Platonism

Valery Rees graduated MA from Newnham College, Cambridge. She leads Renaissance Studies at the School of Philosophy and Economic Science. Her publications include The Letters of Marsilio Ficino and From Gabriel to Lucifer. A Cultural History of Angels. Anna Corrias is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the universities of Cambridge and Toronto. She authored the monograph The Renaissance of Plotinus: The Soul and Human Nature in Marsilio Ficino’s Commentary on the “Enneads” (Routledge, 2020) and several articles. Francesca M. Crasta is Professor of the History of Philosophy at the University of Cagliari. She works on early modern metaphysics and natural philosophy and has published several articles and books on Emanuel Swedenborg and eighteenth-century Italian philosophy. Laura Follesa is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Jena. Her research focuses on German authors (Herder, Schelling), the notion of 'thinking in images' (Das 'Denken in Bildern', Lang 2019), and the interplay between philosophy and science. Guido Giglioni is Associate Professor of History of Philosophy at the University of Macerata, Italy. His research concentrates on the interplay of life and imagination in the early modern period. His publications include two books on Jan Baptista van Helmont (Milan, 2000) and Francis Bacon (Rome, 2011).

Contents

Introduction



1 Philosophy on the Defensive: Marsilio Ficino’s Response in a Time of Religious Turmoil

 Valery Rees



2 Ficino, Plotinus, and the Chameleonic Soul

 Anna Corrias



3 Healing Rituals and Their Philosophical Significance in Marsilio Ficino’s Philosophy

 Guido Giglioni



4 A Platonic Light Metaphysics between St. Augustine and Ficino: Girolamo Seripando’s Quaestiones CIX De re philosophico-theologica

 Angelo Maria Vitale



5 The Letter of Lysis to Hipparchus in the Renaissance

 Eva Del Soldato



6 Niccolò Leonico Tomeo’s Accounts of Veridical Dreams and the Idola of Synesius

 Nicholas Holland



7 The Platonic Stain: Origen, Philosophy and Censorship between the Renaissance and the Counter Reformation

 Pasquale Terracciano



8 Francisco de Hollanda on Artistic Creation, the Origin of Ideas, and Demiurgic Painting

 Paula Oliveira e Silva



9 ‘Platonic-Hermetic’ Jacob Böhme, or: Is Böhme a Platonist?

 Cecilia Muratori



10 The Theory of Ideal Objects and Relations in the Cambridge Platonists (Rust, More, and Cudworth)

 Brunello Lotti



11 Platonism, Metaphysics, and Modern Science: Rüdiger and Swedenborg

 Francesca Maria Crasta



12 Schelling and Plato: the Idea of the World-Soul in Schelling’s Timaeus

 Laura Follesa



13 On the Phenomenological ‘Reactivation’ or ‘Repetition’ of Plato’s Dialogues by Leo Strauss

 Pierpaolo Ciccarelli



14 Care of the Self and Politics: Michel Foucault, Heir of a Forgotten Plato?

 Laura Candiotto



15 Dialectic in Plato’s Sophist and Derrida’s ‘Law of the Supplement of Copula’

 Arnold Oberhammer



16 Image and Copy in French Deconstruction of Platonism

 Andrea Le Moli



Index