Aidan Fusco

Aidan Fusco, first in his family to attend university, is a second generation immigrant, whose maternal Irish side came to England to escape poverty. His father's side is Italian and came to England as political refugees against both unification and the abolition of Italy's monarchy. As an intellectual historian interested in the relationship between words and things, Platonism and Neo-Platonism, self-knowledge, memory, mathematical logic, and the philosophy of language.

The thesis treats the development of Renaissance philosophies of self-knowledge and the interior mind in post-Reformation England, and their application to political texts, most notably Leviathan (1651). This development was obtained through a remarkable combination of Pauline conscience, St. Augustine’s theory of language, the Ars Memoria within the Renaissane Ars rhetorica, and that root of that rhetorical concept of the mind as a book or tablet in Plato’s theory of recollection or anamnesis. Much in the same way that artificial intelligence is the Millenarian cause today, artificial memory (as the Rhetorica ad Herennium puts it) was a profound concern in sixteenth and seventeenth century England. The nexus of theology, rhetoric, logic, and memory has been a feature of English literature since before there was an England. King Alfred's Old English adaptation of Boethius (c. 850) deals with precisely the same questions that Hobbes would later engage with in 1651.

Aidan Fusco holds an LAHP studentship, awarded by the AHRC. 

PhD

Supervisors: Prof. Angus Gowland (primary supervisor) Prof. Quentin Skinner (LAHP joint supervisor), and Prof. Valentina Arena (secondary supervisor.

Title: “Read Thyself, or, Hobbes and the Settling of Significations”. 

Expected completion date: 2025 (ABD)

Publications:

Popular

- On Leibniz’s Description of Hobbes as plusquam nominalis in the Oxford Centre for Intellectual History Blog, March 2021. Deals with Leibniz’s attempts to combat an arbitrary definition of the truth by appealing to a mathematical, divine logic, inherent in the universe.

Translation Articles

As featured translator for the Journal of Italian Translation’s “Voices in English from Europe to New Zealand”:

- 'English translation of poems by Giambattista Marino and Eugenio Montale' in the Journal of Italian Translation, Vol. XVI, Spring 2021, pp. 146-153.

- ‘English translation of poems by Sara Bonadei and Marina Citadello’ in the Journal of Italian Translation, Vol. XVI, Fall 2021, pp 210-244.

- ‘English translation of a videoscript by Gianni Fabriani and three  

poems by Pasquale Quaglia’ in the Journal of Italian Translation, Vol. XVII, Spring 2022, pp. 284-300.

- ‘English translation of poems by Rosario Papa’ in the Journal of Italian Translation, Vol. XVII, Fall 2022, pp. 213-221

- ‘English translation of Buon compleanno, amore mio by Michelle Grillo’ in The Journal of Italian Translation, Vol. XVIII, Spring 2023, pp. 316-326.

- ‘English translation of poems by Alice Loda’, Vol. XVIII, Fall 2023, pp. 272-286.

I have now proposed a new section for the journal, which has been accepted this year, called “Never Translated, for a Reason” in which I find strange and wonderful mediaeval and Renaissance Italian texts never before translated. The first article will be my own,

- ‘Never translated for a reason: Sir Tobie Matthews’, Vol XX, Spring 2025, 1-13.

Academic Journal articles

- Knowledge is Memory, or Finding Hobbes’s Plato in the journal, Erudition and the Republic of Letters 9 (2024), pp. 76–109, in which it is demonstrated that Hobbes, far from the atheist we consider him to be today, was profoundly concerned with the unsettling of moral and theological concepts because of his reading of Plato.

- Enthymematic Faith: Physician and Humanist, Theodore Goulston in Erudition and the Republic of Letters, due for publication 2026

Qualifications:

• BA in Ancient and Modern History from Oxford (2018)
• MA in Intellectual History and the History of Political Thought from Queen Mary's (2019)