Leone Ebreo

English translation of paper title: The Microcosm topos as an analogical figure of thought in the Renaissance as displayed in Charles de Bovelles's philosophy.

This paper is part of a larger research project on the new type of rationality developed in the Renaissance: inclusive and reconciliatory rather than dissentive and discriminatory. It focuses on the microcosm-macrocosm analogy as used by Charles de Bovelles and shows how this relational "figure of thought" (Denkfigur) becomes a major instrument of an indeed alternative type of rationality. The paper also discusses in what ways Michel Foucault failed to appreciate the philosophical novelty in the Renaissance's use of analogy.

Relazione all'interno del panel "Di passioni, di umori, di cieli: amore, filosofia e filosofia della natura fra medio evo e prima età moderna" co-organizzato con Anna Lisa Somma per il XXIII Congresso Nazionale Associazione degli Italianisti, Università di Pisa in collaborazione con Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, 12-14 settembre 2019

Yehuda Avravanel's Dialoghi d'amore probably had its greatest impact in the Spanish-speaking world. Over a period of some fifty years, four separate and distinct translations were produced in Spanish, most notably that of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, which drew on elements from those that preceded it.

M.A. Thesis in Aesthetics and History of aesthetics, Laurea Magistrale (Master's degree) in Philosophical Sciences, Università degli Studi di Firenze, academic year 2013/2014 (dissertation discussed on 27th February 2015).
Supervisors: Prof Sergio Givone and Prof Dr Gianluca Garelli

The aim of this article is to analyze Lucrezia Marinella’s primary sources in chapter two and three of her treatise La nobiltà et l’eccellenza delle Donne. The article provides a short introduction to the concept of Beauty and Good found in the authors quoted (or utilized) by Marinella, together with a close reading of the Neoplatonic citations used by the philosopher to corroborate her claim to women’s superiority in relationship with their beauty, and her take on Plato’s scala amoris.

El presente artículo resalta los rasgos de neoplatonismo italiano presentes en el discurso de la pastora Marcela contenido en la primera parte de Don Quijote de La Mancha. El género pastoril ofrecía un camuflaje seguro para aquellas ideas procedentes de Italia que fueron en gran medida proscritas debido a los ímpetus de la Contrarreforma que caracterizaron al período posterior a la muerte de Felipe II. El discurso de Marcela resulta por tanto una referencia solapada a los indelebles vínculos intelectuales entre los escritores españoles y los neoplatónicos del Renacimiento Italiano, más concretamente a León Hebreo y sus Diálogos de amor
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V roku 1535 vychádza v Ríme dielo Dialoghi d’Amore, ktoré napísal židovský mysliteľ Jehuda Abravanel, známy pod menom Leone Ebreo. Obsiahle a tajomné dielo napísané formou fiktívneho dialógu medzi mužom a ženou sa stalo jednou z najčítanejších kníh európskej kultúry v období 16. a 17. storočia. Príťažlivosť pre rozmanité intelektuálne a umelecké publikum získalo vďaka synkretickému charakteru a jedinečnosti Leonovej filozofickej vízie. Pre mnohých bolo dielo renesančnou encyklopédiou, bludiskom alegorických interpretácií pohanskej mytológie, súperiacich kozmológií, biblickej exegézy, židovskej kabaly alebo komentárov k antickej filozofickej tradícii. Práca, ktorá si všíma vybrané otázky Leonovej filozofie (inšpiračné zdroje, ontologický a kozmologický princíp lásky, vzťah židovskej a pohanskej múdrosti, hľadanie spoločného jazyka mýtu a filozofie) je úvodnou štúdiou k porozumeniu diela, ktoré predstavuje filozofický a umelecký klenot renesančnej epochy.

