Giorgio Pini
Associate Professor
Fordham University
Department of Philosophy
Collins Hall
441 E. Fordham Road
Bronx NY 10458
Tel: 718-817-2775
e-mail: pini@fordham.edu

My CV is here.

My specialty is later medieval philosophy, in particular the thought of John Duns Scotus and other philosophers and theologians active in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century, such as Giles of Rome, James of Viterbo, and Henry of Ghent. My research focuses on the reception and interpretation of ancient philosophy and specifically Aristotle, particularly but not exclusively in logic and metaphysics. Other prominent interests of mine are the philosophical debates in Paris and Oxford after Thomas Aquinas’s death, the interpretation of Thomas Aquinas’s thought, and the Scotistic school in the late Middle Ages and early modern era. I pay particular attention to the relationship between theological and philosophical issues.

I have recently become interested in the fortunes and interpretation of Augustine and Augustinianism in the later Middle Ages. My intention is to keep together an attention to the most philosophically challenging aspects of medieval thought, a close reading of the actual way in which doctrines were worded, and a reconstruction of the historical context in which those doctrines were developed. My aim is to establish some coordinates in order to explore the relationship between ancient, medieval and modern thought concerning the most important metaphysical concepts such as being, substance, accident, essence, individual, universal and the concept of metaphysics itself.

Philology and paleography are part of my training. I am currently completing the edition of Scotus’s notes on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, which were long thought to be lost but which I discovered in a manuscript of the Ambrosian Library in Milan. This edition is intended to be part of a larger project concerning the evolution of Duns Scotus’s metaphysical thought, in particular as contained in his Questions on the Metaphysics.