And the Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at Kings College

L.

L.m. in Munich, online at history of philosophy.net. Today's episode, True Romance, theories of love.

If love had a color, what color would it be? Green, obviously, as in Al Green, the singer

whose linky seductive and soulful tributes to this emotion include I'm still in love with you love and happiness and the imaginatively titled L-O-V-E love. I myself would love to know how many people alive today were conceived while Al Green's music was playing in the background.

Or am I making a basic mistake here?

Confusing love with lust.

Marsilia Fichino would say so. If you asked Ficino what color love is, he would probably say white.

Referring not to Maurice White, whose band Earth Wind and Fire produced more than its share of slinky soul, but to these snowy white of purity and chastity.

Ficina would approve of our using the phrase platonic love for affection that does not involve sex.

Indeed, he can take a good deal of the credit for associating this idea with Plato.

He made a case that this author of several often rather sexually suggestive dialogues about the erotic life

was actually encouraging us to turn away from the body to abandon physical beauty for the sake of higher beauties and ultimately the beauty of God himself.

Like Cardinal Bissarian before him, Fichina was concerned to rebut charges brought by

critics of Plato, including George of Trebizond. Drawing on scurrilous details from ancient biographies of Plato and the erotic dialogues themselves,

George condemned Plato as a depraved lover of boys.

Ficino's case for the defense began with his translations of Plato, as when he rendered the Greek word

Piederastin, meaning to love boys with a less explicit Latin verb.

A bit of massaging in the process of translation could turn talk of erotic attraction into talk of fond friendship.

But the purification of Plato was carried out especially in Ficino's commentaries.

In his summary of the Republic, for example, was carried out especially in Fichino's commentaries.

In his summary of the Republic, for example, he dismisses as a harmless joke, the suggestion

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