Matteo Johannes Stettler

is a postdoctoral researcher at the Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna, Italy. He obtained his Ph.D. in Philosophy at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. Matteo was formerly an Adjunct Instructor in Philosophy at the Lorenzo de' Medici International Institute of Florence, Italy, where he taught an undergraduate course in 'The Philosophy of Happiness.'

Bios

Born in Florence, Tuscany, Matteo J. Stettler is a half-Italian, half-Swiss researcher and instructor in Philosophy. He specialized in the ancient notion of philosophy as a 'way of life,' 'practice', or an 'art of living,' in the tradition of thought inaugurated in the second half of the twentieth century by French scholars such as Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault. He has published several articles on the subject and has lectured extensively on it. He brings his experience and expertise to his teaching and strives to inspire his students to embrace and lead a philosophical life.

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Forthcoming Publications

'Hadot Among the Medievalists: Revisiting the Historiography on ‘Intellectual Felicity' in the XIII Century,' Eidos, Thematic Issue 'What Exactly Is Philosophy as a Way of Life? Boundaries, Crossroads, Deadlocks' (Proceedings of the kick-off conference of the research project 'Mapping Philosophy as a Way of Life' held the 5-6 July 2023 in Lisbon)

The reception of Hadot’s work on the tradition of spiritual exercises among historians of medieval philosophy has rarely produced the results that one would have reasonably hoped for. Medievalists have often criticized Hadot’s early thesis of a medieval decline of the ancient notion of ‘philosophy as a way of life’ – and rightly so – but they usually failed to register the important revision to which Hadot subjected his thesis after his encounter with Domański’s works in the 1990s. In addition, it has so far gone entirely unexplored what the post-1990s Hadot’s acceptance of some interpretative positions currently debated by historians of medieval philosophy might itself mean for his conceptualization of the ancient notion of ‘philosophy as a way of life.’ In the present revisitation of the historiography on the medieval notion of ‘intellectual felicity’ in the XIII century, I thus hope to be able to, first, provide a corrective to the understanding that so many medievalists still seem to have of Hadot’s contribution to the study of medieval philosophy, and, second, show how the current debates raging in medievalist circles might point us towards some of the possible limitations with Hadot’s understanding of ‘philosophy as a way of life’ in and beyond the Middle Ages.

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