You're listening to the partially examined life episode 298 we've been talking about in

Marsilio Ficinos, commentary on Plato's symposium on Love from 1475 with our special guest

Peter Adamson from the History and Philosophy podcast. Peter, what is there? Some major

concept that we have not yet hit and this that we want to start with from your perspective?

I mean I think it would be worth mentioning something that I actually talk about in the book

you kind of mentioned at the start of part one which is that this is only one of a whole

series of works on love that were written in the Renaissance. Probably the most famous

one is by a Jewish author named Leone Eberreo which is also a dialogue about love but there's one

by Pietro Bembo, there's one by Pico de la Marandola who's a famous colleague of Ficinos who

is this young rich dude who sort of threw himself into Platonism and Kabbalah and so on and he

wrote a commentary on a poem that's about love and a really interesting case is Tullia de

Aragona so a female philosopher who also wrote a dialogue where she's talking to a male friend who's

a real person and that's really a really nice dialogue because it adds another layer to all this

neoplatonic stuff we've been talking about by having the two characters flurch and in particular

the guy keeps sort of pursuing Tullia so she's put herself into the dialogue as a real person so

the author appears in it as a character is what I mean and her friend is sort of like saying

roughly speaking hey we should really put all this theory into practice and she's like oh you

you know so she's sort of she's playing hard to get and there's a lot of humor that comes out

of that so that's a really nice example but it's not just that they keep coming back to the theme

these humanists it's also that they don't necessarily agree about the nature of love for example

in part one we were talking about the fact that Ficino has this very dismissive attitude towards

physical love and Pico defines love differently from Ficino because Ficino really defines love in

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