Horia-Roman Patapievici
History of Science and Ideas, Director
Romanian Cultural Foundation, Bucharest
Born in 1957 in Bucharest
Studied Physics at the University of Bucharest
Fellowship
Andrew W. Mellon-Fellow
Project
Dante and the Medieval Cosmology
I intend to write a book in which to make plausible that the most consistent description of the medieval cosmology belongs to Dante, because he is the only one who understood that the Ptolemaic universe must be compelled to admit the data of the Christian dogmatics, but not simply in a formal way, but in a way that can be fully visualized. Obviously, from this constraint there resulted the strange description he left. In order to be visualized, the universe must be a hypersphere, and what Dante described, in order to be coherent, must be interpreted as the intersection of the Euclidian space in which he was moving with this hypersphere. Only thus, both the finite shape of the world and the requirement that everything, visible and invisible world together, must have God in its center, can be saved.Recommended Reading
Patapievici, Horia-Roman. Flying Against the Arrow: An Intellectual in Ceausescu's Romania. Budapest, New York: Central Euopean University Press, 2003.
-. Matters Political (in Rumanian). Bucharest: Humanitas Publishing House, 1996.
-. The Recent Man: A Critique of the Modernity from the Point of View of what has been Lost when Something has been Gained (in Rumanian).<br> Bucharest: Humanitas Publishing House, 2001.
Publications from the Fellows' Library
Patapievici, Horia-Roman (Barcelona, 2006)
El hombre reciente : una crítica a la modernidad desde la posición de quien se pregunta ; ¿qué perdemos cada vez que ganamos algo? Omul recent
Patapievici, Horia-Roman (Bucuresti, 2006)
Ochii Beatricei : cum arata cu adevarat lumea lui Dante?
Patapievici, Horia-Roman (Bucuresti, 2006)
Zbor în bataia sagetii : eseu asupra formarii
Patapievici, Horia-Roman (Bucuresti, 2006)
Patapievici, Horia-Roman (Bucuresti, 2006)
Patapievici, Horia-Roman ([Milano], 2006)
Gli occhi di Beatrice : com'era davvero il mondo di Dante? Ochii Beatricei <ital.>