Luka Kuchukhidze

by Rodrigo Ballon Villanueva

Luka Kuchukhidze

Summer 2024 – Before going to the summer holidays, we want to introduce you to Luka Kuchukhidze! Luka is a PhD candidate, Assistant Researcher and Lecturer at the ‘Savle Tsereteli Institute of Philosophy’, Ilia State University (Georgia). Although his current research focuses on Medieval Latin Philosophy, he comes from a varied philosophical background. He was awarded a BA (2017) from Tbilisi State University and an MA (2019) in Philosophy from Ilia State University. During the former, he studied the influence of Byzantine thought on early 20^th-century Russian religious thinkers, gaining a solid understanding of the Eastern tradition in the Middle Ages. For the latter, he concentrated on the reception of ideas developed throughout the Early Modern Scientific Revolution in the philosophy of A. N. Whitehead.

When Luka began his PhD in 2020, his research interests shifted exclusively to Latin Philosophy, especially to Boethius. Accordingly, Luka is working on a dissertation titled ‘Philosophical and Theological Aspects of Truth in Boethius: Significare, Determinare, Aeternitas in the Transitional Period from Antiquity to the Middle Ages’, supervised by Tamar Tsopurashvili. Here, he focuses on the methodological or meta-philosophical aspects of the relationship between philosophy and theology, as presented in Boethius’s writings – including the logical commentaries, De consolatione philosophiae, and the Opuscula sacra. For this, Luka attempts to reconstruct Boethius’s conception of truth by taking into consideration his views on semantics, logic, epistemology, and metaphysics.

Luka is also interested in the Boethian tradition and, in particular, the reception of Boethius’s Opuscula sacra in the 12^th and 13^th centuries, especially in the commentaries of Thomas Aquinas. This interest towards Opuscula has led him (parallel to his PhD project) to examine the tradition of predicatio in divinis in the Early Middle Ages (before and after Boethius), especially in Augustine and Eriugena. The result of this research is a book chapter titled ‘Categories and praedicatio in divinis: Perspectives from Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages: Augustine, Boethius, Eriugena’, whichis going to be published in a bilingual (Georgian/English) volume in Tbilisi, later this year. Apart from this piece, Luka has a book chapter titled ‘Determinism, Future Contingents and Divine Foreknowledge in Boethius’s II Commentary on De Interpretatione’ that will be published soon in the volume Radical Thinking in the Middle Ages (Brepols, 2024). You can follow Luka’s research here.