This book offers a fresh account of one of the remarkable figures in the Renaissance, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, by focusing on a neglected aspect of his work; his reading of scholasticism and its reception in the fifteenth century.

This article presents the first detailed account of Giorgio Benigno Salviati's discussion of the will written in Urbino during the mid-1470s and the early 1480s. A Franciscan friar and a prominent professor of theology and philosophy, Salviati was a prolific author and central figure in the circles of Cardinal Bessarion in Rome and of Lorenzo de' Medici in Florence. This article focuses on his defense of the Scotist theory of the will. It considers its fifteenth-century context, in which both humanist (...) and scholastic thinkers dealt with the question of the intellect and the will. While basing himself partly on authorities such as Aristotle, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas, Salviati is clearly aware of the novelty of his theory, and its important implications for ethics and theology. (shrink)

Dans cet article nous examinons les tensions dialectiques entre les humanistes renaissants et les scolastiques renaissants telles qu’elles sont représentées dans la culture orale des sermons, des conférences universitaires et des débats publics à Florence à la fin du Quattrocento. Nous tâchons de montrer comment cette culture orale reflète d’importants aspects de ce nouvel environnement que nous intitulons « la Renaissance » et qui ne correspond pas toujours à certaines notions historiographiques populaires surannées d’un mouvement laïc et antireligieux. Les sermons (...) prononcés au sein des fraternités religieuses par des humanistes tels que Francesco Berlinghieri, Giovanni Cocchi, Christoforo Landino, entre autres, constituent le principal objet d’étude de notre première partie ; nous examinons ensuite l’un des documents les plus importants de la Renaissance : De la dignité de l’homme de Pic de la Mirandole. Dans notre deuxième partie nous nous penchons sur la réaction de Giovanni Caroli au projet de Pic et dressons une comparaison entre les deux en abordant les intentions et méthodes qui distinguent leurs approches respectives de la philosophie et de la théologie. (shrink)

Francesco Patrizi was a competent Greek scholar, a mathematician, and a Neoplatonic thinker, well known for his sharp critique of Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition. In this article I shall present, in the first part, the importance of the concept of a three-dimensional space which is regarded as a body, as opposed to the Aristotelian two-dimensional space or interval, in Patrizi’s discussion of physical space. This point, I shall argue, is an essential part of Patrizi’s overall critique of Aristotelian science, (...) in which Epicurean, Stoic, and mainly Neoplatonic elements were brought together, in what seems like an original theory of space and a radical revision of Aristotelian physics. Moreover, I shall try to show Patrizi’s dialectical method of definition, his geometrical argumentation, and trace some of the ideas and terms used by him back to Proclus’ Commentary on Euclid. This text of Proclus, as will be shown in the second part of the article, was also important for Patrizi’s discussion of mathematical space, where Patrizi deals with the status of mathematics and redefines some mathematical concepts such as the point and the line according to his new theory of space.Keywords: Francesco Patrizi; Space; Geometry; Mathematics; Aristotle; Proclus. (shrink)