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 King's College London and the LMU in Munich online at history of philosophy

dot net today's episode the good Place Utopias in the Italian Renaissance.

If you were given the task of designing a perfect city, what would you put in it?

High on my own list of priorities would be plenty of good. perfect city, what would you put in it?

High on my own list of priorities would be plenty of green spaces, pedestrian zones,

independent booksellers, coffee shops, and, of course, cinemas, showing silent films and

other classic movies. I'd also have statues put up in the honor of my favorite philosophers like Plato, Avicenna, and Christine de Bizan, plus one of my twin brother, in part because he really deserves one, and in part because people might think it was me.

I guess we should also have a statue of Thomas More, whose 15-16 treatise Utopia, is of course the most famous example of a project like the one I'm describing. Forget Fantasy Islands, more proposed a whole fantasy society and the ideal educational, political, and economic conditions that would prevail there.

It's convenient that I've already decided to have a statue of Plato, since Moore was in turn

looking back to the Republic, the original utopia of the European philosophical tradition in which Plato anticipated some of Moore's radical proposals, such as the common sharing of property.

Moore's Utopia illustrates a point that has so far gone largely unacknowledged in this

podcast.

I've been focusing on developments in Italy, implying that Renaissance philosophy began there,

with the rest of Europe having to catch up later. This is a traditional way of telling the story,

in part on the grounds that the quintessentially renaissance movement called humanism

was triggered by the presence of Eastern Greek scholars in Italy and then taken up by

northern scholars like Erasmus. But it's not as if Italian intellectuals were never influenced by the rest of Europe.

Two obvious examples are the arrival of the printing press and the Protestant Reformation.

The latter provoked the counter-reformation, or if you prefer

Catholic Reformation in southern Europe, providing the context for developments in Italian

thought in the 16th century.

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