Although in his later years Giovanni Pico della Mirandola vehemently rejected astrology, he earlier used it in a variety of ways, but primarily to provide further evidence for positions to which he had arrived by other means. One such early use appears in his commentary on his friend Girolamo Benivieni’s love poetry, the Canzone d’amore, of 1486–1487. In the passages discussed here, Pico presents an intensive Platonic natural philosophical analysis based on a deep astrologically informed understanding of human nature as (...) he attempts to explain a perennial question, namely, why one person is attracted to a certain person , and another to others. I will place this discussion of the mysteries of attraction and desire in historical perspective by tracing Pico’s changing relationship to astrology during the course of his short but passionate life, and in historiographic perspective by revising Frances Yates’s still influential views concerning Pico’s contribution to Renaissance thought and his relationship with Marsilio Ficino. (shrink)

Leibniz participates in a quite important thought tradition of christian Europe, that of concordia between Christians, or between religions. With him this heritage is universalised: the globalization of concordia gives birth to Leibniz’s harmony of universal truth, that the whole of humankind can access.

The subject of the article is the reconstruction of the death event of Socrates, as well as the hermeneutics of his last words spoken shortly before his death. Based on ancient Greek texts and a subsequent tradition, the author identifies three key interpretations of these words. According to the first interpretation, the death of Socrates is a kind of a cure for life. Within the framework of the second one it is understood as an act of parrhesias or a form (...) of philosophical verdict of the truth. The third interpretation aims to deconstruct the “heroic” pathos of this event. Based on historical sources, a hypothesis is put forward according to which Socrates is considered as a political criminal, an enemy of Athenian democracy. Based on this thesis, his death is revealed as a religious practice of the scapegoat ritual. From this perspective this expression of Socrates is perceived as irony and grotesque and does not, in fact, seriously affect the general context of his philosophical practice. In our opinion, each of three interpretations presented forms its original horizon in understanding philosophy as the therapy of a soul. So in the first case we are talking about a comforting conversation format as caring about ourselves. In the second case, we are talking about the consideration of the figure of a philosopher as a “philosopher on barricades” – about a tradition that finds its continuation in Plato's “trips” to Syracuse to visit Dionysius as well as in the revolutionary actions of May 1968. Finally, the third format of philosophical therapy reconstructs the mechanism of ancient social practice in front of us during which the image of the sage and his philosophical practice are considered by society as poison which threatens with its fundamental foundations. The latter problematizes the figure of a philosopher and his role in the context of a political, religious and social life of a community. If the first two forms of understanding philosophy as a social therapy represent its discourse as the means of “healing”, which arises in order to cure society from internal ailments, then the latter, on the contrary, symbolically depicts a philosopher's public condemnation and his death itself as the only medicine that can save society from a disease called philosophy. (shrink)

Humanists and philosophers in the Quattrocento find inspiration for their treatises on human dignity not only in Classical Antiquity, but also in the works of the Church Fathers. The present paper examines the influence of the latter on the theories of freedom at the dawn of Modernity, especially regarding the Patristic conception of human self as person or hypostasis, whose free decision is considered inviolable, creative and irreducible to its own nature or essence.