Abstract

Dante Alighieri’s thought, particularly as expressed in the treatise The Banquet, provides a rich ground for investigating the presence of ‘weak first philosophy’ in late medieval thought. There is no anti-metaphysical motivation in Dante’s approach; rather, he proposes a hermeneutic conception of ‘metaphysics’ that resonates with a ‘poor’ determination of it. This poverty is poised for transformation, as illustrated in a famous Pauline passage: precisely because it is poor and ‘indirect,’ such metaphysics opens the door to a fresh foundational understanding of human knowledge and conduct, taking as axioms the principles of the first cause as grace and of human nature as marked by original failure.