Self-reflection, as the hallmark of the modern age, originates more profoundly with Dante than with Descartes. This book rewrites modern intellectual history, taking Dante’s lyrical language in Paradiso as enacting a Trinitarian self-reflexivity that gives a theological spin to the birth of the modern subject already with the Troubadours. The ever more intense self-reflexivity that has led to our contemporary secular world and its technological apocalypse can lead also to the poetic vision of other worlds such as those experienced by Dante. Facing the same nominalist crisis as Duns Scotus, his exact contemporary and the precursor of scientific method, Dante’s thought and work indicate an alternative modernity along the path not taken. This other way shows up in Nicholas of Cusa’s conjectural science and in Giambattista Vico’s new science of imagination as alternatives to the exclusive reign of positive empirical science. In continuity with Dante’s vision, they contribute to a reappropriation of self-reflection for the humanities.

Self-reflection, as the hallmark of the modern age, originates more profoundly with Dante than with Descartes. This book rewrites modern intellectual history, taking Dante's lyrical language in Paradiso as enacting a Trinitarian self-reflexivity that gives a theological spin to the birth of the modern subject already with the Troubadours. The ever more intense self-reflexivity that has led to our contemporary secular world and its technological apocalypse can also lead to the poetic vision of other worlds such as those experienced by Dante. Facing the same nominalist crisis as Duns Scotus, his exact contemporary and the precursor of scientific method, Dante's thought and work indicate an alternative modernity along the path not taken. This alternative shows up in Nicholas of Cusa's conjectural science and in Giambattista Vico's new science of imagination as alternatives to positive empirical science. In continuity with Dante's vision, they contribute to a reappropriation of self-reflection for the humanities.

In Canto XVIII of Paradiso, Dante sees thirty-five letters of Scripture - LOVE JUSTICE, YOU WHO RULE THE EARTH - 'painted' one after the other in the sky. It is an epiphany that encapsulates the Paradiso, staging its ultimate goal - the divine vision. This book offers a fresh, intensive reading of this extraordinary passage at the heart of the third canticle of the Divine Comedy. While adapting in novel ways the methods of the traditional lectura Dantis, William Franke meditates independently on the philosophical, theological, political, ethical, and aesthetic ideas that Dante's text so provocatively projects into a multiplicity of disciplinary contexts. This book demands that we question not only what Dante may have meant by his representations, but also what they mean for us today in the broad horizon of our intellectual traditions and cultural heritage.

This book comprises a searching philosophical meditation on the evolution of the humanities in recent decades, taking Dante studies as an exemplary specimen. The contemporary currents of theory have decisively impacted this field, but Dante also has a strong relationship with theology. The idea that theology, teleology, and logocentric rationalities are simply overcome and swept away by new theoretical approaches proves much more complex as the theory revolution is exposed in its crypto-theological motives and origins. The revolutionary agendas and methodologies of theoretical currents have ushered in all manner of minorities and postcolonial and gender studies. But the exciting adventure they inaugurate shows up in quite a surprising light when brought to focus through the scholarly discipline of Dante studies as a terrain of dispute between traditional philology and postmodern theory. On this terrain, negative theology can play a peculiarly destabilizing, but also a conciliatory, role: it is equally critical of all languages for a theological transcendence to which it nevertheless remains infinitely open.

This book offers a reading particularly of Part II of Don Quixote, a reading that is embedded in a philosophical reflection on the revelation of religious truth in and through literature. Part II of Don Quixote is the far richer part for its meta-literary reflection on the novel itself as a genre and on life as such seen through the lens of self-reflection. The author has treated the phenomenon of modern self-reflexivity as originally theological in nature in previous publications (notably Dante’s Paradiso and the Theological Origins of Modern Thought: Toward a Speculative Philosophy of Self-Reflection, Routledge, 2021). The present endeavor expands this overall intellectual project, extending it into detailed consideration of what is recognizably another nodal great work inaugurating unprecedented forms of self-reflection in the early modern period. Reading the founding texts of literary and cultural tradition in this negative-theological key proves crucial to allowing them to release the full force of their religious vision in the present age, despite its sometimes obstinate secularity. This reading absorbs and reconciles the religious and secular readings of Miguel de Unamuno and José Ortega y Gasset, two of Spain’s outstanding philosophical luminaries. Both thinkers based their entire philosophies and their analyses of the Spanish national character and destiny on their interpretations of the Quixote. Negative theology deploys critical reason that critiques the limits of reason itself and opens toward an unfathomable (un)ground of All. Such speculative interpretation performs a synthesis of the secularizing and sacralizing tendencies that are both sublimely operative in the text of the Quixote. It thereby enables the work to emerge in the fully parodic and paradoxical vitality that other interpretations, governed by one paradigm or the other, access only partially. Rather than falling into one camp or the other, the proposed approach combines and resources both heritages, sacred and secular, in their deepest synergisms. Spanish baroque mysticism and contemporary post-secular thought are made to converge in highlighting the blessed, even sacred, donation that literature like Don Quixote preserves and transmits as our most precious and saving cultural heritage.

A vivid reimagining of the Vita nuova as a revolution in poetry and a revelation of divine destiny through love.

Dante and the Other brings together noted and emerging Dante scholars with theologians, philosophers, psychoanalysts, and psychotherapists, bridging the Florentine’s premodern world to today’s postmodern context. Exploring how alterity has become a potent symbol in religion, philosophy, politics, and culture, this book will be of interest to many related fields. The book offers a thorough foundation in approaching Dante as proto-phenomenologist. It includes an informative review of literature, historical insight into Dante’s poetics-toward-ineffability as alternative to modern scientism, a foray into science fiction, existential elaborations, phenomenological analyses of Inferno’s Canto I, and applications to psychotherapy and qualitative research. It also contains a poem from an imagined Virgil retiring in Limbo, and a meditation on Dante’s complicated relationship to homosexuality. Dante and the Other presents the mystical passion of apophatic spirituality, the millennia-spanning Augustinianism of radical orthodoxy, Levinas, Heidegger, and many others—all driven by Dante’s Labors of Love. It is essential reading for Dante scholars, as well as readers interested in his works.