By an accident of transmission history, medieval and Renaissance Hebrew readers received the opening line of Metaphysics α ἔλαττον (considered in our editions to be Book II) as the opening line of the Metaphysics as a whole: 'Theorizing about truth is in one sense difficult, in another sense easy.' This line took on its own iconic status as it was quoted, though more often referred to through literary allusion, in numerous Hebrew works. These include the Derašot of Nissim of Gerona, the opening of Joseph Albo’s Sefer ha-‘Iqarim, the Ḥešeq Šelomo of Yoḥanan Alemanno, and Don Isaac Abravanel’s Commentary on 1 Samuel 8. Additionally, the line is referred to in the Italian Dialoghi d’Amore of Judah Abravanel (Leone Ebreo) in a way that reflects previous uses. These authors refer to this line so that their readers will recall metaphysics and divine science in a general way, even though the texts themselves do not engage with Aristotle’s Metaphysics in significant detail. Such literary references to the Metaphysics highlight the preference of these thinkers to shy away from Aristotelian metaphysics and a theology based upon it.



Du fait des aléas de sa transmission, au Moyen Âge et à la Renaissance les lecteurs juifs prenaient la première ligne de la Métaphysique α ἔλαττον (qui correspond aujourd’hui au Livre II) pour la première ligne de la Métaphysique tout entière: «L’étude de la vérité est difficile en un sens et facile en un autre sens». Cette phrase s’est imposée comme un topos, cité comme tel dans de nombreuses œuvres en hébreu, et plus souvent encore sous des formes allusives. C’est notamment le cas des Derašot de Nissim de Gérone, du début du Sefer ha-‘Iqarim de Joseph Albo, du Ḥešeq Šelomo de Yoḥanan Alemanno et du Commentaire sur 1 Samuel 8 de Don Isaac Abravanel. Les Dialoghi d’Amore de Judah Abravanel (Leone Ebreo) y font allusion d’une façon qui reflète certaines utilisations antérieures. Ces auteurs se réfèrent à cette phrase afin de rappeler à leurs lecteurs la métaphysique et la science divine d’une manière générale, sans toutefois s’engager dans une lecture détaillée de la Métaphysique d’Aristote. Il ressort de ce genre d’allusions que ces penseurs ont choisi de prendre leurs distances avec la métaphysique aristotélicienne et avec toute théologie qui y trouve son fondement.

Leone Ebreo’s Dialogues of Love achieved a broad Spanish-language readership thanks to the three published Spanish translations that appeared during the sixteenth century, in addition to the circulation of manuscript translations. Yet not long after the publication of the first Spanish translation, signs of ecclesiastical censure begin to appear: the 1581 Portuguese Index issued an order of expurgation of the work; the Spanish Index librorum prohibitorum et expurgatorum of both 1612 (Sandoval y Rojas) and that of Zapata in 1632 would eventually prohibit all vernacular editions of the Dialogues as well as command the expurgation of the 1564 Latin edition translated by Giovan Carlo Saraceno. This paper explores Inquisitorial motivations that led to the eventual censure and ban of Leone Ebreo’s work and their possible connections to the author’s own theories on allegory and the safeguarding of philosophical and theological doctrine.

In the Renaissance, human and cosmic images could constitute images not only when employed in language as metaphors but also in their real existence as objects: for example, it was often believed that the human body was literally an image of the cosmos, and the sun an image of God. The book shows that poets reflected on these real ‘images’ by depicting them in poetic images: for example, poetic representations of the cosmos as human body explored the relationship between cosmos and ‘man’, and did so differently from theological or natural-philosophical (scientific) prose. Thus, through its use of images, poetry made distinctive contributions to thinking about relationships between God, ‘man’, and the world, relationships which were fundamental to the questions at the heart of the Reformation, as well as to topics as diverse as nature, politics, and love. So the book is concerned with the relation of literature and literary methodologies to the histories of science, religion, and political turmoil. The book operates through case studies of two poems, Du Bartas’s natural-philosophical poem, 'La Sepmaine', and Maurice Scève’s collection of love lyric, 'La Délie'.

The Borders between Myth and Philosophy in the Work of Leone Ebreo (1460–1535)

The article deals with the borders between mythical and philosophical language in the treatise Dialoghi d´Amore written by the Renaissance Jewish thinker Leone Ebreo (1460–1535). This popular piece of work, which formed the culture of the 16th and 17th century by its  encyclopaedic and syncretic character, represents a unique attempt to harmonize ancient, medieval and renaissance thinking. On the background of metaphysics of love, Leone Ebreo overcomes the differences between theory and practice, reason and will, active and contemplative life, language of myth and that of science. The originality of Ebreo’s philosophical project shows a dynamic concept of the universe, in which dialectics of differentiation and complementarity becomes the means to reach unity.

