Marsilio Ficino as Reader of Plotinus: The 'Enneads' Commentary

Erscheinungsjahr 2024
ISBN: 978-90-04-70111-3
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 5, 560 Seiten, Format (B × H): 159 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 1081 g

Reihe: History of Metaphysics: Ancient, Medieval, Modern

This book represents the first ever systematic philosophical study of Marsilio Ficino’s Commentary on Plotinus’ ‘Enneads’ (first published in Florence, 1492), this work of Ficino being arguably as definitive for the Florentine thinker’s later work as the Platonic Theology was for his earlier. Publication of the present study uniquely illuminates the extent to which Plotinus had always been the crucial influence over Ficino’s revolutionary projects of introducing Platonic thought based on original Greek sources to western Europe, correcting certain features of late medieval and Renaissance Aristotelianism, and laying the foundations of a new Christian Platonism. The study can be read both as an independent introduction to Ficino’s later philosophy and as the complement to the first modern edition and translation of the Commentary on the 'Enneads' itself also by Stephen Gersh (I Tatti Renaissance Library, 2017-).

Autoren/Hrsg.

Gersh, Stephen

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Metaphysik, Ontologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Geschichte der Westlichen Philosophie Mittelalterliche & Scholastische Philosophie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements

Citations of the Plotinus Commentary

Preface

General Introduction: The Commentary on Plotinus’ Enneads

1 Religious Philosophy or Philosophical Religion

2 Plotinus’ Disclosure of Plato’s Mysteries

3 The Correction of Peripateticism

4 The Exegetical Approach to the Enneads

5 The Place of the Plotinus Commentary in Ficino’s Work

6 The Place of the Commentary in the Earlier “Plotinian” Tradition

Excursus 0: The Problem of Ficino’s exhortatio

Part 1: Analogy and Trinity

1 Plotinus and Christianity

1.1 The Christian Context

1.2 The Three Primary Substances: Terminology

1.3 The Heretical Errors

2 Ficino’s Logic of Analogy

2.1 The Platonic Genera and Their Mysteries

2.2 The Analogy between Platonic Genera and Peripatetic Categories

2.3 Ficino and Analogy

2.4 Ratio and Analogy

Excursus 2: Substance and Quality

x2.1 Substance

x2.2 Quality

3 The Trinitarian Analogue

3.1 Ficino, Plotinus, and Aquinas on the Trinity

3.2 The “Plotinian” Trinity

Part 2: From Ontology to Agathology

4 The Structure of Soul

4.1 Importance of the Commentary on Ennead I

4.2 Soul and Animate Being

4.3 From Microcosm to Macrocosm

5 The Unembodied Soul

5.1 The Higher Soul in the Commentary on Ennead I

5.2 Summary of Ficino’s Doctrine of Soul

5.3 The Higher Soul in the Commentary on Ennead IV

6 The Embodied Soul

6.1 The Embodied Soul in the Commentary on Ennead IV

7 Transmigration and Embodiment

7.1 Ficino against Transmigration

7.2 Ficino and Origen

8 Sensation

8.1 General Theory of Sensation

8.2 Ficino’s Innovations

8.3 Vision

9 Intellect and Ideas

9.1 Intellect and Intellectual Soul

9.2 Analogies of Light

9.3 The Divine “Splendour” and “Figure”

9.4 Intellect’s Relation to the Ideas

9.5 The Relation of Ideas to One Another

9.6 The Range of Ideas

9.7 The Distinction between Intellect and the Intelligible

9.8 Agent and Possible Intellect

9.9 The Distinction between Discursive and Non-discursive Thinking

9.10 Ideas, Formulae, and Seminal Reason-Principles

9.11 The Temporalization of the Ideas

9.12 Intellect’s Relation to Number

10 Soul’s Choice between Good and Evil

10.1 The Good

10.2 The Multiplicity of Goods

10.3 The (Sub-) Contrariety of Good and Evil

10.4 The Soul’s Choice: Ficino between Plotinus and Augustine

11 The Threefold Reversion

11.1 Return and Triplicity

11.2 The Triadic Preamble to Ennead I. 3

11.3 The Commentary Proper

12 Ascent to Beauty

12.1 Irradiation of Beauty: lumen and color

12.2 The Divine Nature of Beauty: lumen

12.3 Reception of Beauty: splendor

13 Ascent to the One and the Good

13.1 Presence

13.2 Futurity

13.3 Ascent by Will

Excursus II: Daemons and Soul

xII.1 Internal and External Daemons

xII.2 Plotinus’ Daemon

PART 3: Matter, Reason, Spirit

14 Matter

14.1 Negative and Affirmative Approaches

14.2 The Structure of the Commentary on Ennead II. 4

14.3 Quantity

14.4 Dimensionality

14.5 Privation

14.6 Infinity

Excursus 14: Potency and Act

x14.1 The Structure of the Commentary on Ennead II. 5

x14.2 Potency and Act

x14.3 The Metaphysical Continuum of Potency and Act

x14.4 The Intelligible World

x14.5 Potency and Act in Relation to Soul

x14.6 The Sensible World

x14.7 The Relation of Primal Matter to Being-in-Potency and Being-in-Act

15 Ratio

15.1 The Primal Ratio in Christianity

15.2 The Primal Ratio in Plotinus

Excursus 15: Non-formal Ratio

x15.1 Ratio as Principle of Form

x15.2 Ratio between the Real and the Nominal

x15.3 Ratio above and below Form

16 Spirit

16.1 Heaven, Fire, and Spirit

16.2 Heaven as Macrocosm

16.3 Fire as Macrocosm

16.4 Spirit as Macrocosm and Microcosm

16.5 Conspiration

Conclusion

Bibliography

Über Autor(innen)

Stephen Gersh, Litt. D (2019), Cambridge University, former Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge and Emeritus Professor of Medieval Philosophy, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, has published many books on ancient, medieval, and modern philosophy including From Iamblichus to Eriugena (Brill, 1978).