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

Introduction

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.

Objectives

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the potential of some extraordinary preliminary material to study a wealth of 12th-century manuscripts of mainly unpublished texts with novel concepts.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 A study of mainly unpublished logical texts from a "polyphonic" perspective that will follow a comparative, archaeological, and analytical approach and develop some pioneering digital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.

Required Expertise

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
• The historiography of philosophy

Research Design

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 several other areas, from medieval studies to the history of universities, to the study of commentaries more generally.