15th/16th Century Philosophy

Tommaso Campanella studente nei conventi domenicani di Calabria tra il 1583 ed il 1589 -- Tommaso Campanella nei paesi di Calabria tra il 1598 ed il 1599.

Marsilio Ficino translated the entirety of Plato's works into Latin, singularly reviving Platonism and setting in motion its penetration of all the arts a well as of philosophy during the Renaissance. Jayne's authoritative translation, and his thoughtful Introduction, shows Ficino's Commentary on Plato's Symposium on Love to be as much about Plato's idealization of love found in passages of Plato's dialogue as it is an exposition of Ficino's idea of personal love as "part of a natural cosmic process," as he (...) follows the emanative system of Plotinus. Ficino is also widely acknowledged as the godfather of archetypal psychology. Ficino turned Western Europe on its psychological ear. His esoteric visions of eros and beauty influenced not only Botticelli and Michelangelo, but everyone else since then who cares about love and soul. Includes an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary materials important to a study of Ficino's text and its influence in Western culture. (shrink)

Most nominalist logicians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries believed that we could conceive of and refer to impossible objects. The articulation of the semantics of impossibility that underlined this view is much less known than that of their fourteenth-century predecessors, and it may at first seem to conflict with that tradition’s core principle of theoretical parsimony. Here, I propose a first analysis of John Mair’s case and argue that a central part of that development concerns the theory of signification (...) itself. I will examine his views on empty reference and imaginable impossibilities in relation to John Buridan, Marsilius of Inghen, and John Dorp of Leiden, as well as an anonymous work known as the Hagenau commentary. By doing so, I intend to show that his approach to empty reference is closely connected to issues of conceptual representation. (shrink)

This article proposes a novel interpretation of Montaigne’s and Bayle’s comments on Tacitus. My contention is that their Tacitism is a Foucauldian discourse on toleration. Toleration is an example of governmentality, a strategy to govern a population, not a genuine call for religious diversity. This novel reading applies to Michel de Montaigne’s Essays and Pierre Bayle’s Various Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet and his Historical and Critical Dictionary. Montaigne’s essay On the Useful and the Honourable, he shows that (...) there is a difference between his public and private persona. The author discusses ideas of toleration in a Tacitist style. This happens in his essay Something Lacking in Our Civil Administrations, where the author laments the death of Sebastian Castalio and, indirectly, he supports his commitment to religious pluralism. As I will show, Montaigne embraces a Gallican belief system, which is more conciliatory Bayle a century later, discusses the same issues. In his Various Thoughts, he makes a case for toleration as a tool to manage a population. Ultimately, it will be clear how this plea for toleration is not a product of the Enlightenment, but it is rather a discourse to achieve societal compliance. (shrink)

Althusius is undoubtedly the founder and connotation endower of the term “federation”. He explained the origin of the term as coming from “feudo”, which means feudal territory, covenant, agreement, and obligation. It is a group of people with a common purpose who, under the witness of God, sign a covenant stipulating that a ruler will be elected among them in some just manner, and the others will obey the ruler's commands. The author named this form of organization: federation. The family (...) is the most basic unit of a federation, or more bluntly, the family is the smallest federation. Can a king create another king with the same rights by transferring rights? Impossible. Because the rights of the recipient of the transferred rights are always less than those of the transferor. This is the process and essence of politics. In the author's view, politics, or rather, just politics, should be organized in the form of a federation. In this federal polity, the lower ranks are higher than the upper ranks, and the parts are greater than the whole. Because the lower ranks, parts, peripheries, and subordinates are eternal; while the upper ranks, the whole, the center, and the superiors are temporary, derivative, and created, and thus can also be taken away. Indeed, the authority of an individual citizen is less than that of the supreme magistrate as the head of the union. But the collective authority of the citizens is greater than the authority of the supreme magistrate. (shrink)

