Biography

Tommaso De Robertis (Ph.D, University of Pennsylvania) is an intellectual historian focusing on the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. He has published articles in Annals of Science, Rinascimento, Bruniana & Campanelliana, and the Giornale Critico della Filosofia Italiana. Together with Valérie Cordonier, he is the author of Chrysostomus Javelli’s Epitome of Aristotle’s ‘Liber de bona fortuna’. Examining Fortune in Early Modern Italy (Brill, 2021). He comes to I Tatti after three years as a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Global Fellow at the University of Toronto and the University of Macerata.
 

Project Summary

John Philoponus was a philosopher active in Alexandria during the late fifth and early sixth centuries CE. Associated with the local Neoplatonic school, he produced a substantial body of commentaries on Aristotle. In his commentary on the Physics, Philoponus challenges Aristotle’s two-dimensional conception of place and advances an alternative account grounded in a fully three-dimensional understanding of space. His work remained largely unknown in the Latin Middle Ages and was recovered only in fifteenth-century Italy. Once edited and translated, Philoponus’s commentary exerted a profound influence on Renaissance natural philosophy and science, providing scholars with conceptual resources to reassess fundamental aspects of contemporary spatial thought. By tracing the material recovery and intellectual impact of Philoponus’s work in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy, the project uncovers overlooked intellectual exchanges between central Europe, Byzantium, and the Maghreb. In so doing, it reorients the history of spatial thought and unsettles conventional accounts of the Scientific Revolution.