Papers by Denis Robichaud
Inventer les anges de l’Antiquité à Byzance : conception, représentation, perception (TRAVAUX ET MÉMOIRES 25/2 ; Association des Amis du Centre d'Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance), 2021
This chapter studies how angelic epiphanies are understood in the exegetical tradition on the Cha... more This chapter studies how angelic epiphanies are understood in the exegetical tradition on the Chaldean Oracles in the writings of the Syrian Iamblichus, the Greek Proclus, two Byzantines, Michael Psellos and Georgius Gemistus Pletho, and the Florentine Marsilio Ficino. Working backwards from Ficino, the culmination of this philosophical approach to the Chaldean Oracles, it reconstructs this tradition through Ficino’s sources for his sermon the De stella magorum and his eighteen-volume Platonic Theology. Examining new manuscript evidence, it demonstrates how this tradition of Chaldean epiphanies is central to Ficino’s understanding of the Star of the Magi in the Gospel of Matthew and the angelic apparition to the shepherds in the Gospel of Luke, as well as the philosophical considerations on angels in Ficino’s Platonic Theology.
Marsilio Ficino's 'si deus fiat homo' and Augustine's 'non ibi legi': The Incarnation and Plato's Persona in the Scholia to the Laws
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes
Reading Proclus and the Book of Causes, vol. 3, On Causes and the Noetic Triad,, 2022
The Platonic Triad Being-Life-Intellect and Theology in the Middle Ages Neoplatonists often turn ... more The Platonic Triad Being-Life-Intellect and Theology in the Middle Ages Neoplatonists often turn to the triad being-life-intellect to understand the nature of reality and demiurgy. The modern scholar often cited as the first to investigate the origins of this triad is E.R. Dodds, who devoted a couple of pages to the topic in his commentary on Proclus's Elements of Theology in 1933.1 As Dodds notes, the triad being-life-intellect is older than the Neoplatonists since it finds its origins in a passage from Plato's Sophist (248e) where the Eleatic Stranger proclaims: But for heaven's sake, shall we let ourselves easily be persuaded that motion and life and soul and mind (καὶ ζωὴν καὶ ψυχὴν καὶ φρόνησιν) are really not present to absolute being (τῷ παντελῶς ὄντι), that it neither lives nor thinks, but awful and holy, devoid of mind, is fixed and immovable (ἀλλὰ σεμνὸν καὶ ἅγιον, νοῦν οὐκ ἔχον, ἀκίνητον ἑστὸς εἶναι)?2 Plato here begins to interlock the terms into a triad to explain the nature of absolute or fully complete being as something that also lives and thinks. Plato's student Aristotle must have learned something from his teacher since we find
Tearing Plato to Pieces: Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino on the History of Platonism
Renaissance and Reformation
This article considers Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola’s understanding of the history of Plato... more This article considers Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola’s understanding of the history of Platonism in his Examen vanitatis. It analyzes his sources and methods for understanding the history of philosophy—genealogical source criticism, historiographical analysis, and comparative history—and argues that his approach is shaped by anti-Platonic Christian apologetics. It documents how Gianfrancesco Pico closely studies Marsilio Ficino’s and his uncle Giovanni Pico’s understandings of Platonism and its history, and how his contextualization of their work within the broader history of Platonism is part of a larger endeavour to turn the page and even close the book on this chapter of the Quattrocento. Although neither Ficino nor Gianfrancesco finds universal agreement among ancient Platonists, Ficino explains their history as one of inquiry and interpretation, in which Platonism and Christianity are inexorably united, whereas Gianfrancesco characterizes it as a history of lies and disagr...
Alla scuola di Marsilio Ficino: Il pensiero filosofico di Francesco Cattani da Diacceto. Simone Fellina. Clavis 5. Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2017. 364 pp. €30
Renaissance Quarterly
Pagans and Philosophers: The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz by John Marenbon
The Mediaeval Journal
Bruniana & Campanelliana, 2020
This paper analyzes the compositional, cosmological, and metaphysical order in Marsilio Ficino’s ... more This paper analyzes the compositional, cosmological, and metaphysical order in Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology 1-4. It argues that Ficino conceived of this order according to Timaean and Iamblichean mean terms. It revises the accepted conclusion that the central bond in the Platonic Theology is the human soul, demonstrating instead that the mean term of the third substance in Ficino’s five grades of reality is the soul of the spheres. Examining Ficino’s arguments and ancient sources, it also discusses older traditions of mathematical theologies and cosmologies. It further analyzes the formal nature of cosmological, metaphysical, and theurgical arguments constructed with mathematical laws of mean terms.
Bruniana & Campanelliana, 2020
The present introduction ties together various topics discussed by the contributors to the collec... more The present introduction ties together various topics discussed by the contributors to the collection of articles entitled Marsilio Ficino’s Cosmology: Sources and Reception. Ficino’s translation and performance of an Orphic Hymn to the Heavens, which he transforms into a Hymn to the Cosmos, serves as a framing device to present common themes and conclusions. The introduction further provides details regard- ing the origins of this project in a erc Workshop on Early Modern Cosmology, Marsilio Ficino’s Cosmology: Sources, Reception, Historiography, held at Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia on 21-22 May, 2019.
