The Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at Kings

College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www. History of Philosophy.net.

Today's episode, To Hell and Back, Dante Arigeari.

You never forget your first love, and that goes for intellectual loves too. Mine was Dante Arigeari, whose marvelous poem The

Divine Comedy entranced me so much when I was about 19 years old that it got me into the study

of medieval intellectual culture.

From there I got curious about medieval philosophy in both Latin Christendom and the Islamic

world and the rest is history, or at least history of philosophy.

It was an unusual way to get into the philosophy business, but I'm confident that Dante himself

would have approved.

He made a concerted effort to spread philosophical knowledge to as wider readership

as possible, not by producing a podcast, which given the technical limitations of his age is excusable,

but by writing in Italian. Dante himself was an

outsider to the world of the so-called clerk or cleric. He did however possess enough

Latin and sufficient knowledge of scholasticism to engage with its teaching in a vernacular language, not least in the divine comedy.

Philosophy was only Dante's's second love though.

His first love was Beaetreche.

The poem she inspired are gathered in Dante's first major work, La Vita Nueva, or The New Life, written in 1292 two years after Bétrich's

tragic early death.

La Vita Nueova also offers a running commentary on the poems, marked by an obsession with numerical structure that will stay with Dante throughout his career.

He associates Beattriche with the number nine, and later constructs his comedy in light of numerological structures.

For example, it has a total of 100 chapters or Kantos with lengths that are sometimes symmetrically arranged.

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