Notes on the Contributors
David Albertson
is Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Mathematical Theologies: Nicholas of Cusa and the Legacy of Thierry of Chartres (Oxford, 2014), Without Nature? A New Condition for Theology (Fordham, 2009), and several articles on medieval philosophy and mysticism. He currently serves as President of the American Cusanus Society and directs the Nova Forum for Catholic Thought.
Carmela Baffioni
is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Ismaili Studies (IIS, London), and member of several Academies, including the “Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei” (corresponding member). Until 2012 she served as Full Professor of History of Islamic Philosophy at the University of Naples “L’Orientale”. Her publications include studies on the transmission of Greek thought into Islam, on the most important Islamic philosophers (especially Ismā‘īlī thinkers), as well as on philosophy of nature, atomism, and embryology. The Ikhwan al-Safa’ are her main research field: since 2010 she has prepared Arabic critical editions and English translations of the logical Epistles 10–14 (2010), the natural Epistles 15–21 (2013), Ep. 39–40 (2017), and Ep. 50 (2019) for the series Epistles of the Brethren of Purity patronized by the IIS.
Marta Borgo
(PhD Scuola Normale Superiore – Pisa, 2009) is a member of the Leonine Commission (Paris) since 2010, where she is in charge of the critical edition of Aquinas’ commentaries on Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics. Her main research interests include Aquinas’ sources as well as the reception and use of Aristotle’s natural philosophy and metaphysics in the Latin world, especially in theological contexts. She has collaborated in the achievement of Father Bataillon’s edition of Aquinas’ sermons.
Jean-Pierre Brach
is currently Directeur d’études at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris, Sorbonne), holding the Chair “History of Esoteric Currents in Modern and Contemporary Europe”. He is the author of La symbolique des nombres (Paris, 1994; Italian transl. 1999), of an annotated edition and translation of Guillaume Postel’s De admirandis numerorum platonicorum secretis (Paris, 2001), and of numerous articles concerning the history of Christian kabbalah, early modern magic and alchemy, number symbolism and 19th–20th-century Mesmerism, occultism and “Traditional” thinking (French, Anglo-Saxon, Italian). Co-editor, with J.-P. Laurant, of the review Politica Hermetica and, with W.J. Hanegraaff, A. Faivre and R. van den Broek, of the Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism (Leiden, 2005).
Sonja Brentjes
is a Historian of science in Islamicate societies and Christian Europe, visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. Her research includes the history of the mathematical sciences, mapmaking, institutions, cross-cultural exchange of knowledge and the involvement of the arts in the sciences. Among her recent publications are Teaching and Learning the Sciences in Islamicate Societies, 800–1700 (Turnhout, 2018), and, coedited with T. Edis and L. Richter-Bernburg, 1001 Distortions: How (Not) to Narrate the History of Science, Medicine and Technology in Non-Western Cultures (Würzburg, 2016).
Irene Caiazzo
is Senior Research Fellow at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). She specializes in the history of medieval philosophy and science and is editor-in-chief of the annual journal Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge. Her major publications include Lectures médiévales de Macrobe: Les Glosae Colonienses super Macrobium (Paris, 2002), and Thierry of Chartres: The Commentary on the De arithmetica of Boethius (Toronto, 2015).
Iacopo Costa
(PhD 2007) is Senior Research Fellow at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS – Laboratoire d’Études sur les monothéismes) and a member of the Leonine Commission. He is a specialist in moral philosophy and moral theology in the 13th and 14th centuries. He studies in particular the reception of Aristotle’s Ethics and has edited various important texts of Latin scholasticism.
Daniel De Smet
is Senior Research Fellow at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and also teaches Arabic philosophy at the University of Leuven (KUL), in Belgium. His main fields of interest are Shīʿī Islam (in particular Ismāʿīlism), Arabic Neoplatonism, and Islamic philosophy. He is the author of La Quiétude de l’Intellect: Néoplatonisme et gnose ismaélienne dans l’œuvre de Ḥamīd ad-Dīn al-Kirmānī (Xe/XIe s.) (Louvain, 1995); Empedocles Arabus: Une lecture néoplatonicienne tardive (Brussels, 1998); Les Épîtres sacrées des Druzes: Rasā’il al-Ḥikma, Volumes 1 et 2, Introduction, édition critique et traduction annotée des traités attribués à Ḥamza b. ‘Alī et à Ismā‘īl at-Tamīmī (Louvain, 2007); and La philosophie ismaélienne: Un ésotérisme chiite entre néoplatonisme et gnose (Paris, 2012). He has co-edited Controverses sur les écritures canoniques de l’islam (Paris, 2014) and L’ésotérisme shi‘ite, ses racines et ses prolongements (Turnhout, 2016) (both with M.A. Amir-Moezzi); Noétique et théorie de la connaissance dans la philosophie arabe du IXe au XIIe siècle. Des traductions gréco-arabes aux disciples d’Avicenne (Paris, 2019; with M. Sebti).