Buddhists point to the soteriological value not only of the dispelling of ignorance, but the arising of insight or wisdom which constitutes the salvific goal of practice. Madhyamaka’s unique conception of the ultimate nature of reality makes this cognition of what is metaphysically ultimate distinct from other kinds of knowledge, as these soteriologically valuable cognitive states aim at something unlike anything else so known: the lack of ‘own- being,’ or emptiness, of all reality. After considering and rejecting some popular interpretations (...) of the Madhyamaka Buddhist tradition regarding this soteriologically valuable epistemological state, I propose that a Thomistic conception of the Gift of Wisdom might provide a model that explains the unique nature of such insight into ultimate reality and its soteriological value. In short, wisdom involves a direct nonjudgmental veridical self-awareness arising from a good moral character, which is therefore also indirectly a direct nonjudgmental awareness of what ultimate reality is like. The final part will address the obvious dissimilarities between Christian and Buddhist metaphysics which might be thought to undermine these epistemological parallels and show, by contrast, that Christians are uniquely placed among theists in sharing many relevant features of Madhyamaka metaphysics that undergird parallels even in soteriological aims. (shrink)

Henry of Herford frequently addresses medical topics throughout his encyclopedia, the Catena aurea entium. The paper offers an overview of the sections that deal with health, sickness, and diseases. While including key texts of medieval medical literature, Henry’s ‘medical library’ has a specific focus on practical medicine, pharmacology, and the regimen. The paper also includes editions of some questions dedicated to specific diseases.

This article examines the late-medieval plague tractate by Augustine of Trento, an Augustinian friar who addressed the matter of plague before the Black Death of 1347/1348. I will investigate Augustine’s astrological approach to the prognostication, prevention, and cure of the plague epidemic. Further, I will compare his work to the Compendium medicinalis astrologiae, composed by the Dominican Niccolò de Paganica in 1330, and to the consilia produced by the master of medicine Gentile da Foligno in 1348. This double comparison will (...) help to better understand the shared intellectual milieu and the different approaches of these three authors. (shrink)

Due to his first-hand experience with the Black Death, the Italian physician Gentile da Foligno (d. 1348) became a famous authority in this field. He devoted various writings to the pestilence; one of them was a Consilium addressed to the city of Pisa. This same Advice on the Plague was then rendered into Hebrew by an anonymous translator. The practical character of the Consilium, which contains numerous instructions and recipes to prevent contagion and treat the disease, might have aroused the (...) interest of Jewish physicians who, excluded from academic education, were looking for useful treatments. In this paper, the Latin text and its Hebrew translation are analyzed, and in the appendix the edition of both versions is provided. (shrink)

Marsilio Ficino of Florence (1433-99) was one of the most influential thinkers of the Renaissance. He put before society a new ideal of human nature, emphasising its divine potential. As teacher and guide to a remarkable circle of men, he made a vital contribution to changes that were taking place in European thought. For Ficino, the writings of Plato provided the key to the most important knowledge for mankind, knowledge of God and the soul. It was the absorption of this (...) knowledge that proved so important to Ficino, to his circle, and to later writers and artists. As a young man, Ficino had been directed by Cosimo de' Medici towards the study of Plato in the original Greek. Later he formed a close connection with Cosimo's grandson, Lorenzo de' Medici, under whom Florence achieved its age of brilliance. Gathered round Ficino and Lorenzo were such men as Landino, Bembo, Poliziano and Pico della Mirandola. The ideas they discussed became central to the work of Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Raphael, Dürer, and many other writers and artists. The first letter in this volume is from Cosimo to Ficino, inviting him to visit him on his estate at Careggii and to bring with him 'Plato's book on The Highest Good' (the Philebus) which Cosimo had asked him to translate in 1463. Though there is some uncertainty about the precise nature of Ficino's Platonic Academy, in another letter he replies to a correspondent's request for 'that maxim of mine that is inscribed around the walls of the Academy'. This revised edition has corrected errors made in the original translation more than four decades ago, and the notes to the letters and the biographical notes have incorporated much new material from scholarship on the period which has grown enormously in the intervening years and continues to flourish. (shrink)

Une apparition miraculeuse dans l'histoire de l'humanite et particulierement dans celle de l'esprit allemand : c'est en ces termes que Schelling, dans sa Philosophie de la Revelation, salue la figure de Jacob Boehme. Si l'on reconnait aujourd'hui a l'oeuvre du celebre cordonnier-philosophe une influence majeure sur le destin de la metaphysique allemande, la pensee du premier philosophe allemand, comme l'appelle Hegel dans son Histoire de la philosophie, demeure encore pour nous deroutante et au premier abord insaisissable. Or, a travers l'etude (...) chronologique des principales oeuvres de Boehme (L'Aurore naissante; Les trois principes de l'essence divine; La triple vie de l'homme; etc.), c'est cette coherence et cette unite souvent tenues pour incertaines que le grand historien Alexandre Koyre parvient a retrouver dans la doctrine de Boehme. Pour le dire d'un mot, c'est la reprise du double probleme de l'existence du mal et de la nature des rapports de Dieu au monde, qui se revele etre le fil conducteur de la theosophie boehmienne. Reprise dont la profonde originalite repose autant sur une formulation inedite de la question que sur les solutions qui en decoulent : loin de reduire le mal a une simple negation, a un neant oppose a l'essence divine, comme le fera Leibniz, heritier de toute une tradition scolastique, Boehme s'efforce au contraire de le penser comme une qualite positive et reelle, montrant que ce n'est que si le mal est positif, donc contingent, que l'on peut esperer un jour sa defaite. (shrink)

