Platonic Commentaries in the Renaissance

Room 351, Malet Street
Birkbeck, 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’.

This event, organized by Stephen Clucas and John Sellars, is free and open to all.
To book a place please email either [email protected] or [email protected].

With the generous support of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities

Info online at