Aristotle’s Ideal of Intellectual Happiness in XIV-century Italy

This presentation examines the rediscovery of philosophy as a way of life in Dante’s Italy, engaging critically with Pierre Hadot’s thesis that the medieval university and the rise of Scholasticism led to the decline of ancient philosophy as a spiritual practice. Against this narrative, which Hadot himself partly retracted later on in his career, the article builds on the intuition of Maria Corti to show that the ideal of “intellectual happiness” (felicitas intellectualis) — namely, the contemplative life ideal celebrated in Book X of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and revived by thirteenth-century Parisian masters of arts such as Boethius of Dacia and Siger of Brabant — did not remain confined to Paris, but was successfully exported to Italy, particularly to the studium of Arts and Medicine at the University of Bologna between the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.