Institute of Continuing Education (ICE)
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Cecilia Muratori is Research Fellow at the University of Warwick. She is a historian of philosophy who publishes and teaches in English, Italian and German. 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, and especially in the reception of G.W.F. Hegel: ‘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)). She is now completing her second monograph, on the topic of philosophical vegetarianism in the Renaissance. Recently, she has also published a co-edited volume on philosophical historiography: Early Modern Philosophers and the Renaissance Legacy (2016).
She is interested in the mediation of philosophical concepts through the visual arts, and is co-curator of the first philosophical exhibition on Jacob Böhme: All in All: The Conceptual World of the Mystical Philosopher Jacob Böhme (Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden 2017).
At ICE, she will teach courses on the Philosophy of German mysticism, and on Interdisciplinary Strategies for Philosophical Encounters with the Visual Arts. As a teacher, she fosters terminological precision, historical contextualisation, and the capability of grasping systematically the arguments contained in a text. She aims to stimulatestudents to bridge the gap between historical texts and contemporary concerns in a critically engaged way.She is passionate about presenting and discussing with students difficult philosophical questions in a clear and approachable manner, but without sacrificing the complexity of the arguments.
The philosophy of German mysticism, especially Jacob Böhme and his reception from the 17th to the mid-19th century; the relation between mysticism and philosophy in German idealism, especially in the work of G.W.F. Hegel.
Competing conceptions of the human-animal differentiation in the intertwined fields of psychology, ethics and natural philosophy, in particular the Renaissance reception of Aristotle’s view of the human-animal difference, and philosophical debates on eating animals in the Renaissance, with special attention to the reception of Porphyry’s work On Abstinence.
I am also interested in the methodology of the history of philosophy, in two principal areas: firstly philosophical historiography, especially the question about how to conceptualize continuities and philosophical turning points, and secondly the relationship between philosophy and the visual arts, and the mediation of philosophical concepts through exhibitions.
