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Title: Bruno Nardi's Louvain Dissertation (1911) and the Uneasy Character of Dante's Philosophy
Author(s): FALZONE, Paolo
Journal: Tijdschrift voor Filosofie
Volume: 75    Issue: 2   Date: 2013   
Pages: 357-373
DOI: 10.2143/TVF.75.2.2990710

Abstract :
This article is meant to honour the doctoral thesis of Bruno Nardi, entitled Siger de Brabant dans la Divine Comédie et les sources de la philosophie de Dante. The thesis, which he defended more than a century ago (February 1911) at the Institute of Philosophy of Louvain, was written under the supervision of Maurice de Wulf. This paper aims at describing the essential parameters of the ‘Nardian’ interpretation: in opposition to the Neo-Thomistic revival of his time, Bruno Nardi showed the influence of Latin Averroism on Dante’s thought (e.g. the presence of Siger in Paradise), thus proving the vulgate of the ‘Thomistic Dante’ to be unfounded. While this was an important achievement of Nardi’s work, the historiographical debate of the last decades has nevertheless rejected his tendency to stiffen and to compress Dante’s multifarious intellectual tale into a coherent and unitary line, inadequate to represent the complexity of perspectives that cohabit and are sometimes even intertwined in Dante’s thought.

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