There is no registration fee, but please email either myself (s.clucas@bbk.ac.uk) or John Sellars (john.sellars@bbk.ac.uk) if you would like to book a place.
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Platonic Commentaries in the Renaissance

10.30-5.30, Wednesday 11 June 2014

Birkbeck, Malet Street, Room 351

University of London



The Platonic translations and commentaries of Marsilio Ficino at the end of the fifteenth century created the conditions for a widespread revival of Platonism in Western Europe throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The texts of Plato and his later followers such as Plotinus, Proclus and Porphyry were linguistically and conceptually unfamiliar and complex, and called for substantial hermeneutic labour on the part of Renaissance scholars. The resulting Platonic commentaries are only now beginning to receive the attention they deserve but much work remains to be done to examine both their contents and the role of the Platonic commentary tradition within the history of philosophy.





Programme



10.30-11.00       Arrival

11.00-12.00       Valery Rees, ‘Approaching the Divine: Ficino’s St Paul Commentary’

12.00-1.00         Dilwyn Knox, ‘Marsilio Ficino, De amore, 1.3’

1.00-2.00          Lunch

2.00-3.00          Jacomien Prins, ‘Harmony and Health in Ficino's Timaeus Commentary’

3.00-4.00          Anna Corrias, ‘Interpreting an Exalted Mind: Marsilio Ficino as a Commentator of Plotinus’

4.00-4.30          Tea/Coffee

4.30-5.30          Michael J. B. Allen, ‘Marsilio Ficino's commentary on Dionysius the Areopagite’.



With the generous support of
the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities