Dr. Enrico Piergiacomi

Enrico Piergiacomi is assistant professor in history of philosophy at the Technion | Israel Institute of Technology. He was recipient of the international grant The Reception of Lucretius and Roman Epicureanism from the Middle Ages to the Eighteenth century (2019-2020), research in residence at the Bogliasco Foundation of Genova (2021), fellow at Villa I Tatti | The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (2021-2022) where he carried on the project The Pleasures of Piety. The History of a Neglected Religious Tradition, and postdoctoral fellow in the research group Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations at the Max-Weber-Kolleg of Trento (2022).

He specializes in ancient/modern philosophical thought and its intersections with philosophy of science, medicine, psychology, theology, and ethics. His research interests include atomism; hedonism; medical theory; philosophical theology; scientific poetry; theory of performance. He has so far published two books: Storia delle antiche teologie atomiste (Sapienza University Press, Rome 2017), and Amicus Lucretius. Gassendi, il “De rerum natura” e l’edonismo cristiano (De Gruyter, Berlin-New York 2022).

At present, he is working on the following four projects, listed in the order of priority and progress:

• A small book on the Presocratic conception of the natural law and its impact in rhetoric, psychology, and ethics;
• A project on the medical-scientific poem from antiquity to the early modern period, and possibly beyond, with the provisional title Contagious Poetics. Atomistic Poetics of Etiology and Therapy. One of the outputs of this research will be the first-ever English monograph on the poet, philosopher and physician Girolamo Fracastoro (1476-1553);
• The project The Pleasures of Piety. The History of a Neglected Religious Tradition, started at I Tatti, which reconstructs the theological-scientific views of the Renaissance / early modern Christian hedonists, such as Lorenzo Valla, Marsilio Ficino, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Pierre Gassendi;
• The dissemination project Theatresophy, started in 2014, which investigates the history of ancient philosophical interpretations of the performing arts.