Gebet an den einen Gott -- Zusammenfassung der Lehren des Zoroaster und des Platon -- Die Totenklage auf die verblichene Fürstin Kleope -- Die Totenklage auf Helena Palaiogina -- Die Unterschiede zwischen Platon und Aristoteles -- Mahnrede an den Despoten Theodor -- An Manuel Palaiologos -- An den Kaiser -- Kleine Dankadresse an den Despoten.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

After a very brief presentation of the most important facts concerning the life and writings of Georgius Gemistus Plethon, we shortly summarize the challenging content of his greatest and posthumously published opus entitled Nómōn syngraphḗ. While this paper offers the first Polish translation of this amazing work, the purpose of present article is to familiarize and promote Plethon’s fascinating treatise.

The essay illustrates the figure of Demetrios Kavàkis Rhaoul, Byzantine official at the service of the last two Paleologue emperors and of the Despots of the Peloponnese, who was also George Gemistos Plethon’s friend and student. Two short works of his are here published for the first time, one on the Sun God and another on the classification of the religions professed by humanity, alongside two small inedited letters by Plethon. In the first of the two writings, Kavàkis (...) clears the reasons for his aversion towards any kind of religion or philosophy that places the divine beyond the visible world and that believes in the existence of an intelligible or, even worse, over-intelligible world. These ideas lead him to clash not only with Christianity, but also with Plato and with the ideas of his beloved teacher Plethon, who, however, seems to agree with him in a dream. In the second writing this peculiar solar religion is reaffirmed, against the religion of poets and the religions of transcendence, warning however that nature wants some respect for the religion of ancestors, whichever this might be, when it is functional to the life of the society and of the State. (shrink)

Paul Richard Blum Et nuper Plethon – Ficino's Praise of Georgios Gemistos ABSTRACT Most authors who refer to Marsilio Ficino's famous Prooemium to his translation of Plotinus, addressed to Lorenzo de'Medici, discuss the alleged foundation of the Platonic Academy in Florence, but rarely continue reading down the same page, where – for a second time – Georgios Gemistos Plethon is mentioned. The passage contains more than one surprising claim: 1. Pletho is a reliable interpreter of Aristotle. 2. Pletho (...) and Pico are the most recent Aristotelians, more precisely, they are the latest candle bearers of true Aristotelian tradition. 3. Pletho, alongside with the other authors mentioned, is religiously orthodox. In this paper I show that these statements are contrafactual, and discuss the reasons for Ficino's attempt at making Plethon and Pico his allies. Ficino suggests that Pico and Pletho are representatives of such "philosophic religion" that eventually might convert the Aristotelians to the same piety that unites Pico, Plethon, and the Platonizing interpreters of Aristotle. Pletho's agenda was to restore ancient pagan wisdom in order not to supplant Christianity. Ficino's device to counter corrupt Aristetelianism is to create a counter-tradition, that parallels Platonism, namely the pious reading of Aristotle. He employed the figure of young Pico as having urged him to translate Plotinus. Pico serves as a step stone between the Council of Florence, when in 1439 Cosimo encountered Pletho, and the new translation of Plotinus. The divine inspiration, instilled by Pletho and forwarded from Cosimo via Pico to Ficino christianizes the project, which would sound dubitable, if related only to Pletho. Thus Pico was to help saving Ficino's reputation as a religious philosopher. For this purpose, Ficino had to parallel Pletho with the unsuspected Pico, to the effect that Pletho becomes so to say christened. (shrink)

This study of the Byzantine philosopher George Gemistos Plethon includes the first complete translation of his treatise, On the Differences of Aristotle from Plato, and summarizes all his other works. Woodhouse emphasizes Plethon's controversy with George Scholarios on the respective merits of Plato and Aristotle and his important impact on the Italian humanists during the Council of Union at Ferrara and Florence in 1438-9. Though Plethon's ambition to create a new religion based on Neoplatonism was never realized, (...) his ideas had a significant influence on the western Renaissance. (shrink)

George Gemistos Plethon was a Byzantine Philosopher, who lived during the 14th and 15th centuries before the fall of the Byzantine Empire. In his writings we can find the feeling of an intense Greek identity. Also, he can be considered as a genuine neoplatonist, who played a decisive role in the controversy between Platonists and Aristotelians in his era. He took part in the Council of Florence and the Council of Ferrara (1438-1439), where he gave a course of lectures (...) on Platonic Philosophy, which was the cause for the founding of Academia Platonica by Cozimo de Medici (1459). His social and political ideas were very important and derived from an ideal for reforming the social reality of his country. But they weren’t appreciated, as he wished, in Peloponnesus, and especially in Mistra, where he lived for the most part of his life. Although his theology and ontology are based on a metaphysical determinism, the human being maintains his freedom because of the rational part of soul. Man and his soul are in a middle position between the intelligible and the sensible world. His ethics was developed on a wide theory of virtues, including the four main platonic virtues, from which derive twelve subdivisions. His anthropological, social and ethical theories belong on the neoplatonic line of thought and had a very large influence not only on Byzantium but also on the whole European culture of Renaissance. (shrink)

