The Divine Comedy By Dante Aleghiri - 1648 Words

Dante Aleghiri s Divine Comedy is widely taught and written about. In it Dante, the author, details his trip through Hell, Purgatory, and then Paradise. The Divine Comedy was written during Dante s exile from his beloved city of Florence Italy. The work itself is read at various different levels. One could read it as a theological work, a political work, simply as a poetic work, or even as a philosophical work. In his work, Dante’s Paradiso: No Human Beings Allowed philosophy professor Bruce Silver argues that, † Dante is not a philosopher, instead he just deals with philosophical issues, including the relation between reasoning well and happiness. Dr. Jason Aleksander, the philosophy department chair at Saint Xavier s University, would disagree, stating, In short, for Dante, wisdom, the body of philosophy, results from the proper ordering of earthly desires or, in other words, from the order among the moral virtues. Aleksander sees Dante as a philosopher tackling philosophical issues and because he takes that stance he interprets Dante differently than Silver does. Though both see Dante s work as philosophical they take differing stances on certain points and actually tackle the work in two different ways. Silver makes concise arguments towards Dante trying to deal with the balance between reason and faith. He specifically talks about, the relation between reasoning well and happiness. Silver uses several different philosophers to prove his point,