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Marsilio Ficino’s Commentary on Plato’s Gorgias
No full textPlato’s Gorgias sets out to discuss the nature and aim of rhetoric. The dialogue was held in high esteem among late ancient Platonists and it resurfaced in Renaissance discussions about ethics. Olympiodorus (6thcentury) produced an extensive commentary on the dialogue, emphasising its ethical content. In 1409, Leonardo Bruni (1369-1444) provided the first complete Latin translation of the Gorgiaswith preface and annotations. Later in the Renaissance we find direct and indirect commentaries by George of Trebizond (1395-1472/1473) and Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499).I argue that Ficino’s translation of, and commentary to, Plato’s Gorgiaswas a significant, but perhaps also unintended, contribution to the dissemination of ancient sophists in the Italian Renaissance. Ficino’s commentary to the Gorgiasdefends a legitimate and philosophical use of rhetoric, including the one we find in Plato’s own writings. Furthermore, Ficino treats the character Callicles - together with several other sophists in Plato’s dialogues - as an enemy of the Platonic-Pythagorean ethical ideal, maintaining that the sophists were wrong. Moreover, he treats ancient sophists as a fairly homogeneous group, unlike some of the ancient sources
Compagnevole per natura. L’animale politico (e il regime politico) nelle traduzioni del De regimine principum
No full textThis article focuses on Giles of Rome’s De regimine
principum (ca. 1280) and on its oldest Italian version
(Governamento dei re e dei principi, 1288), which is
based on the Old French translation by Henri de Gauchy
(1282). One of the most important themes of Giles’ speculum
is the Aristotelian conception of man as a political
animal; the present contribution analyses the differences
in its reception in the vernacular translations, and then takes
into account the treatment of related themes such as
the problem of the regimen politicum in the original and
vernacular De regimine
Hercules, Silenus and the Fly: Lucian’s Rhetorical Paradoxes in Erasmus’ Ethics
Get PDFStarting from the fierce conflict between Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther, my contribution aims to show the rhetorical genesis of Erasmus’ reflection on ethics. Specifically, I will focus on the fact that some of most significant and recurrent metaphors in Erasmus’ moral and theological meditation (e.g.Hercules, Silenus and the fly) trace their roots back to the work of Lucian of Samosata. Against this background, it will be possible to investigate the fundamental role of the Lucianic attitude in defining some key-concepts of Erasmus’ thought, such as the rhetorical concepts of festivitasand persona. Moreover, I will demonstrate how these concepts become the starting point of Erasmus’ silenic moral, modelled on the sophistic ability to transform relations and proportions between things by using words
Bio-art et transhumanisme : une anthropologie des limites
No full textThe invention of the concept of bio-power by
Foucault opens a space for thinking about the contemporary
articulation of biology, the diffuse forms of
power or control, as well as the construction of subjectivities.
The work of the bio-artist, far from being merely a
denunciation of the societies of control or an utopia of an
“augmented man”, reveals the ambivalence of biotechnologies,
in the mode of “pharmakon” (Stiegler) : at the same
time, both “remedy” and “poison”. Contradictorily,
biomachines allow both an increase in the power to act
and plasticity, but also, simultaneously, a recolonization
of lives, even by the normativity of performance and
growth. Is this then a will to power and a wish to improve
living conditions, in the wake of the ideologies of
progress, or rather a desire to finish, the “tiredness of
being oneself”
Rhetoric’s Demiurgy: from Synesius of Cyrene to Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola
No full textThe present work aims to highlight the impact that Synesius of Cyrene had on Ficino and Pico della Mirandola in the formation process of the Renaissance concept of rhetoric and the anthropology connected thereto. Special attention will be drawn to the close link between rhetoric and phantasia, both imaginative and creative forces that are present in all three authors. The master of these forces is the rhetorician, who assumes in this respect an exemplary anthropological function. In fact, if on the one hand he is an ambiguous manipulator of shady speeches, on the other hand he is able to fully express the variety of human nature. This makes him an alter deus, that is, a demonic being whose nature is superior to any other. It is no accident that the demigod Proteus is a theme in all three authors and is the symbol of a positive human nature, which reveals itself as amphibious, multiple and, above all, highly characterised on the verbal level and the imaginative level
La philosophie en langue vulgaire comme projet pédagogique
No full textThis article aims to deepen the understanding
of a neglected aspect of Eckhart\u27s thought, i.e. the pedagogical
scope of his vernacular production. In the first
part, the article offers some remarks on \u27philosophy in the
vernacular\u27 and its importance for the history of medieval
thought. In the second part, these reflections are applied
to the case of Master Eckhart, especially to his work Liber
Benedictus and his possible source, Thomas Aquinas
“E vale altanto questa parola monarcie in franciesco quanto sengnoria d’un uomo tutto solo”. Il volgarizzamento toscano anonimo del Defensor pacis
No full textThe purpose of this article is to analyse the Libro
del difenditore della pacie e tranquilità, the anonymous
Italian vernacularization of Marsilius of Padua’s
Defensor pacis: the translation is preserved in the sole
manuscript Laurenziano Pluteo XLIV.26 and is dated to
1363. The Difenditore is strongly connected to the historical
context in which it was born and can be considered
as a cultural answer to the difficult political situation characterising
Florence in the fourteenth century. Issues concerning
the genesis of the translation, both from a linguistic
and philosophical point of view, are discussed
Une philosophie pour l’Ici et Maintenant? L’oeuvre française de Nicole Oresme
No full textThe mere interest in vernacular languages as
the terminological vehicle for certain medieval philosophical
texts opens an interesting field of investigation, because
the vast majority of texts recognized as philosophical
at that time were written in Latin (or rather, as Ruedi
Imbach\u27s works have shown, do we tend to transfer onto
these works the criteria of what we recognize today as falling
within the philosophical discipline?). But can the history
of philosophy take as its own object the opinion that
the medieval thinkers themselves had on the vernacular?
Is the choice of a language and thus, of a readership, not
only a political gesture, but also a philosophical one? This
article puts forward the hypothesis –through the examination
of the treatment and use of the French medium by
Nicole Oresme in his translations of Aristotle in the second
half of the 14th century– that linguistic voluntarism
(be it translation, spelling reform, lexical innovations) is
inseparable from an underlying epistemological conception,
which confronts the tension between an eternal truth
and a moving and multiple human condition
Enhancing the Research on Sophistry in the Renaissance
No full textThis contribution introduces the proceedings of the international conference The Sophistic Renaissance: Authors, Texts, Interpretationsheld in Veniceon September 26th, 2016 as part of my Marie Skłodowska-Curie project Sperone Speroni (1500-1588) and the Rebirth of Sophistry in the Italian Renaissance at Ca’ Foscari University (2015-2016). This introduction briefly presents the status quaestionis and the essays collected herein, discusses the challenges scholars encounter while exploring the legacy of ancient sophists in early modern culture, and addresses some promising lines of research for deepening some aspects of the subject in the future
Bioart : définition(s) et enjeux éthiques. Essai introductif
Get PDFThe aim of this introductory paper is twofold.
First, we seek to illustrate which are the difficulties into
which one runs when one attempts to give a precise definition
of what bioart is. Our hypothesis is that every attempt
at such definition runs into a paradox. Indeed, if on
the one hand, every definition seems inevitably reductionist,
unjustly omitting one or more elements, on the other
hand, defining and constraining the study area is a necessary
preliminary step to understand the artistic phenomenon
known as bioart. In the second part of our paper, attention
will be focused on the ethical issues that bioart
confront us with. These issues are all the more relevant,
given the fact that bioartists often make use of biotechnologies
to manipulate living organisms for artistic purposes