2025 Theses Doctoral

Identity Across the Scale of Being: Puzzles and Problems of Synchronic and Diachronic Identity in Dante’s Corpus

East, Charles Firestone

Dante’s philosophical and theological thought has been treated at length in scholarship across multiple disciplines. However, the methodology adopted by most scholars, exemplified by the works of Bruno Nardi and Giovanni Busnelli, has overwhelmingly been to find the exact source of Dante’s claims in the works of Thomas Aquinas and other notable medieval thinkers.

My dissertation resists this tendency and instead treats Dante as a poet-philosopher in his own right. In particular, I assess whether there is a “Dantean” metaphysics present throughout his corpus that, once reconstructed, can aid in our understanding of Dante’s thought on creation, both the creation of our own reality and of the world he builds in the Commedia.

I begin this work by outlining in chapter one a series of puzzles from across the Commedia which concern in some capacity alterations of identity, such as the metamorphoses of the thieves in Inferno XXIV-XXV. I propose that the rhetorical effect of these scenarios is dependent on the reader having a standard conception of identity with which the imagined situation plays.

I take a more forensic approach in chapters 2-5 by dedicating them to reconstructing Dante’s understanding of each of the three hylomorphic parts of reality: form, matter, and their composite. In these chapters, I survey, categorize, and analyze Dante’s complex usage of these terms across his various prose treatises and poems. These chapters also provide original commentaries on passages that feature this terminology in unexpected and seemingly inconsistent ways considering his corpus as a whole.

In chapters 6 and 7, I turn from individual metaphysical terms to Dante’s application of them in arguments about controversial topics related to human identity. In chapter 6, I analyze Dante’s famous outline of embryological development in Purgatorio XXV and highlight the uniqueness of his presentation of the gradual yet sequential progression of the embryo toward ensoulment. Chapter 7 culminates in a study of Dante’s theory of aerial bodies, a familiar concept in medieval thought that Dante utilizes in a new way to provide a greater visual sense of the (incomplete) continuity of human identity in separated souls.

With this analysis of Dante’s hylomorphism and of his thought concerning certain issues of identity, I reconstruct over the course of this dissertation an authentically Dantean philosophical toolkit of metaphysical terms and concepts and apply it to lecturae Dantis of some of Dante’s most well-known philosophical cantos. In doing so, I also create a new resource which Dante scholars can use to better analyze his innovative contributions to scholastic thought and the philosophical dimensions of his poetry and oft-neglected prose works more generally.