of a “withdrawal” (the withdrawal of the invisible from the visible through the visible), the icon is distinguished in the first place by its apophatic and kenotic character. In this sense, the salient trait of the icon is its constitutive disquiet: it is founded on the “relational economy” of the image, which implies the need of an incessant articulation of the relation between visible and invisible. We can thus see in the icon the paradigm itself of “great art”: indeed, like the icon, great art is always primarily characterised by its disquiet, that is its ability to make transcendence appear in immanence, the Other of the visible appear in the visible. Issue No:Vol. 11
Authors:Cecilia Panti Abstract: The convergence of the Neoplatonic/Neopythagorean approach with the Aristotelian organization of the sciences is one of the most interesting features that characterizes the two influential mathematical treatises on On Arithmetics (De institutione arithmetica) and On Music (De institutione musica) by Severinus Boethius. Basing his reasoning on Nicomachus and Ptolemy, Boethius follows the philosophical tradition that had tried to reconcile Plato’s and Aristotle’s views. This attitude is examined in the present paper as regards Boethius’ response concerning the relation between numbers, ethics and aesthetics. His view emerges as coming out of a rather complex construction, which assigns the ethical scope of mathematics in indicating to the human mind how to correct the ratios that realize the best relationship in movements of the soul and the body. More precisely, its ethical aim is to correct the specific form of movement of human beings, that is their actions, exemplified in the way in which mathematical ratios represent the forms of government and musical ratios evoke and heal psychophysical affections. More complex, on the other hand, is the relationship between mathematics and beauty. In clear antithesis to the position taken by Augustine on the beauty of the rhythmic patterns that better represent the beauty of unity, Boethius does not relate the mathematical ratios of the consonances to an esthetical judgment by making use of the category of beauty. For him, the physical world is totally immersed in changes and movements, and this cannot but impede things from expressing the stable unity, which is required for contemplating the beautiful. Issue No:Vol. 11
Authors:Stefano Perfetti Abstract: This essay examines the biblical discourse on animals in Job 38-41, as interpreted by Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas in their 13th-century biblical commentaries. In God’s first reply to Job (chapters 38 and 39) twelve species of animals are introduced and realistically described, including accurate details of their behavior. Subsequently, chapters 40 and 41 introduce two more complex animals, Behemoth and Leviathan, in which realistic and symbolic features intertwine. This peculiarity of the book of Job – long sequences dedicated to descriptions of animals – allows to investigate to what extent and how the availability of Aristotelian zoology, whose study was prescribed in the Dominican program promoted and practiced by Albert himself, became an instrument for a renewed biblical exegesis, different from the allegorical and theological moralizing hitherto prevailing in the Christian tradition of commentaries on Job. Issue No:Vol. 11
Authors:Amalia Cerrito Abstract: In the 13th century, the availability of Aristotle’s treatises of natural philosophy encouraged forms of integration between libri naturales and sapientia biblica. Instead of diving into allegory and symbolism, several Dominican exegetes began to explore more realistic approaches. The foremost figure is Albert the Great. In his biblical commentaries, philosophy of nature and theology join forces as complementary forms of knowledge. By focusing on Albert’s De vegetabilibus, this paper is aimed at analyzing in which ways the Dominican master reuses his naturalistic and, especially, botanical knowledge as an exegetical tool to deepen both the historical and the allegorical sense, realism and spiritual interpretation. Issue No:Vol. 11
Authors:Riccardo Saccenti Abstract: Natural law is a crucial subject in the twelfth-century debates among Roman and canon lawyers, but also among the exegetes and theologians. Starting from two verses of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (Rm 1:18-20 and 2:13-14), the masters debated the natural capability of human being to achieve a moral knowledge and the features of the universal moral principle, that is the lex naturalis, which natural reason can understand. Through the analysis of Gilbert of La Porrée’s Glossa in epistolas Beati Pauli (ca. 1130) and of Ps. Hugh of St. Victor’s Quaestiones in epistolas Beati Pauli (ca. 1160), this essay examines the exegetical developments in the Parisian milieu of the mid-twelfth century. It shows how the doctrinal positions of Gilbert and the Ps. Hugh stand in their intellectual landscape and which influence they have in the development of the theological debate on natural law. Issue No:Vol. 11
