Dante's metaphysics — his understanding of reality — is very different from our own. To present Dante's ideas about the cosmos, or God, or salvation, or history, or poetry within the context of post-Enlightenment presuppositions, as is usually done, is thus to capture only imperfectly the essence of those ideas. This book argues that the recovery of Dante's metaphysics is essential if we are to resolve what has been called “the central problem in the interpretation of the Comedy. ”That problem is what to make of the Comedy's claim to the “status of revelation, vision, or experiential record — as something more than imaginative literature.” This book offers a sustained treatment of the metaphysical picture that grounds and motivates the Comedy, and of the relation between those metaphysics and Dante's poetics. The book carries this out through an examination of three notoriously complex cantos of the Paradiso, read against the background of the Neoplatonic and Aristotelian tradition from which they arise.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.