Renaissance Readings Of The Corpus Aristotelicum

The conference was part of the international research network Renaissance: The Origins of Modernity organized by the University of Copenhagen. The 13 papers include discussions of the reception of the political Aristotle from Brunetto Latini to Dante Alighieri, Greek and Latin learning in Theodore Gaza's Antirrheticon, and Caspar Bartholin. One of the papers is in Italian. Distributed in the US by ISBS. c. Book News Inc.

Our modern-day word for sympathy is derived from the classical Greek word for fellow-feeling. Both in the vernacular as well as in the various specialist literatures within philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, economics, and history, "sympathy" and "empathy" are routinely conflated. In practice, they are also used to refer to a large variety of complex, all-too-familiar social phenomena: for example, simultaneous yawning or the giggles. Moreover, sympathy is invoked to address problems associated with social dislocation and political conflict. It is, then, turned into a vehicle toward generating harmony among otherwise isolated individuals and a way for them to fit into a larger whole, be it society and the universe. This volume offers a historical overview of some of the most significant attempts to come to grips with sympathy in Western thought from Plato to experimental economics. The contributors are leading scholars in philosophy, classics, history, economics, comparative literature, and political science. Sympathy is originally developed in Stoic thought. It was also taken up by Plotinus and Galen. There are original contributed chapters on each of these historical moments. Use for the concept was re-discovered in the Renaissance. And the volume has original chapters not just on medical and philosophical Renaissance interest in sympathy, but also on the role of antipathy in Shakespeare and the significance of sympathy in music theory. Inspired by the influence of Spinoza, sympathy plays a central role in the great moral psychologies of, say, Anne Conway, Leibniz, Hume, Adam Smith, and Sophie De Grouchy during the eighteenth century. The volume offers an introduction to key background concepts that are often overlooked in many of the most important philosophies of the early modern period. About a century ago the idea of Einfühlung (or empathy) was developed in theoretical philosophy, then applied in practical philosophy and the newly emerging scientific disciplines of psychology. Moreover, recent economists have rediscovered sympathy in part experimentally and, in part by careful re-reading of the classics of the field.

Even if specific pieces of research (on the sources or on individual authors, such as Pico, Agrippa, Erasmus, Montaigne, Sanches etc.) have given and are still producing significant results on Renaissance scepticism, an overall synthesis comprising the entire period has not been achieved yet. No predetermined idea of that complex historical subject that is Renaissance scepticism underlies this book, and we want to sacrifice the complexity of movements, personalities, tendencies and interpretations to any sort of a priori unity of theme even less. We acknowledge unhesitatingly that we had always thought of “scepticisms” in the plural, and believe that the different contexts (philosophical, religious, cultural) in which these forms grew up must also be taken into account. Furthermore, given the transversal nature and provocative character of the sceptical challenge, this book contains essays also on philosophers who, without being sceptics and sometimes engaged in fighting scepticism, nevertheless took up its challenge. The main authors considered in this book are: Vives, Castellio, Agrippa, Pedro de Valencia, Pico, Sanchez, Montaigne, Charron, Bruno, Bacon, and Campanella. The various essays in the book show the relevance of the philosophical thought of authors little known by the general public and put in new perspective important aspects of the thought of some of the great thinkers of the Renaissance.

This monograph is the first to analyze Julius Caesar Scaliger’s Exotericae Exercitationes (1557). In order to make this late-Renaissance work accessible to modern readers, Kuni Sakamoto conducted a detailed textual analysis and revealed the basic tenets of Scaliger’s philosophy.

Takes a careful look at how Renaissance scientists analyzed and interpreted rain, wind, meteors, earthquakes, and other weather and its impact on the great thinkers of the scientific revolution.

This book offers new insights into a largely understudied group of Greek texts preserved in selected manuscripts from the Library at Wellcome Collection, London. The content of these manuscripts ranges from medicine, including theories on diagnosis and treatment of disease, to astronomy, philosophy, and poetry. With texts dating from the ancient era to the Byzantine and Ottoman worlds, each manuscript provides its own unique story, opening a window onto different social and cultural milieus. All chapters are illustrated with black and white and colour figures, highlighting some of the most significant codices in the collection.

In the sixteenth century medicinal plants, which until then had been the monopoly of apothecaries, became a major topic of investigation in the medical faculties of Italian universities, where they were observed, transplanted, and grown by learned physicians both in the wild and in the newly founded botanical gardens. Tuscany was one of the main European centres in this new field of inquiry, thanks largely to the Medici Grand Dukes, who patronised and sustained research and teaching, whilst also taking a significant personal interest in plants and medicine. This is the first major reconstruction of this new world of plants in sixteenth-century Tuscany. Focusing primarily on the medical use of plants, this book also shows how plants, while maintaining their importance in therapy, began to be considered and studied for themselves, and how this new understanding prepared the groundwork for the science of botany. More broadly this study explores how the New World's flora impacted on existing botanical knowledge and how this led to the first attempts at taxonomy.