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 London and the Ebbamieu in Munich, online at History of Philosophy.net.

Today's episode will be an interview about Platonism in the Renaissance with

Denis Rolvichol, who is associate professor in the program of liberal studies at

the University of Notre Dame. Hi Denis. Hello, how are you? I'm good. Thanks

for coming on the podcast. We're going to be talking about Plato in the Renaissance, how his text were received what they did with his ideas. Plato was also an influential figure in the medieval period,

how did the Renaissance readers

treat Plato differently than the medieval ones did?

Well, the first thing to consider, which may be obvious,

but shouldn't go unnoticed is the texts.

So there were some dialogues by Plato available as the texts. So there were some dialogue by Plato available

in the Middle Ages, the Fido, the Mino,

the Tameas and portions of the Republic, for example.

But it's in the 15th century

that we really have a rediscovery of the platonic corpus as a whole.

A number of humanists translated various dialogues, but Marcello Ficino is the one who

translate all of Plato's dialogues for the first time and he prints them in 1484.

Now this has certain consequences. For one it means that there's an emphasis in reading Plato not just for doxographical reasons, meaning not just to read the doctrines.

So for example, a theory of recollection or immortality of the soul, these things are still very important in the Italian

Renaissance, but you also have a new way to start to look at Plato that involves

sometimes the dialogic nature of the works, the fragments of pre-Socratic's that Plato quotes or pieces of poetry

or even looking at Plato for rhetorical or literary purposes as well too.

...