Authors:Anna Rodolfi Abstract: This paper deals with the discussion by Albert the Great of the possibility of a human knowledge of God. Albert’s reflection on this topics is articulated in different levels: from a first level, concerning our natural or ordinary knowledge of God, to the upper level of the beatific vision after death, passing through the mystical contemplation of divinity during earthly life. Even if he does not exclude the possibility of knowing God through affectus, Albert finally states that God’s essence goes beyond the range of human knowledge. Issue No:Vol. 11
Authors:Enrico Donato Abstract: In this paper I consider a problem – originally raised by Thomas Aquinas – that is a side effect of integrating Aristotle’s epistemology with Augustine’s. Thus, how can the human soul obtain knowledge of its own stable dispositions (habitus)' In a serious attempt to meet the constraints that Aristotle had placed on the possibility of human reflexive thought, Aquinas builds his answer on a distinction between actual and habitual self-knowledge. Both Matthew of Acquasparta and Roger Marston will draw on the distinction, as well as on the overall formulation of the problem, and yet – due to a stronger commitment to Augustineʼs epistemology – they will reject with different arguments Aquinas’s solution. Issue No:Vol. 11
Authors:Roberta Guccinelli Abstract: In this paper I provide an ecological, Schelerian-based description of the aesthetic experience that, without being exhaustive, may account for its complexity, perspective character and stratifications. Aesthetic enjoyment, aesthetic object and the creative process of the artistic type are all specific and necessary moments of an experience – an aesthetic experience – shared by different experiential “individuals”, who also contribute to its formation process. The content of this experience grows and develops in conformity with its own laws, like a living being so to speak, able, as such, to turn its own gaze to the others’ gaze at the same time as they turn to it. In other words, I will deal with the dynamics of the artist’s interactions with the spectator, of those of the spectator with the artist and of those of both with the work of art, which, created by the artist, or rather, “brought to light” by the artist, becomes an object– a quasi-sujet in Dufrennian terms – unique to the spectator. In this context, I will try to rehabilitate the axiological virtues of beauty, not in the sense of a metaphysics of beauty, but in a sense nearer to our experiences of “seeing something in a new light”. Issue No:Vol. 11
Authors:Mariagrazia Portera Abstract: This paper is mainly intended to provide some insights into the relationship between the aesthetic dimension, human practical/habitual knowledge and the environment (broadly understood); more specifically, I shall shed some light on that variety of problems, issues and questions that arise when we examine role and functioning of our human aesthetic attitude – considered as an anthropological constant result of both biological evolution and cultural evolution and which involves, in its exercise, an intimate relationship between the organism and its environment – within the context of today’s environmental crisis. Issue No:Vol. 11
Authors:Orsola Rignani Abstract: The paper examines and discusses Michel Serres’ idea, expressed in the eighties, of the rediscovery of the senses and his idea expressed in the nineties of the metamorphism and mimicry of the body, reading them as a hominescence. Issue No:Vol. 11
Authors:Daniela Sacco Abstract: The fruitful intellectual exchange between Aby Warburg and Ernst Cassirer revolves around the concept of “symbolic function”. In particular, the concept of function that emerges from Cassirer’s early volume, Substance and Function (1910), can be applied to the analysis of the compositional principle that gives shape to the architecture of Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas. Issue No:Vol. 11
Authors:Antonio Valentini Abstract: One of the main characteristics of the contemporary aesthetic debate is the recovery of the concept of mimesis, as a dimension that is originally involved in the foundation of human culture and the processes of cultural learning. This is evident in the aesthetic reflection developed by Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf. For these two authors, mimesis is never a mere reproduction of the given reality, but always implies the production of the New, of the Other, of the different with respect to the empirical world, i.e. to the existing categorical order of the world. In particular, Gebauer and Wulf underline the constitutive ambivalence of the notion of mimesis: on the one hand, it favors the processes of reification fueled by capitalist society and, on the other hand, it contributes to the affirmation of a critical and “utopian” instance that can counter “instrumental reason” and the primacy of identity. Issue No:Vol. 11
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