About The Reception of Aristotle’s Poetics in the Italian Renaissance and Beyond

Using new and cutting-edge perspectives, this book explores literary criticism and the reception of Aristotle's Poetics in early modern Italy. Written by leading international scholars, the chapters examine the current state of the field and set out new directions for future study.The reception of classical texts of literary criticism, such as Horace's Ars Poetica, Longinus's On the Sublime, and most importantly, Aristotle's Poetics was a crucial part of the intellectual culture of Renaissance Italy. Revisiting the translations, commentaries, lectures, and polemic treatises produced, the contributors apply new interdisciplinary methods from book history, translation studies, history of the emotions and classical reception to them. Placing several early modern Italian poetic texts in dialogue with twentieth-century literary theory for the first time, The Reception of Aristotle's Poetics in the Italian Renaissance and Beyond models contemporary practice and maps out avenues for future study.

This testimony discusses an experiment in teaching French academic genres in the context of a French reading and composition class held at UC Berkeley in spring 2020. The experiment was designed and implimenetd in collaboration with Emily Linares. The article describes the reasons for introducing students to these genres, within a multiliteracies framework and explains which pedagogical strategies worked best in this context, and why. It also points to possible socio-political implications of the experiment, which could also prove beneficial to minority students or students from underrepresented backgrounds in American universities.

This dissertation is a study of the materialist current of the French Enlightenment. Far from assuming that early modern materialism constituted a homogenous philosophical current, my dissertation applies the materialist method of critique to the category of "materialism" itself. I argue that "Materialism" was invented in the 18th century, and it had little to do with the simple affirmation of the primacy of matter or the reductionist "one -substance monism", as its detractors at the time wanted the public to believe. I show that the adjective "materialist" was coined in the context of a social transformation of philosophy (a social reconfiguration of philosophical activity with the rise of the bourgeois public sphere) and in the midst of an ideological crisis of French absolutism. I argue that religious and political authorities labeled a set of public philosophical interventions that advocated for a new conception of public philosophy, an experimental and critical one, as "materialists". Most of the thinkers which were labeled as materialists (Julien Offray La Mettrie, Denis Diderot, Claude-Hadrien Helvetius, Paul Henry Thiry D'Holbach) borrowed from the emerging field of modern science a critical method of inquiry, yet, what distinguished them particularly was that they extended this critique to moral values, metaphysical concepts and the political institutions of the regime. They also shared a commitment to an intellectual political independence from the State and to the development of the critical function of philosophy in an expanded public sphere. It was for this reason that materialism was considered morally and politically "dangerous" as a philosophy, one that needed to be repressed and persecuted. By the early 19th Century with the re-institutionalization of philosophy by the Empire materialism as a public philosophical critique was dead.

After 1758 the debate around materialism polarized the Enlightenment movement itself. Some of the key figures of the Enlightenment, like Voltaire, Jean e Rond D'Alembert or Nicolas Condorcet, which had secured for them a place in the French academy, began to distance themselves from the materialist figures and from their public positions, by defending publicly the benefits of an "enlightened monarchy" and a necessary metaphysical base for science, philosophy and morality.

In my dissertation I argue that the "radical" and "political" dimension of La Mettrie's and Diderot's philosophy is not to be found in the proposal of a positive program of reform. Theirs was an exploration of the new public status of philosophy and the philosophical means to achieve a popular enlightenment. Besides being the first advocates for a public education system open to all and targeted to a diversity of social needs, they reflected on the form philosophical texts should produce. Philosophical form, for La Mettrie and Diderot had to necessarily appeal not only to reason but also to imagination, using fiction, and requesting from the reader an active and open interpretation in order to "enlighten" him or her in a non-deterministic way.