The Merits of Matter

Abstract

In the Convivio Dante affirms that God grants nobility only to the “well disposed” soul. But the notion of “disposition” recurs throughout the entire treatise. Indeed, the principle of matter’s necessary aptitude to the reception of form and the complementary idea that this aptitude can be greater or lesser are valid, for Dante, far beyond the sphere of biology and pertain to physics in general and, further up, to first philosophy. The article aims to reconstruct the constellation within which this doctrine originated. For this reason, it goes back to Aristotle’s discussion of dynamis, to the notion (first developed by Alexander of Aphrodisias and then reworked by the Neoplatonic tradition) of epitedeiotes, and, finally, to Avicenna’s isti‘dād ẖāṣṣ (“appropriate disposition”).