Second scholasticism, ​analytical metaphysics, and Christian apologetics are the three topics characteristic of the lifelong efforts of the eminent Czech philosopher Stanislav Sousedík, who celebrated his 90th birthday in 2021. To honour this anniversary, a conference named accordingly was organized in Prague. The papers presented at this event — further elaborated by their authors and supplemented with Sousedík’s remarkable “Brief Autobiography” — constitute the gist of this book: a collective homage to Professor Sousedík and an attempt to promote and develop (...) his intellectual legacy. (shrink)

Obra epistologràfica / introducció de J. Estellés -- Obra filològica / introducció de J. Pérez Durà -- Obra filosòfica / introducció de C. Mínguez -- Obra jurídica / introducció d'I. Roca -- Obra religiosa / introducció d'I. Roca -- Sobre ciència i medicina / introducció de J. Ll. Barona i V. Navarro -- Sobre la dona / introducció de N. Campillo -- Obra pedagògica / introducció d'A. Mayordomo -- Obra psicològica / introducció de F. Tortosa.

1. Abt, Medizinische, naturwissenschaftliche und philosophische Schriften, hrsg. von K. Sudhoff. 14 v.--2. Abt. Theologische und religionsphilosophische Schriften, hrsg. von K. Goldammer.

The theory of passions in the music was a Baroque doctrin of musical figures which has its preceding thinkers in the natural philosophy and sciences of the 16th century. The aim of this study is to reconstruct the theory of the passions in Girolamo Cardano, because he is one of the main natural philosophers and encyclopedists of the Renaissance, and to analyse his patterns in thinking the power of music for the creation of passions. In Cardano’s mathematical work De proportionibus (...) and in his De musica, the remaining part of an unpublished work about music, he explains a physiological theory about passions as local movements of the corporal part of the soul. In De subtilitate Cardano claims that the passions are movements and variations of natural heat and he investigates the effects of passions in the human body and their benefits and dangers for health. At last Cardano excludes some passions, amor, odium and tristitia from the effects of music because sounds effect only general passions - passions without knowledge of something - and cause life, not death. (shrink)

Volume 1, Books I-II. On methods -- Volume 2, Books III-IV. On methods-On regressus.

English summary: The monograph-length study of Marsilio Ficino examines the Renaissance Neoplatonists philosophy from a metaphysical and anthropological point of view. Ficino was not only the first Latin translator of Platos entire works, but also a creative thinker in his own right whose religious and philosophical program troubled his native Florence and agitated his Christian contemporaries. French description: Marsile Ficin ne fut pas seulement le traducteur et le commentateur de Platon et des neoplatoniciens, comme Plotin et Proclus. Ce fut un (...) philosophe a part entiere, qui puisa de maniere creative aux ressources de la tradition platonicienne pour resoudre les questions agitees dans la Florence de son temps ou heritees de discussions universitaires medievales. Il elabora sa pensee a partir des possibilites conceptuelles inedites offertes par la philosophie de l'Un pour repenser l'ontologie. Cette monographie analyse l'originalite et la coherence de sa philosophie aussi bien sur le plan metaphysique qu'anthropologique, repondant ainsi a l'exigence d'une etude systematique qui fait defaut depuis longtemps. On y examine autant la specificite du projet ficinien de renouvellement philosophique et religieux que les aspects qui devoilent sa profonde incompatibilite avec le christianisme. (shrink)