Through a close reading of rarely studied materials, Sergius Kodera examines the contested position of the body in Renaissance philosophy, showing how abstract metaphysical ideas evolved in tandem with the creation of new metaphors that shaped the understanding of early modern political, cultural, and scientific practices. The result is a new approach to the issues that describes the function of new technologies (such as optics and distillation) and their interaction with popular creeds (such as witchcraft and folk medicine), as well as their relationship to the newly discovered ancient Greek and Roman texts that captured the attention of Renaissance intellectuals. The text also investigates, for the first time, how some philosophers forged their original syntheses from newly available and traditional materials. In so doing, these philosophers contributed in unexpected ways to the formation of new cultural practices—practices that entailed largely unexplored conceptualisations of physical bodies but also linked inextricably to the formation of new and striking metaphors for the physical world.

This article foregrounds the crucial importance of El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s reading of the Classical tradition in the construction of the historiographic, philosophical, and epistemological categories deployed in his work as translator and chronicler. The first section examines El Inca’s stylistic and conceptual appropriation of Leone Ebreo’s Dialoghi d’amore, and the application of Ebreo’s Neoplatonic syncretism to a meta- physical identification between Cuzco and ancient Rome. The second sec- tion situates Garcilaso’s own fascination with Julius Caesar within a literary and literal genealogy of soldiers/writers that begins with the Roman and finishes with El Inca. By using the Classics as a starting point to understand Garcilaso’s negotiation of Greco-Roman, Jewish, Renaissance, Andean, Christian, and broader transatlantic categories, this essay demonstrates how El Inca both propounded and sought to embody a mestizaje far more com- plex than the Spanish/Indigenous duality through which he is often under- stood.

El estudio del motivo del beso de almas en la poesía petrarquista española del siglo XVI en relación con los principales tratados neoplatónicos del Renacimiento (Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Bembo, Castiglione, León Hebreo) permite plantear una hipótesis sobre el neoplatonismo, la doctrina amorosa oficial del petrarquismo del siglo XVI. Michel Foucault sostiene que en el Banquete de Platón se plantea una disyuntiva entre el amor como búsqueda de uno mismo en el otro por medio del coito (la concepción andrógina) frente al amor como búsqueda de la verdad más allá del otro y de su cuerpo (la concepción diotímica). En el comentario de sonetos de Gregorio Silvestre, Fernando de Herrera y Francisco de Aldana se señalará en qué medida el tratamiento del beso de almas manifiesta la opción por una o la síntesis de las dos concepciones tal y como el neoplatonismo renacentista las entendía. Más aún, el motivo del beso de almas resulta muy adecuado para indagar acerca de las doctrinas amorosas por tratarse del encuentro del cuerpo y del aliento, que es a la vez ánima y lenguaje. De ahí que también se comente una canción de Francisco de Figueroa donde el beso es un intercambio lingüístico entre los amantes.

Seminario all'interno del ciclo di incontri "Teatro Filosofico. I filosofi e l'amore" ideato da Agimus Venezia con il sostegno dell’Archivio “Vittorio Cini” e dell’Ateneo Veneto, realizzato in collaborazione con il Dipartimento di Filosofia e Beni Culturali di Ca’ Foscari, il Conservatorio “B. Marcello” e il Liceo Artistico di Venezia e curato scientificamente da Melania Cassian, Maria Vittoria Comacchi, Federica Galantucci, Camilla Grandi e Letizia Michielon.
Ateneo Veneto, Sala Tommaseo, 16 aprile 2019

Conference "Sleep and Wakefulness – A Dyadic life", 4-5 March 2019, Università degli Studi di Milano, organized by the Doctoral School in Philosophy and Human Sciences of the Università degli Studi di Milano and sponsored by the Università degli Studi di Milano and the International Brain Research Organization.