The dogma of the solitary philosopher

Belonging to the very first generation of medical humanists active in Italy at the turn of the sixteenth century, Nicolò Leoniceno was prolific in producing widely-used translations of Galen’s works. By examining the confrontation between the medieval Arabo-Latin tradition and Renaissance humanism in natural philosophy, this article aims to analyze the continuity of a traditional debate as it underwent a transformation via the new elements introduced by the humanist movement. Galen’s newly recovered embryological treatise "On the Formation of the Fetus" profoundly stimulated the debate on the nature of the formative power of the seed. Starting from Galen’s ideas as found in this treatise, Leoniceno composed one of the first “humanist” embryological works, "On Formative Power" (Venice, 1506). This treatise documents the beginning of a shift of the authority on which scholarship was based—from Arabic writers (Avicenna and Averroes) and their Latin followers (Pietro d’Abano and Gentile da Foligno) to the classical Greek sources, including not only the works of Galen himself but also the new Latin translation of Aristotle’s corpus as well as the newly recovered writings of Aristotle’s Greek commentators such as Simplicius and Michael of Ephesus. Leoniceno’s use of these commentators is particularly noteworthy because he was one of the first humanists to make recourse to them in medical and scientific discussions. Moreover, his familiarity with ongoing debates on the soul and intellect by his humanist contemporaries, such as the Florentine Platonists, will also become evident. Certainly, a typical humanist way of doing natural philosophy can be observed in Leoniceno’s text.

Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences, Springer, 2020

Bogoslovni vestnik, 2021

The present paper analyzes the personal devotion to St. Jerome as expressed in the works of Pier Paolo Vergerio, one of the leading humanist authors of his generation. Jerome’s simultaneous investment in theology and classical learning made him a famed saint among the humanists. By transforming St. Jerome into a model of a pious scholar, Vergerio was, therefore, one of the key proponents in the dissemination of St. Jerome’s cult in the Renaissance. Vergerio’s ten lively Sermones pro Sancto Hieronymo (1392–1408) are considered the earliest examples of the classicizing orations (panegyrics) in the context of devotional public oratory. Vergerio includes traditional elements of Jerome’s hagiography in his orations yet charges them with a personal dimension. Referring to the ancient tradition of his family, Vergerio portrays St. Jerome as their protector and patron saint and commends his recently deceased father into the saint’s care. There is, however, no extant information about the family’s rituals regarding St. Jerome and Vergerio does not refer to their devotion in all of his orations in honour of the saint. This paper explores Vergerio’s creation of a personal cult of St. Jerome and interprets it as a self-fashioning device, aiming to establish Vergerio as an eloquent humanist intellectual.

Italian Studies, 2016

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Review essay on Juliusz Domanski's untranslated but important text, La Philosophie, Théorie oui manière de Vivre? The essay hopes to make available to English-language readers, at second hand, Domanski's analyses of the metaphilosophical texts of the classical authors (1), the early Church fathers (2), the scholastics, who mostly subordinate philosophy, alongside the liberal arts, to higher studies (3), the counter-strains of medieval metaphilosophy (mediaeval-monastic and 'Averroist') which keep alive the ancient 'practicist' sense of the goal of philosophy (4), then the renaissance humanists led by Petrarch and Erasmus, who reanimate the classical sense of philosophia (5). Particularly the work of (3), (4) and (5) represent an important contribution to scholarship on philosophy as a way of life and its modern eclipse, given the focus in Hadot, Foucault, Sellars and others on the ancients. Concluding remarks (6) highlight the significance of the text and raise brief qualifications.

Quart. Kwartalnik Instytutu Historii Sztuki Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2019