Denis J-J. Robichaud, "Working with Plotinus: A Study of Marsilio Ficino's Textual and Divinatory Philology," Teachers, Students, and Schools of Greek in the Renaissance, ed. Federica Ciccolella and Luigi Silvano (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 120-154., 2017
Erudition and the Republic of Letters, 2018
This paper examines a facet in the long history of Italian Renaissance humanism: how later histor... more This paper examines a facet in the long history of Italian Renaissance humanism: how later historians of philology understood Renaissance humanists. These later recon-siderations framed the legacies of Italian Renaissance humanism, at times by asking whether the primary contribution of humanism was philosophical or philological. Philologists-especially from nineteenth-century Germany in the generations before Voigt and Burckhardt-wrote about Renaissance humanists by employing prosopog-raphy and bio-bibliographic models. Rather than studying humanists and their works for their own merits, the authors of these histories sought to legitimize their own disciplinary identities by recognizing them as intellectual ancestors. Their writings, in turn, helped lay the foundation for later scholarship on Italian Renaissance humanism and defined, in particular, how later twentieth-century historians of philology and scholarship understood the Italian Renaissance.
May 21-22,2019: Malcanton Marcorà Palace, Aula Mazzariol, Dorsoduro 348/D, Venice
Ca' Foscari Uni... more May 21-22,2019: Malcanton Marcorà Palace, Aula Mazzariol, Dorsoduro 348/D, Venice
Ca' Foscari University, Venice, Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage, Center for Renaissance and Early Modern Thought, ERC: Early Modern Cosmology
Pythagorean Knowledge from the Ancient to the Modern World: Askesis, Religion, Science, 2016
This article analyzes new evidence from the marginalia to Ficino’s Plotinus manuscripts and offer... more This article analyzes new evidence from the marginalia to Ficino’s Plotinus manuscripts and offers a novel reading of Ficino’s “De Vita” 3. It settles scholarly disagreements concerning Paul O. Kristeller’s manuscript research and Frances Yates’s Hermetic thesis about “De Vita” 3, and reconsiders accepted conclusions regarding the centrality of Hermetic magic in Ficino’s philosophy. It demonstrates the origins and sources for “De Vita” 3 in Ficino’s reading of Plotinus’s explanations of prayer, and also reveals Iamblichus’s overlooked influence on Ficino: on the performative nature of philosophy in “De Vita” 3, and even on Ficino’s acknowledgment of the pseudonymity of the Hermetica.
In most Western European languages, conversion is etymologically linked to the Latin word convers... more In most Western European languages, conversion is etymologically linked to the Latin word conversio. In Latin, however, conversio is used to translate two rather different, and in certain contexts even incompatible, Greek terms indicating spiritual change: epistrophê and metanoia. At the time of the great Hellenistic revival that marked the fifteenth century, how did the Florentine philosopher Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) translate epistrophê when venturing into the first Latin translation of Plotinus's (204/5-270) Enneads? Was Ficino aware of the hermeneutic distance that divides Plotinus's world and Early Modern Christianity? And if so, how did he manage to make Plotinus's thinking on spiritual change acceptable for a Western Christian audience? By looking closely at how Ficino translated Plotinus's language of spiritual transformation, this essay will illustrate the enduring influence of the Florentine philosopher on Early Modern conceptions of conversion, while also contributing to current debates on this problematic concept from a linguistic angle.
The present paper discusses the question of Marsilio Ficino's lost translations of Proclus' Eleme... more The present paper discusses the question of Marsilio Ficino's lost translations of Proclus' Elements of Physics and Elements of Theology. It reviews all known evidence for Ficino's work on the Elements of Physics and Elements of Theology, examines new references and fragments of these texts in Ficino's manuscripts, especially in his personal manuscript of Plotinus' Enneads, and studies how they fit within the Florentine's philosophical oeuvre. The present case studies of manuscript evidence demonstrate how Proclus accompanied Ficino from his early 'scholastic background' through to his mastery of the Platonic tradition late in his career, especially, as is shown, in his study of Pseudo-Dionysius and Plotinus. Despite the fact that scholarship at times pits scholasticism and Renaissance Platonism against each other, in this sense Proclus—largely due to the Elements—bridges the two cultures.
in Stephen Bullivant and Michael Ruse eds., The Oxford Handbook of Atheism, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 179-194., 2013
in Christopher Celenza ed., Angelo Poliziano's Lamia, Text, Translation, and Introductory Studies (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 131-189, 2010
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Papers by Denis Robichaud
Ca' Foscari University, Venice, Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage, Center for Renaissance and Early Modern Thought, ERC: Early Modern Cosmology