WIP Talk: Anna Corrias

Please join us as Anna Corrias (Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Toronto) gives a presentation to the CPAMP Work-in-Progress seminar, titled:

“Potential to What? Marsilio Ficino, Theophrastus, and the Platonic Aristotle“

Abstract: The humanist philosopher Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) is well known for being the translator of the entire Platonic corpus, Plotinus’s Enneads, and some other late ancient Platonic works. Throughout his life, he cherished his role as Plato’s herald in the Latin West. However, I believe that he constantly engages with Aristotle too. In fact, one of the central tasks of his hermeneutical enterprise was precisely to rescue Aristotle’s De anima from those perverted interpretations which, in his view, had made Aristotle a ‘non-Platonist’. By focusing on some passages from his Commentary on Priscianus Lydus’s paraphrase of Theophrastus’s ‘On the Soul’ (1497), I will discuss Ficino’s reception – through Priscianus but also beyond Priscianus – of Theophrastus’s view that when it comes to the intellect which is ‘capable of being everything’ we ‘should seek how it may be said to be potential in another way’.