Teaching: selecting new authors and editions for the Spring iteration of the Great Books course (Plato, Sophocles, Sallust, Augustine, Rabelais, De la Boétie), moving the balance of the material more firmly back to the early Modern period; searching for the optimal anthologization of the City of God for the purposes of the history of political thought. Devising a new texts-first pedagogical format, organized around in-class reading of tricky passages and group activities to match broad themes with textual loci. Writing a new AI policy for LLM use (“you can use ’em, but do you need ’em?”). Attempting to make assessment methods fairer for non-native speakers of English. Updating teaching materials and slides.
Research:
- History of political thought: further work on the Alfieri piece; identifying other primary works of relevance (“Odi all’America libera”, “Parigi sbastigliato”, “Avvertenza alle potenze italiane”, “Elogio di re Luigi XVI”, Satire, and the speech on Machiavelli…); comparisons with other reactions to the French Revolution both contemporary (Burke) and later (Maurras); reflections on framing and argument; initial exploration of conference options for presentation.
- Tech and politics: chapter on “Trust and Institutions” for the Disinformation Handbook on the final stretch: reviews and publisher input. Investigating adjoining projects.
Interesting books:
- Accetto, Torquato, and Salvatore S. Nigro. Della dissimulazione onesta. Biblioteca Einaudi. Torino: Einaudi, 1997.
- Awrey, Dan. Beyond Banks: Technology, Regulation, and the Future of Money. 1st ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024.
- Bolingbroke, Henry St John. The Idea of a Patriot King. Edited by S. W. Jackman. Library of Liberal Arts. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965.
- Commynes, Philippe de. Mémoires sur Louis XI: 1464-1483. Edited by Jean Dufournet. Folio. Paris: Gallimard, 1979.
- Coolidge, Calvin. The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge, 1929.
- Fredriksen, Paula. Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years. 1st ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024.
- Garin, Eugenio. Ermetismo del Rinascimento. Pisa: Scuola normale superiore, 2006.
- ———. La cultura filosofica del rinascimento italiano: ricerche e documenti. Saggi tascabili 34. Bergamo: Bompiani, 1994.
- La Mothe Le Vayer, François de. De la patrie et des étrangers: et autres petits traités sceptiques. Edited by Philippe-Joseph Salazar. Collection XVIIe siècle. Paris: Desjonquères, 2003.
- Magid, Shaul. Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021.
- Peng, Li Jun. One and All: The Logic of Chinese Sovereignty. Stanford (Calif.): Stanford university press, 2024.
- Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni. De hominis dignitate, Heptaplus, De ente et uno, e scritti vari a cura di Eugenio Garin. Edizione nazionale dei classici del pensiero italiano. Firenze: Vallecchi, 1942.
- Reill, Dominique Kirchner. Nationalists Who Feared the Nation: Adriatic Multi-Nationalism in Habsburg Dalmatia, Trieste, and Venice. Stanford Studies on Central and Eastern Europe. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2012.
- Russell, George William. The National Being, 1916.
- Sextus Empiricus. Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Against the Dogmatists, Against the Professors. Edited by Robert Gregg Bury. 4 vols. Loeb Classical Library. London, Cambridge, Mass.: W. Heinemann ; Harvard Univ. Press, 1971.
- Vairasse, Denis. L’histoire des Sévarambes. Edited by Aubrey Rosenberg. Libre pensée et littérature clandestine 5. Paris: H. Champion, 2001.
Interesting events/visits: Good exhibitions in Palermo (“PINAKOTHEK’A: Da Cagnaccio a Guttuso, da Christo e Jeanne-Claude ad Arienti” at Palazzo Sant’Elia) and Paris (“Heinz Berggruen, a dealer and his collection” at the Musée de l’Orangerie and “Suzanne Valadon” at the Centre Pompidou).
Rabbit holes: other victims of religious intolerance in the 16th-17th centuries (e.g. Cardano, Vanini, Sarpi). Philippe de Commynes; what Sainte Beuve thought of him; comparison with Froissart; the issue of malice and the end of chivalry; relation with Machiavelli and Tacitus; his use of the term ‘vertu‘. Humanist erudites in baroque Rome and Naples: the Accademia degli Umoristi and the Accademia degli Oziosi; the case of Margherita Sarrocchi (La Scanderbeide). Coluccio Salutati’s house in Piazza de’ Peruzzi in Florence; his manuscript library (one of the largest private collections in Western Europe: 600+ titles!); his relations with Leonardo Bruni. Other Italian philosophers of the later Renaissance and the Seicento (Telesio, Patrizi, Pietro d’Abano, Zuccolo…). René Pintard (Rev. Ét. It., 1936) on the influence of Italian thought in French cultural life in the 17th century. Demography, migration, public order, and insurrections in unified Italy during the 1870s (two major anarchist uprisings; 500k people left the country over a decade). Ficino’s non-boring revisitation of Platonism, as told by Garin (Magic! Alchemy! Philosophical debates squatting in churches!)— Platonism as risk and adventure…
Sundry: Experiments with various alternative browsers and search engines.