Byzantium has recently attracted much attention, principally among cultural, social and economic historians. This book shifts the focus to philosophy and intellectual history, exploring the thought-world of visionary reformer Gemistos Plethon. It argues that Plethon brought to their fulfilment latent tendencies among Byzantine humanists towards a distinctive anti-Christian and pagan outlook. His magnum opus, the pagan Nomoi, was meant to provide an alternative to, and escape-route from, the disputes over the Orthodoxy of Gregory Palamas and Thomism. It was (...) also a groundbreaking reaction to the bankruptcy of a pre-existing humanist agenda and to aborted attempts at the secularisation of the State, whose cause Plethon had himself championed in his two utopian Memoranda. Inspired by Plato, Plethon's secular utopianism and paganism emerge as the two sides of a single coin. On another level, the book challenges anti-essentialist scholarship that views paganism and Christianity as social and cultural constructions. (shrink)

Translations and commentary on Plethon's complete system of Neopagan theology and religious practice focused on the Hellenic pantheon and deeply rooted in ancient Greek Paganism. Includes rituals, prayers, invocations, and hymns for holiday and daily use along with Plethon's complete sacred calendar.

In Marc. gr., classis XI,18 an anonymous florilegium consisting of selected paragraphs of the Second Part of the Fifth Division of the 3rd book of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa contra Gentiles is extant. These paragraphs were excerpted from the Greek translation of the Latin text by Demetrios Cydones and 106 ; ch. 101, § 2 partim; 103; ch. 94, § 3-5; 12-15). The main topic of this text is «fate». An edition of it is offered, and it is argued, on the (...) basis of its similarity with another florilegium Thomisticum of the professed Byzantine Thomist Georgios Scholarios - Gennadios II as well as with some of his writings, that it must be attributed to the same author. It should be probably placed in 1444/53 and regarded as part of Scholarios’ preparation for refuting Georgios Gemistos - Plethon’s Laws II,6, which from 1439 onwards was circulated independently as De fato. (shrink)

The article aims at reconstructing some fundamental aspects of Pletho's aesthetical views by investigating the ontological foundations of the plethonian concept of beauty. In a first step, the analysis concentrates on one extant fragment from the Laws, in which Pletho provides his definition of the concept of beauty. Here its definition in terms of an ,,ontological comparative" is combined with the platonic notions of the limit and the limitless . In the next step, the article shows the position of peras (...) and apeiron in the plethonian ontology: the pair appears as Hera and Poseidon at the very top of the plethonian pantheon. After a brief analysis of the several ways in which Pletho explains their union, in the last step, the article shows that Poseidon is brought explicitly in connection with the notion of beauty in a variety of extant texts. Thus the union of Poseidon and Hera is shown to be both effective at the root of the plethonian universe and to be central for the Plethonian concept of beauty. Beauty thus becomes a constitutive trait of the plethonian universe. (shrink)

This Handbook contains forty essays by an international team of experts on the antecedents, the content, and the reception of the Dionysian corpus, a body of writings falsely ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite, a convert of St Paul, but actually written about 500 AD. The first section contains discussions of the genesis of the corpus, its Christian antecedents, and its Neoplatonic influences. In the second section, studies on the Syriac reception, the relation of the Syriac to the original Greek, and (...) the editing of the Greek by John of Scythopolis are followed by contributions on the use of the corpus in such Byzantine authors as Maximus the Confessor, John of Damascus, Theodore the Studite, Niketas Stethatos, Gregory Palamas, and Gemistus Pletho. In the third section attention turns to the Western tradition, represented first by the translators John Scotus Eriugena, John Sarracenus, and Robert Grosseteste and then by such readers as the Victorines, the early Franciscans, Albert the Great, Aquinas, Bonaventure, Dante, the English mystics, Nicholas of Cusa, and Marsilio Ficino. The contributors to the final section survey the effect on Western readers of Lorenzo Valla's proof of the inauthenticity of the corpus and the subsequent exposure of its dependence on Proclus by Koch and Stiglmayr. The authors studied in this section include Erasmus, Luther and his followers, Vladimir Lossky, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Jacques Derrida, as well as modern thinkers of the Greek Church. Essays on Dionysius as a mystic and a political theologian conclude the volume. (shrink)

Dans la meilleure tradition des manuels d'histoire de la philosophie, ce livre souhaite offrir à l'étudiant autant qu'à l'homme cultivé un certain profil tics penseurs illustres qui tracèrent les multiples itinéraires philosophiques grâce auxquels s'est édifiée la modernité. De la pratique, généalogique, du mythe jusqu'à Pléthon, dernier penseur du Moyen Age, qui associe encore mythe généalogique et métaphysique, c'est le foisonnement varié de la pensée qui y est décrit, en fonction de l'idée d'une promotion de certaines pensées qui se sont (...) imposées au détriment de la profusion des expériences philosophiques des hommes, dont la plupart sont perdues à jamais alors que d'autres demeurent encore dans l'ombre. Plus qu'un panorama de philosophes juxtaposés, cette histoire de la philosophie amorce une nouvelle méthode de lecture du passé, en alliant approche pédagogique et rigueur philosophique. (shrink)