In his medical treatise De vita (1498), Marsilio Ficino describes the force of medical talismans and their efficacy on humans against the background of a cosmological physiology. This article focuses ...on the question of how -- according to Ficino -- the powers of medical talismans were experienced by humans, by the living, sensible body (corpus animatum). Discussion of this question also leads to theoretical considerations about the efficacy of artifacts in the Renaissance.
This volume consists of 21 essays on Marsilio Ficino (1433-99), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus-priest who was the architect of Renaissance Platonism. They cast fascinating new light on his ...theology, philosophy, and psychology as well as on his influence and sources.
In 1484, humanist philosopher and theologian Marsilio Ficino
published the first complete Latin translation of Plato's extant
works. Students of Plato now had access to the entire range of the
...dialogues, which revealed to Renaissance audiences the rich ancient
landscape of myths, allegories, philosophical arguments,
etymologies, fragments of poetry, other works of philosophy,
aspects of ancient pagan religious practices, concepts of
mathematics and natural philosophy, and the dialogic nature of the
Platonic corpus's interlocutors. By and large, Renaissance readers
in the Latin West encountered Plato's text through Ficino's
translations and interpretation.
In Plato's Persona , Denis J.-J. Robichaud provides the
first synthetic study of Ficino's interpretation of the Platonic
corpus. Robichaud analyzes Plato's works in their original Greek
and in Ficino's Latin translations, as well as Ficino's
non-Platonic writings and correspondence, in the process uncovering
new aspects of Ficino's intellectual work habits. In his letters
and works, Ficino self-consciously imitated a Platonic style of
prose, in effect devising a persona for himself as a Platonic
philosopher. Plato's dialogues are populated with a wealth of
literary characters with whom Plato interacts and against whom
Plato refines his own philosophies. Reading through Ficino's
translations, Robichaud finds that the Renaissance philosopher
seeks an understanding of Plato's persona(e) among all the
dialogues' interlocutors. In effect, Ficino assumed the role of
Plato's Latin spokesperson in the Renaissance.
Plato's Persona is grounded in an extensive study of
scholarship in Renaissance humanism, classics, philosophy, and
intellectual history, and contextualizes Ficino's intellectual
achievements within the contemporary Christian orthodox view of
Platonism. Ficino was an influential figure in the early Italian
Renaissance: the key intermediary between Greek and Latin, and
between manuscript and print, giving voice to Plato and access to
the ancient frameworks needed to interpret his dialogues.
Celenza discusses the history of philosophy. In this work, the Historia critica philosophiae (1740), Johann Jakob Brucker is rightly regarded as the first modern historian of philosophy. His comments ...about Marsilio Ficino tell a lot about the enterprise of the history of philosophy, its canons, and its guiding assumptions. They can also help the people understand why fifteenth-century intellectual history has traditionally played such a small part in the history of philosophy. Ficino represents one of the fifteenth century's most important philosophers and certainly one whose work, if often subterraneously, had significant influence in succeeding centuries.
This essay provides a contextualised analysis of a set of texts that Marsilio Ficino collected in one of his extant working notebooks-Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana, MS 92-and probably used as a ...textual basis for his Commentary on Plato's Symposium (1469). In this context, I will discuss Ficino's treatment of his sources, investigating specific facets of his reading and excerpting practices. Special emphasis will be placed on the Latin section of the manuscript, containing a set of hitherto unexplored excerpts from Plotinus's Enneads. The study of this aspect of Ficino's work aims to shed light on his methodology as well as on his philosophical outlook. More generally, the article will provide further information on Renaissance reading practices. More specifically, it will offer new insight into the study of the genesis of Ficino's commentary.
Sometime in the late 1450s the Platonic philosopher Marsilio Ficino wrote a “little commentary” on Lucretius’s De rerum natura—a commentary he said he eventually burned as Plato once burned his own ...juvenilia. Scholars have read this text as an expression of a “religious crisis,” and they have described the event of its destruction as a critical turn both in Ficino’s thought and in Renaissance intellectual history. This essay explores an alternative explanation for Ficino’s early engagement with the poetry of the ancient atomist, revisiting a number of familiar problems in the scholarship, including the philosopher’s ideas about the uses of poetry, the story of his intellectual development, and the influence of Lucretius in the Quattrocento. As Ficino sought to revive Plato in Latin, I argue, he may have been drawn to the author of De rerum natura as a model of philosophical and poetic transmission.
Die Beiträge zur Altertumskunde enthalten Monographien, Sammelbände, Editionen, Übersetzungen und Kommentare zu Themen aus den Bereichen Klassische, Mittel- und Neulateinische Philologie, Alte ...Geschichte, Archäologie, Antike Philosophie sowie Nachwirken der Antike bis in die Neuzeit. Dadurch leistet die Reihe einen umfassenden Beitrag zur Erschließung klassischer Literatur und zur Forschung im gesamten Gebiet der Altertumswissenschaften.
Among the items in his legacy, the Florentine philosopher and humanist Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) left an extensive collection of Latin letters, which illustrate his studies and how he viewed ...himself as a teacher and counselor of princes. This book provides an introduction to this letter collection, analyzing selected letters with reference to the roles adopted by the author and his literary strategies.
This essay considers readings of Plato’s Symposium in sixteenth-century trattati d’amore (love treatises) — especially Francesco Patrizi’s L’amorosa filosofia — that offer an alternative to Marsilio ...Ficino’s pervasive interpretation as presented in his De amore. Against the backdrop of a larger debate concerning the role of the lower senses (touch, in particular) and the relationship between body and soul, these alternative readings of the Symposium attempt to redeem the role of tactility in love matters. Whereas Ficino and his most influential followers — Pico della Mirandola, Pietro Bembo, and Baldassare Castiglione — center their exegesis on Diotima’s speech and privilege sight as the most noble sense, Patrizi’s reading — to a large extent preceded by those of Sperone Speroni, Agnolo Firenzuola, and Flaminio Nobili — focuses on Aristophanes’s myth and the figure of the hermaphrodite as the model for a different kind of human love that is both sensual and spiritual.
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