Plato’s Persona. Marsilio Ficino, Renaissance Humanism, and Platonic Traditions

Elenchos ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 209-216
Author(s):  
Francesco Caruso ◽  
Carlo delle Donne
Keyword(s):  
Renaissance Humanism ◽  
Marsilio Ficino

scholarly journals Denis J. J. Robichaud, Plato’s Persona: Marsilio Ficino, Renaissance Humanism, and Platonic Traditions, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 2018.

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 435-440
Author(s):  
Valery Rees
Keyword(s):  
University Of Pennsylvania ◽  
Renaissance Humanism ◽  
Marsilio Ficino

Review of: Denis J. J. Robichaud, Plato’s Persona: Marsilio Ficino, Renaissance Humanism, and Platonic Traditions, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 2018, 344 pp., ISBN 9780812249859.

Nifo, Agostino (c.1470–1538)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward P. Mahoney
Keyword(s):  
Strong Influence ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Medical Doctor ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Public Controversy ◽  
Renaissance Humanism ◽  
Marsilio Ficino ◽  
Agostino Nifo ◽  
Original Works ◽  
Human Intellect

Agostino Nifo was a university teacher, medical doctor and extremely prolific writer. His books included many commentaries on Aristotle’s logic, natural philosophy and metaphysics, as well as original works on topics ranging from elementary logic to beauty and love. However, his most important works had to do with the human intellect, and with Averroes’ view that there is just one intellect shared by all human beings. Although he never accepted Averroes’ position as true, he did initially believe that Averroes correctly interpreted Aristotle on this point. He also entered into public controversy with Pomponazzi on the question whether human immortality could be proved. Nifo’s Aristotelianism reflects his interest in many different traditions of commentary on Aristotle, including medieval Latin commentators, especially Thomas Aquinas, medieval Arab commentators and their Latin followers, especially John of Jandun, but most of all the Greek commentators. Here he shows the strong influence of Renaissance humanism, which made the Greek texts available. It was when Nifo himself learned Greek that he came to abandon the notion that Averroes was an accurate interpreter of Aristotle. Nifo was also very interested in Plato and Platonism, particularly as presented by Marsilio Ficino. His careful presentations of other people’s doctrines were popular in university circles for much of the sixteenth century.

Lucretius Renaissance Thought

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ada Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Edmund Spenser ◽  
John Dryden ◽  
Margaret Cavendish ◽  
Human Society ◽  
De Rerum Natura ◽  
Renaissance Humanism ◽  
Marsilio Ficino ◽  
Lucy Hutchinson ◽  
Primitive State ◽  
Transmission Studies

Even before its celebrated rediscovery by Poggio Bracciolini in 1417, Lucretius’s didactic Epicurean epic De rerum natura was famous as a Roman masterpiece celebrated by Virgil and Ovid, and infamous as a capsule of dangerous, irreligious paganism ferociously denounced by Arnobius and other Christian apologists. The manuscript remained in the sole possession of Niccolò Niccoli until his death in 1437 when his library was acquired by Cosimo de Medici and numerous copies began to circulate in Florence and, soon thereafter, in Venice and the Veneto region, then Rome, Naples, and Iberia. A total of fifty-four manuscripts survive from the Renaissance, and thirty editions of the poem were printed by 1600, including commentaries by Albertus Pius (1512), Denys Lambin (1563), and Hubert van Giffen (Gifanius, 1565–1566). The diversity of subjects treated in the De rerum natura has invited a broad range of scholarly approaches. Philological study of the text’s transmission has been extensive, and for many years work on the stemma of Lucretius manuscripts served as a model for transmission studies in general. Historians of science frequently examine Lucretius’s influence on atomism, materialism, corpuscular theory, and ideas of generation, especially from the 17th century on. Scholarship on his influence on poetry, literature, language, and art has concentrated on Italian and English contexts, though his influence in France and Iberia is also extensive. Others have concentrated on Lucretius’s influence on ethics and political thought; his Epicurean celebration of pleasure and his account of how human society and government developed gradually out of a less complicated primitive state greatly influenced Machiavelli, Montaigne, and Thomas Hobbes. Lucretius is also a lynchpin in current debates over the modernity of the Renaissance and is often invoked in narratives that portray Renaissance humanism as a modernizing, secularizing force, characterized by a turn toward rationalism and away from Christian orthodoxy—such narratives are common but also controversial, and much scholarship has been devoted to advancing and to refuting such readings of the Renaissance Lucretius. Other figures often examined in a Lucretian context include Pomponio Leto, Marsilio Ficino, Poliziano, Bartolomeo Scala, Botticelli, Pierre Gassendi, Edmund Spenser, Lucy Hutchinson, Margaret Cavendish, John Dryden, and Girolamo Fracastoro.

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