Date/Time
Date(s) - 12 Apr 2016
5:30 PM - 5:30 PM
Location
Columbia University Faculty House
Category(ies) No Categories
The Columbia University Seminar in the Renaissance will have its third meeting of the academic term on Tuesday, April 12th at 5:30 PM at Faculty House. The Faculty House located at 64 Morningside Drive, can also be reached by the gate at 501 W. 116th St. We will hear a paper by Jacomien Prins, University of Warwick, Centre for the Study of the Renaissance (CSR) entitled
“Marsilio Ficino’s and Girolamo Cardano’s variations on The dream of Scipio“.
Abstract:
Both the story of a near-death experience in the myth of Er that concludes Plato’sRepublic and the dream report about a disembodied soul in the Dream of Scipio in the sixth book of Cicero’s Republic are narrations of journeys through the heavenly spheres. The influence of these stories, and especially of their portrayal of a ‘music of the spheres’, was great and long-lasting, despite rivalling Aristotelian conceptions of a silent cosmos. The Dream itself, which was handed down to Ficino and Cardano as recorded in Macrobius’ commentary on it, reflects a belief in the existence of a perfect harmonic world beyond the senses. Both Renaissance philosophers used this belief to formulate an answer to the question of what one can gain in this earthly life that is lasting and significant, especially if one compares it to that other life in the hereafter. By comparing Marsilio Ficino’s (1433-1499) interpretation of Scipio’s dream in his ‘Letter to King Ferdinand’ (Epistolae 6, Letter 13, 1479) with the interpretation of the dream in Girolamo Cardano’s (1501-1576) ‘Dialogue between Girolamo Cardano and Fazio Cardano, his own father’ (ca. 1574), I will demonstrate in this paper how entirely different interpretations of the elusive ‘music of the spheres’, from perfect harmony to sheer cacophony, were used to deal with what Ficino and Cardano considered to be mankind’s major concerns, namely, physical and mental disease and the fear of one’s own death and the illnesses of one’s fellow humans and grief over the deaths of one’s loved ones.
Following the talk, at 7 pm, you are invited to join the speaker and other members of the Seminar to continue our discussion over dinner in Faculty House ($25 by check only, payable to Columbia University).
Please make sure to notify the Seminar Rapporteur, Marilyn Bowen <[email protected]>, ten days before the meeting if you plan to attend and, especially, if you plan on attending dinner. There is no need to contact the Rapporteur if you do not plan to attend.