Meditations on the Soul: selected letters of Marsilio Ficino
Marsilio Ficino
Inner Traditions, 1996
186.4 F446m
The problems that taxed the minds of people during the Renaissance were much the same as those confronting us today. In their perplexity many deep-thinking people sought the advice of Marsilio Ficino, the leader of the Platonic Academy in Florence, and through his letters he advised them, encouraged them, and sometimes reproved them. Ficino was utterly fearless in expressing what he knew to be true. His letters cover the widest range of topics, mixing philosophy and humor, compassion and advice, and offering a profound glimpse into the soul of the Renaissance. - publisher
legacy:
Ficino died in 1499, leaving a significant cultural legacy. Textually, he provided western European thinkers with authoritative versions of Plato, Plotinus, and other Platonizing thinkers. Ficino's Latin translations of those texts became standard ones for over three centuries after his death. Ficino's theories on love permeated sixteenth-century literature, as writers from Baldassare Castiglione and Pietro Bembo in Italy to Joachim du Bellay and Pierre de Ronsard in France took up “Platonic” love in their literary works.
Ficino also helped legitimize, for a time, a style of thinking that one sixteenth-century thinker, Agostino Steuco, termed “perennial philosophy” (philosophia perennis), a designation that became more famous when Gottfried Leibniz took it up in a 1714 letter (Leibniz, DPS, 3: 624–25; Schmitt 1966, 506, n.11). Adherents believed that there was a discernible core of truth in many philosophies seen as different on the surface. The late sixteenth century saw the teaching of Platonism at the University of Ferrara, with the Croatian-born Francesco Patrizi (1529–1597) holding the chair from 1578–92, moving thence to teach Platonic thought at the University of Rome from 1592 until his death.
-Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy