Dr Cecilia Muratori

Profile

Cecilia Muratori is Research Fellow in the Centre for Anglo-German Cultural Relations. She is a historian of philosophy by training: her main research interests are the role of mysticism in philosophical speculation, and the definition of the border dividing humans from animals. Her first monograph is dedicated to the mystical philosopher Jacob Böhme and his remarkable afterlives in German Idealism: ‘The First German Philosopher’: The Mysticism of Jakob Böhme as Interpreted by Hegel (2016). While she was Research Fellow at LMU Munich (2009-2013) and at Harvard-I Tatti (2013-2014) she developed an interest in Renaissance animal ethics: on this subject she has published several articles and edited two essay collections ('The Animal Soul and the Human Mind: Renaissance Debates' (2013), and 'Ethical Perspectives on Animals in the Renaissance and Early Modern Period', co-edited with Burkhard Dohm (2013)). Her second monograph, on Renaissance philosophical vegetarianism, will be published with Legenda in 2020.

She is interested in the mediation of philosophical concepts through the visual arts, and is co-curator of a series of philosophical exhibitions on the early modern philosopher Jacob Böhme for the Dresden State Art Collections:

• 'All in All: The Conceptual World of the Mystical Philosopher Jacob Böhme' (SKD Dresden, Summer'Autumn 2017),
• 'Light in Darkness: The Mystical Philosophy of Jacob Böhme' (Coventry Cathedral, Spring/Summer 2019), and
• 'An Eye for The World: The Visionary Thinker Jacob Boehme' (Amsterdam, Embassy of the Free Mind Winter 2019/Spring 2020).

Research

Publications

Monographs

• Renaissance Vegetarianism: The Philosophical Afterlives of Porphyry’s On Abstinence [forthcoming 2020, under contract with Legenda. Series: ‘Italian Perspectives’, 46].
• The First German Philosopher: The Mysticism of Jakob Böhme as Interpreted by Hegel (Berlin and New York: Springer, 2016).

Edited Volumes

• Light in Darkness: The Mystical Philosophy of Jacob Böhme, ed. by Cecilia Muratori, Claudia Brink and Lucinda Martin (Dresden: Sandstein, 2019) [Dutch edition forthcoming December 2019].
• Early Modern Philosophers and the Renaissance Legacy, ed. by Cecilia Muratori and Gianni Paganini (Berlin and New York: Springer, 2016). Series: ‘International Archives of the History of Ideas’, 220.
• Ethical Perspectives on Animals in the Early Modern Period, ed. by Cecilia Muratori and Burkhard Dohm (Galluzzo: SISMEL, 2013). Series: ‘Micrologus’ Library’, 55.
• The Animal Soul and the Human Mind: Renaissance Debates, ed. by Cecilia Muratori (Pisa and Rome: Fabrizio Serra, 2013). Series: ‘Supplementi’ of Bruniana & Campanelliana [Studi, 15].

Recent Journal Articles

• ‘The Aristotelian Carnivore: The Ethical Afterlives of Aristotle’s Theory of Animal Irrationality’, Revue des sciences religieuses 93.3 (2019), 257-279.
• ‘Better Animal than Human: The Happy Animal and the Human Animal in the Renaissance Reception of Aristotle’, Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie (2019), 477-497.
• ‘Science or “Sad Trash”?: Aristotelian Lineages in the Historiography of Animal Magnetism’, Ad argumenta. Quaestio Special Issue (Journal of the History of Metaphysics) 1 (2019), 203-222.
• ‘In Human Shape to Become the Very Beast!’ – Henry More on Animals’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 25.5 (2017), 897-915.
• ‘Real Animals in Ideal Cities: The Place and Use of Animals in Renaissance Utopian Literature’, Renaissance Studies 31.2 (2017), 223-239.
• ‘From Animal Bodies to Human Souls: (Pseudo)-Aristotelian Animals in Della Porta’s Physiognomics’, Early Science and Medicine 22.1 (2017), 1-23.
• ‘The Body Speaks Italian: Vernacular Aristotelianism in Giuseppe Liceti’s De la nobiltà de’ principali membri dell’huomo (1590)’, Intellectual History Review 27.4 (2017), 473-492.