Tschumi believes that the quality of architecture depends on the theoretical factor it contains. Such a view led to the creation of architecture that would achieve visibility and comprehensibility only after its interpretation. On his way to creating such an architecture he took on a purely philosophical reflection on the basic building block of architecture, which is space. In 1975, he wrote an essay entitled Questions of Space, in which he included several dozen questions about the nature of space. The questions he formulated could be regarded as analogous to the situation in the philosophy of the time, in which the interest in questioning the most obvious forms of understanding the world and intellectual categories increased. The research on space is an area common to many fields of natural sciences, humanities and artistic creation, but it also deals with other problems, such as issues of experience. The concept of space-time continuum proposed by Hermann Minkowski drew attention to the identity of time and space with the events taking place. Probably regardless of the postulates of physicists commenting on Einstein’s discoveries, also in philosophy it increased the importance of the concept of the event which became dominant in Heidegger’s latest work Contributions of Philosophy. Of the event. Furthermore, Tschumi’s reflections on space entered into relation with the problem of experience, which aroused the interest of a group of French philosophers trying to assimilate Georges Bataille’s concept of “inner experience”. Both Tschumi and Derrida referred to Bataille because his views could be used not only to modify the concept of the subject, but also to change the understanding of what constitutes the area of architecture. The discussion on experience has led to the recognition that the subject is not sovereign, but actually a form of what is on their outside. Such insights make it possible to treat the area of the Parc de La Villette as existing mainly when it is organised by its users. The decisive features of the Park are its assumptions, according to which it is a variety of active void that leads to agreeing new social relations with it. The park does not force to participate in already existing moral or political communities, but tries to move into an unknown future in which the scope of free functioning of individuals will be increased. Doubts about the principles of functioning of the individual self and its discovery as a whole composed of non-coherent parts, as well as its dependence on its own depth full of disordered forces, influenced the understanding of architecture as a set of contradictions whose source is a fundamental void anticipating the empty phenomenal space. The use of this phenomenal void in architecture, as well as the rejection of the whole and unity, had a specific political purpose and drew its inspiration from political analyses. In the Parc de La Villette, metaphysics and politics were brought closer together because the philosophy of void was used to create new conditions for community action. It can be argued that the source of this philosophy was the perception of errors in existing societies dependent on the shortcomings of traditional metaphysics. Spacing (espacement) was one of the key terms in Derrida’s philosophy, which was also combined with the concepts of différance and chôra. The study of the nature of space, especially its transition from the level of pure possibility to the level of sensual phenomenon, also contributes to understanding how well designed space can have an impact on its audience. This explanation is based on Tschumi’s assumption that the space of the Parc de La Villette contradicts the integrating approaches and instead exposes contradictions, but it does so in a way that combines incompatible properties into a single piece of architecture. The specificity of such integration is similar to the invention of a musical phrase, which is an ideological message: moral and political. Such a thesis may raise doubts, however, if both the clearly adopted assumptions and those deduced from the work allow for their logically ordered presentation then to a limited extent it may be assumed that the work has achieved a connection between a specific philosophy of space and its practical application. Derrida combined the problem of spatiality with the problem of transcendental imagination in Kant’s philosophy, who in the first version of Critique of Pure Reason assumed that pure imagination precedes the appearance of time and space, even in their transcendental forms. The imagination in such a situation can be described as a factor activating time and space, which indicates what function is played by movement in this activity. This leads us to recognize that the ultra originary source of pure forms of sensual intuition is movement, which in early Greek philosophy was identified with void and its lack of resistance to phenomena occurring in it. Derrida’s philosophy in search of a certain super-transcendental source of time and space pointed to différance which, like void or the chôra, does not have material features or even any other form of being. Différance is the primary cause of the disruption of motionlessness and the introduction of activity into motionless time and space, thus its activity can be described as spacing (espacement). Derrida’s discoveries in this respect are not entirely original, because Hegel already pointed out when examining the present that it is primarily a differential relation (differente Beziehung), which, being seemingly neutral, influences the present with supernatural force and makes it unidentifiable with itself. Differente Beziehung must similarly influence the originary space, negating its initial character by multiplying its divisions and expanding its boundaries. Différance acts by revealing contradictions wherever there is apparent undifferentiation. Tschumi, composing the Parc de La Villette as a variety of void and a set of incompatible layers, followed the rules of différance or the chôra: he made void visible together with its saturation with contradictions. If space can be considered to be the result of the activity of difference, such activity has a certain regularity, which influences the behaviour of its observers. Differences or contradictions fall into a certain rhythm, which can be considered a manifestation of transcendent order. The problem is that what can be considered the source of such order, namely the logos or God, is partly disorder and error. According to descriptions contained in Timaeus, the world is a combination of forces that drive to order with forces of erroneous necessity that resounds in every order and forces it to return to disorder. Derrida denied the possibility of understanding différance as a theological value, even if it were a negative or apophatic theology, but no categorical denial could be perfect. The assumption that différance or the chôra are not endowed with any substance properties cannot deny their activity, and thus a certain force. Already since Democritus, philosophy has multiplied the names of such a force and the contradictory variety of its manifestations, never forgetting also the necessity for reason to withdraw from the possibility of giving its correct characteristics. Such a withdrawal may be interpreted as an expression of respect and, in certain situations, as a cult of the force that precedes reasonableness. The Parc de La Villette, which is an artistic divagation about the contradictions and forces behind them, can be considered as a place of their sublimation, and therefore as a variation of the temple of what differs from order and disorder.

BRILL eBooks, 2003