REREADING ARISTOTLE, OR HOW TO COUNTER FORTUNE: BOCCACCIO ON INDUSTRY (DECAMERON, DAY III)

According to all of Boccaccio’s interpreters, the notion of ‘industria’ deeply connotes his major work and the ethical vision it presents. But how are we to define this notion? The claim of this essay is that in Decameron Day III ‘industria’ should not be identified simply with the wide-ranging ideas of ingenuity, skill, or astuteness that have been discussed in Boccaccio scholarship. While including all the semantic fields mentioned above, Decameronian ‘industria’ refers to a specific philosophical concept, dinotica (deinótes), which is described in Aristotle’s Ethics as the mental faculty that achieves the goals dictated by desire. Breaking with the medieval tradition that contrasted fortune to moral virtue, Decameron Day III suggests that fortune can be countered by means of a morally neutral intellectual faculty, thus proposing a more innovative reading of the relationship between fortune and human agency.