“Jason Aleksander’s Redefining Faith in Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’ is a major contribution toward the illumination of Dante’s authentic thinking and writing…. Aleksander’s scholarship and philology (including a substantial and very pertinent discussion of Averroes) are impeccable and wide-ranging, whether he is treating Dante’s Comedy or relevant medieval history, intellectual history, the history of medieval doctrines, and the history of philosophy.”
—Gregory B. Stone, Joseph S. Yenni Professor of Italian Studies, Louisiana State University, USA

“A philosopher’s reading of Dante’s Divine Comedy, this book offers a striking new definition of ‘faith’ that is poised to challenge traditional scholarship and unlock the poem’s power to unhinge contemporary assumptions about knowledge, virtue, and the ways we define and reshape them. With his limpid and evocative prose, Aleksander leads readers on an interpretive journey into what he defines as Dante’s ‘complex experiment in the ethics of reading.’ Under his critical lens, the poem’s ambiguities and aporias become opportunities for inquiry and invitations to reconsider its epistemological and ethical demands on the reader.”
—Filippo Gianferrari, Associate Professor of Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA

Drawing on close readings of Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, Jason Aleksander’s Redefining Faith in Dante’s Divine Comedy invites readers to see Dante’s poem anew—as a work that provocatively reconfigures “faith” as a mode of creative and interpretive engagement grounded in the exercise of practical judgment (phronēsis) and intellectual humility. Weaving together intellectual history, literary analysis, and sustained engagement with pagan, Christian, and Islamic philosophical traditions, Aleksander shows how the poem’s treatment of heresy, salvation, personal immortality, atonement, and freedom of will invite us to read—and to live—with greater attentiveness, responsibility, and openness to the possibility of personal transformation. This book is ideal for scholars and students of Dante, medieval and Renaissance thought, philosophical hermeneutics, and readers interested in how literature shapes moral imagination.

Jason Aleksander is Professor of Philosophy at San José State University, USA.