De humanist Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) was een van de meest invloedrijke filosofen van de Italiaanse renaissance. Zijn wijsbegeerte is van groot belang geweest voor kunstenaars als Botticelli en Michelangelo. Dit boek besteedt uitvoerige aandacht aan Ficino's invloed op artistiek gebied. Fundamentele studies van Chastel, Panofsky en Gombrich passeren daarbij de revue. Ook de rol van de familie De' Medici in Ficino's professionele en persoonlijke leven wordt uiteengezet. Zo ontstaat een veelzijdig en samenhangend beeld van het milieu van de Platonisten in (...) Florence. De filosofie van Plato en zijn navolgers maakte een ware wedergeboorte mee in het Italië van de vijftiende eeuw. De intellectuele omwenteling die Ficino in gang zette, zou zich niet alleen over het Italië van de Renaissance maar over heel Europa verspreiden. Dit boek is opgebouwd uit een algemeen deel, gevolgd door twee traktaten van Ficino: 'De extase van Paulus' en 'Wat is licht?'. Deze verhandelingen zijn als het ware de kroongetuigen bij het algemene deel. Dit boek is voor allen die zich interesseren voor het Italië van de Renaissance."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

This is the first book to focus on occasionalism in early modern German philosophy. It demonstrates that occasionalism provided a strong foundation for the thought of four important yet underexamined German philosophers: Erhard Weigel, Johann Christoph Sturm, Christian Wolff, and Gottfried Ploucquet. Occasionalism is most often associated with Cartesian early modern Christian philosophers, the most famous of whom is perhaps Nicolas Malebranche. Early modern German occasionalism has received very little scholarly attention, leaving us with an incomplete picture of the German (...) causation debate from Leibniz to Kant. This book combines a chronological investigation of four influential and historically connected cases of occasionalism in early modern Germany with a reconstruction of arguments to address specific problems in metaphysics, natural philosophy, philosophy of language, and philosophy of psychology. Providing a sufficient ground for nature and human beings' mental and physical existence is a pressing issue for Weigel, Sturm, Wolff, and Ploucquet. In examining the thought of these four understudied German philosophers, this book helps us rethink the relation between metaphysics of nature and science of nature and better understand the development of early modern debates about causation. Occasionalism and the Debate about Causation in Early Modern Germany is an important resource for scholars and advanced students working on the history of early modern philosophy and the history of metaphysics and causation. (shrink)

I argue for a transformative revival or actualization of the very core of an integrative, methodologically secured form of intellect‑mystical asceticism. This approach draws on traditional sources that are re‑examined from a systematic—synthetic and transcultural—philosophical perspective and in light of the multi‑civilizational global environment of the 21st century. The main traditional points of reference in this paper are provided by Nicolaus de Cusa and Ibn Sīnā, and I refer toa few others, such as Attar of Nishapur, in passing. I begin (...) by developing a basic concept of intellect‑mystical asceticism. It is distinguished from mystification, science, scientism, and modes of everyday communication and cognition. Then, I make the case for an updated, transcultural approach to intellect‑mysticism that can foster the internal (social) and external (environmental) reintegration of the human noosphere and technosphere in future planetary development. In this context, a modern intellect‑mystical philosophical notion of “knowing non‑knowing” (wissendes Nichtwissen, docta ignorantia) is developed. It is inspired by Nicolaus de Cusa and contextualized from a systematic transcultural angle at the same time. Finally, I discuss the problem of the practical, or rather ascetic, realization of the related possibilities of intellect‑mystical self‑enfolding. Here, the preceding steps of the reflection are mapped onto an outline regarding distinct developmental stages of such a transformative intellect‑mystical practice in Ibn Sīnā’s Remarks and Admonitions (al‑Ishārāt wat‑Tanbīhāt). (shrink)

In 1583 the Italian botanist and physician Andrea Cesalpino (1524-1603) published De Plantis Libri XVI, made of 16 books (libri), considered to be the first treatise where botany is treated independently from medicine. In so doing, he broke with a long tradition inherited in Western science from Antiquity and perpetuated during the Middle Age through the early Renaissance. De Plantis lays the foundations of scientific systematics through a new focus on plant morphology and natural similarities and became a milestone in (...) the history of Western botany. It is a precious testimony to the evolution of botanical and physiological knowledge in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and illustrates the role of Aristotelian philosophy in 16th-century knowledge. The volume includes an introductory essay about Cesalpino's philosophy and botany, a critical edition of the Latin text, a translation, a commentary, and indexes. It should interest scholars in Renaissance studies, historians, and philosophers of science and medicine, as well as botanists and plant scientists curious about the history of plant sciences. (shrink)