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Polyphonic Philosophy: Logic in the Long Twelfth Century (c. 1070-1220) for a New Horizon in the History of Philosophy

Project description

Understanding philosophical commentaries

Latin logical commentaries from the Long Twelfth Century (c. 1070-1220), a period of fascination as its scholarly work and discussions would eventually lead to the establishment of the first universities, have not been adequately explored. Addressing this is the EU-funded PolyphonicPhilosophy project. It aims to analyse 35 manuscripts currently housed in a variety of libraries around Europe, as well as a unique corpus of preliminary transcriptions of texts. In doing so, the project will greater our understanding of a particular philosophical approach that the manuscripts attest to, i.e. a ‘polyphonic’ philosophy.

Objective

"This project aims at an innovative, interdisciplinary approach to Latin logical commentaries from the Long Twelfth-Century (c. 1070-1220). My contention is that this little-explored topic presents us with a unique ""Polyphonic Philosophy"" that can open up a new horizon in our understanding of philosophical commentaries, on the one hand, and help to reshape some core ideas in the history of philosophy, on the other - at a time when both are urgently needed.

A team of four postdoctoral researchers led by the PI will actualise the potential of some extraordinary preliminary material to study a wealth of 12th-century manuscripts of mainly unpublished texts with novel concepts. We will have three objectives:
1. A comprehensive study of 12th-century logical manuscripts as the main units for accessing this complex field, in which the notions of unitary text and author have proven challenging.
2. A study of mainly unpublished logical texts from a ""polyphonic"" perspective that will follow a comparative, archaeological and analytical approach and develop some pioneering digital scholarly editions of texts to model their polyphony.
3. Meta-analysis of the concepts used from an interdisciplinary and historiographical perspective, offering new insights into the key concepts of the project and non-solo paradigms to reconstruct philosophy's past.

The project will require interdisciplinary expertise in digital medieval studies, digital textual criticism, codicology, the history of education, the history of literacy, the social history of logic, the history of philosophy, and the historiography of philosophy. Following a concrete-to-abstract highly integrated research design, taking advantage of recent methodologies, this project has the ambitious goal of opening up an entirely new horizon for the history of philosophy, while also impacting on several other areas, from medieval studies, to the history of universities, to the study of commentaries more generally.

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Host institution

UNIVERSITA CA' FOSCARI VENEZIA
Net EU contribution
€ 1 498 215,00
Address
DORSODURO 3246
30123 Venezia
Italy

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Region
Nord-Est Veneto Venezia
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost
€ 1 498 215,00

Beneficiaries (1)