Icastes: Marsilio Ficino's Interpretation of Plato's Sophist : Five Studies and a Critical Edition with Translation.

Aus der Bibliothek von Prof. Wolfgang Haase, langj�igem Herausgeber der ANRW und des International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT) / From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - sehr guter Zustand / very good condition - Michael Allen�s latest work on the profoundly influential Florentine thinker of the fifteenth century, Marsilio Ficino, will be welcomed by philosophers, literary scholars, and historians of the Renaissance, as well as by classicists. Ficino was responsible for inaugurating, shaping, and disseminating the wide-ranging philosophico-cultural movement known as Renaissance Platonism, and his views on the Sophist, which he saw as Plato�s preeminent ontological dialogue, are of signal interest. This dialogue also served Ficino as a vehicle for exploring a number of other humanist, philosophical, and magical preoccupations, including the theme of man the artist and creator. -- The first part of Allen�s new study consists of five chapters on the following topics: Ficino�s controversy with Pico on the primacy of the One over being; his response to Plato�s challenging postulation of not-being�s presence in the very heart of being; the mysterious doctrine of the sublunar demiurge which Ficino attributed to Proclus; his complicated theory of icastic and phantastic art; and the role he assigned to eidola and to the demons in the functioning of the imagination. The second part consists of the first critical edition and translation of Ficino�s Commentary on the Sophist, on the model of those the author has already provided for the Commentaries on the Philebus and the Phaedrus. -- With its two parts, the book offers us the first scholarly portrait of Ficino�s, and by implication the Renaissance�s, interpretation of an important late dialogue. It also considerably deepens our understanding of Ficino as the most accomplished Plato interpreter between Proclus and the nineteenth century, and as a thinker whose multi-faceted writings constitute one of the truly impressive monuments of Renaissance philosophy. ISBN 9780520064195