Gad Freudenthal
is Senior Research Fellow Emeritus at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris, France. He has written on the reception of science and philosophy in Jewish cultures, mainly in the Middle Ages and in the 18th century. His books include: Aristotle’s Theory of Material Substance: Form and Soul, Heat and Pneuma (Oxford, 1995), Science in the Medieval Hebrew and Arabic Traditions (Aldershot, 2005), and the edited volumes: Science in Medieval Jewish Cultures (Cambridge, 2011), Studies on Steinschneider (with R. Leicht, Leiden, 2011), Latin-into-Hebrew – Studies and Texts. Volume 1: Studies (with R. Fontaine, Leiden, 2013). Between 2001 and 2019 he edited Aleph: Historical Studies in Science and Judaism.
Andrew Hicks
is Associate Professor of Music and Medieval Studies at Cornell University. His research focuses on the intellectual history of musical and philosophical thought from a cross-disciplinary perspective. His first book, Composing the World: Harmony in the Medieval Platonic Cosmos (Oxford University Press, 2017), won the ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson book award (2018) and the Society for Music Theory’s Emerging Scholar book award (2018). His published essays range across the history of music theory, late ancient and medieval Pythagoreanism and Platonism, the reception of Martianus Capella, textual criticism, and musical metaphors and modalities in Classical Persian literatures (the subject of his next book project, The Broken Harp: Listening Otherwise in Classical Persian Literature).
Anna Izdebska
is Assistant Professor in Classical Islam at the Institute of Religious Studies of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow (Poland) and researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Her PhD, defended in 2017, is the first monograph-length study of the Arabic Pythagorean tradition. Its results have been summarized in the entry “Pythagore dans la tradition syriaque et arabe,” published in the last volume (VII) of the Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques (Paris, 2018).
Tzvi Langermann
earned his doctorate in History of Science at Harvard. He worked for many years at the Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts in Jerusalem before assuming a post at the Department of Arabic of Bar Ilan University, from which he recently retired. He publishes on a wide range of topics in the history of science and philosophy. His most recent book is a translation and study of Subtle Insights Concerning Knowledge and Practice by Sa’d ibn Mansur Ibn Kammūna al-Baghdādī (Yale University Press, 2019).
Constantinos Macris
(PhD École Pratique des Hautes Études, 2004) is Research Fellow at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). He specializes in ancient Greek philosophy and religion, and has published extensively on Pythagoras and the Pythagorean tradition, focusing on their Neoplatonic reception. He is the author of a commentary on Porphyry’s Life of Pythagoras (Athens, 2001), and co-editor, with G. Cornelli and R. McKirahan, of On Pythagoreanism (Berlin-New York, 2013). Since 2005 he has been contributing regularly to the Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques (ed. R. Goulet), in an effort to constitute a prosopography of the ancient Pythagoreans, and since 2015 he is leading, with L. Brisson and T. Dorandi, an international team working on the Pseudopythagorica of the Hellenistic and Imperial times, whose first publication is Pythagoras redivivus. Studies on the Texts Attributed to Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans, currently in press with Academia Verlag (Baden Baden, 2021). His major recent publication is a “monographic” entry on Pythagoras for the Dictionnaire (vol. VII, 2018), followed by an Appendix on Pythagoreanism and its reception.
Cecilia Panti
is Associate Professor of History of Medieval Philosophy at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. Her publications concentrate mainly on medieval and early Renaissance natural philosophy, optics, theory of music and the quadrivium. Her books include commended editions of Robert Grosseteste’s writings on cosmology (Florence, 2001), and De luce (Pisa, 2011), and the volume Filosofia della musica. Tarda Antichità e Medioevo (Rome, 2008).
Aurélien Robert
is Senior Research Fellow at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). He has published many papers on the history of medieval philosophy, including studies on natural philosophy, medicine, and atomism. His books include Atomism in Late Medieval Philosophy and Theology (with Ch. Grellard, Leiden-Boston, 2009), and a monograph on the reception of Epicureanism in the Middle Ages (Paris, 2021). In 2019, he received the Bronze Medal of the CNRS for his work on medieval philosophy and science.
Denis J.-J. Robichaud
earned his PhD from Johns Hopkins and is Associate Professor of Philosophy in Notre Dame’s Program of Liberal Arts Studies, Medieval Institute, and Italian Studies. He is a Rome-Prize Winner of the American Academy in Rome and a former Yates Fellow at the Warburg Institute. He is presently a Fellow at Harvard’s Villa I Tatti. He has published numerous articles on ancient, medieval, and Renaissance Platonism and Neoplatonism, traditions of ancient philosophy, the philosophy of religion, Renaissance humanism, the history of scholarship, and manuscript studies. University of Pennsylvania Press published his book Plato’s Persona: Marsilio Ficino, Renaissance Humanism, and the Platonic Tradition in 2018. He is co-editor of Marsilio Ficino’s Cosmology: Sources and Receptions.