6 June 2023, 5pm | San Francesco Complex - classroom 1 | online at imt.lu/aula1

Abstract | The thought experiment of the Flying Man, which Avicenna (d. 1037 CE) develops in several works, is controversial among scholars. But interestingly, the difference in interpretations has less to do with the content of the Flying Man than with its function. The dispute revolves around the question of what the Flying Man is for, what argumentative function it has, what Avicenna wants to show. By providing a critical edition of the psychology chapter from Avicenna's treatise 'The Easterners', I would like to shed new light on this question and show that the Flying Man is not an answer to the question of the nature of the soul. But neither is he a bridge to the discussion of substantiality that follows. What is he then?

Poster picture by Danninx, under a Creative Common License

5 June 2023, 5pm | San Francesco Complex - classroom 1 | online at imt.lu/aula1

Abstract | This seminar challenges the current trends in the field of global microhistory, especially the use of biography. Rather than the biography of a global go-between, this seminar offers an intensive contrastive microanalysis of ego-documents, mainly letters. It focuses on the letters exchange between the Moroccan Muhammad Bulghaith Al-Darāwi, imam of Livorno’s prisons between 1661 and 1666, and the Moroccan Jesuit Balthazar Loyola Mandes (1631-1667), Al-Darawi’s mentor during the process of Al-Darawi’s release and conversion to Catholicism. A comparative microanalysis of Al-Darawi’s letters in Arabic and the translations into Italian that Loyola Mandes penned for the Jesuits in Rome let us enter the gray-zones of Mediterranean captivity and unpack Loyola Mandes’s use of translation as a tool of self-fashioning across the Jesuit order and the Medici court. This close comparative observation of Arabic and Italian ego-documents and conversion narratives urges us to reflect on the relationship between ethnocentrism, multilingualism, and archival research.

21 March 2023, 5pm | San Francesco Complex - classroom 1 | online at imt.lu/seminar

Abstract | This talk will focus on the ‘zoological enterprise’ that Avicenna embarks on in his Book of Animals (Kitāb al-Ḥayawān, Liber de Animalibus), his only writing on this topic. In this regard, I will aim to answer two questions: 1) What is Avicenna’s goal in writing this book? 2) How does Avicenna reach his goal? In answering these questions, it is essential to consider the composition of the whole Book of the Cure/Healing (Kitāb al-Šifāʾ), to which the Book of Animals belongs, and its complementarity with the Canon of Medicine (Qānūn fī l-ṭibb). The anatomy and physiology of the organic body, that is, of the proximate matter of the living organism, is the field where (natural) philosophy and medicine interact, overlap, and conflict. According to my interpretation, in zoology as the philosophical study of the organic body, Avicenna aims to overcome the tensions between (Aristotelian) philosophy and (Galenic) medicine and to reconcile the two traditions and their different authorities (Aristotle and Galen) of which he is the heir. To reach his goal, Avicenna makes use of three different modalities: 1) explicit refutation of Galen’s arguments and defence of Aristotle (e.g. in the case of the origination of blood vessels and nerves and the issue of cardiocentrism); 2) explicit refutation of Galen’s arguments but concomitant adherence to and silent use of parts of his arguments (e.g. in the theory of the two semina and the development stages of the embryo); 3) insertion of medical principles within an Aristotelian theoretical framework (e.g. in the theory of humors within the exposition of the three levels of composition of the organic body). The thematic contexts in which these three modalities emerge have not been arbitrarily chosen. On the contrary, they represent areas of investigation that go beyond zoology and intersect other fundamental natural sciences such as psychology and meteorology.

10 October 2022, 5pm | San Francesco Complex - classroom 1 | online at imt.lu/seminar

Abstract | I propose that new materials from the Muqābasāt of al-Tawḥīdī should be attributed to the Arabic treatise On the Soul, which I argue is an extract from an authentic work by Porphyry. These materals contain indications of doctrines on the origin, nature and function of the union (ittiḥād) between the human soul and the divine Agent Intellect that are unattested in Porphyry’s extant Greek works, but may help to shed light on Avicenna’s hitherto unexplained violent reaction to and dismissal of Porphyrian noetics.

22 April 2022, 11am | San Francesco Complex - classroom 1 | online at imt.lu/seminar | in collaboration with MoMiLab

Abstract | Si ritiene in genere che la prima teoria scientifica delle maree sia quella di Newton. In questa presentazione, si mostra invece che: 1) Newton arrivò alla sua sintesi attingendo in modo essenziale a due tradizioni apparentemente contrapposte: quella che attribuiva il fenomeno della marea ai moti della Terra (sostenuta, tra gli altri, da Cesalpino, Sarpi, Galileo, Baliani e Wallis) e la teoria luni-solare, giunta a Newton attraverso Marcantonio De Dominis. 2) Entrambe le teorie precedenti trasmettevano aspetti parziali e complementari dell’antica teoria ellenistica delle maree, che Newton in larga misura ricostruisce.

26-27 May 2023 | Org. A. Bertolacci, M. Signori

In Aristotle’s physical system, the four elements behave according to their fundamental qualities – hotness and coldness, dryness and wetness – and are therefore subject to specifically defined forms of spatial interaction. Among these connections, the one between earth (cold and dry) and water (cold and wet) is particularly rich of consequences for Aristotelian science, because it encroaches the domains of meteorology – full of wet phenomena such as rain and snow –, of geology – addressing issues like the physical shape of the earth, the formation of mountains, etc. –, and of biology – inasmuch as the relation between earth and water is key to the genesis and persistence of complex forms of life. In the religious domain, the biblical account of creation in the Genesis spells out with a certain degree of detail how earth and water were formed, shaped, and divided at the beginning of time, and how animals began to exist in the respective terrestrial and aquatic domains. The intersections between revealed/religious and philosophical/scientific accounts of the relation between water and earth were accordingly explored in much detail by medieval thinkers, not only in the Christian-Latin world, but also in the Jewish-Hebrew and Islamic-Arabic milieus. In this elaborate framework, a singular little text attributed to Italian poet Dante Alighieri, the Questio de aqua et terra, is a paradigmatic specimen of the significance of these debates also outside the boundaries of universities, and possibly for people who were not specifically trained in Aristotelian science and philosophy, or else in theology and Biblical exegesis.

The topic dealt with in the Questio is a central one for the Peripatetic physics of the elements, i.e. the issue of why and how did dry land emerge from water, if water is absolutely lighter than earth, and the elements take the shape of a sphere in their proper domain. This workshop aims to revise the complex tradition which finds in the Questio an all-peculiar exemplum, highlighting the possible crosspollinations between Arabic and Latin Peripatetic sources, and the treatment given to the issue in Dante’s purported treatise. In so doing, the workshop wishes to provide new material to Dante scholars interested in better understanding the theoretical and scientific teachings of the Questio, as well as the debated issue of its authorship. Likewise, it is an aim of the seminar to give historians of medieval and early modern thought a chance to discuss the interrelated issues of physics and religious exegesis raised by the most fundamental elemental interaction of water and earth, in the framework of the long history of Aristotelianism from its Greek origin up to its most recent, post-medieval incarnations.

1-2 December 2022

A first online workshop disseminating the results of the PRO3 joint programme project "Scientific computing for natural sciences, social sciences, and applications: methodological and technological development", joining the efforts of researchers of IMT School, Scuola Normale Superiore, Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati di Trieste, Istituto Universitario di Studi Superiori di Pavia and Gran Sasso Science Institute.

Watch the video of the conference here!