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 King's College London philosophy department and the

LMU in Munich online at history of philosophy.net.

Today's episode will be an interview about philosophy and medicine in the Renaissance with Guido Gilloni who is professor of the history of philosophy at the University of Macharata.

Hi Guido.

Hi, thank you very much for having me today.

Oh, thank you.

Thanks for coming on the podcast.

I guess the first thing to ask is what the Renaissance philosophers were reading

when they did medicine or what Renaissance doctors were reading

how does their reading material differ from what was available in the medieval period and how does

Renaissance medicine in general differ from medieval medicine?

It's an very important question, the one related to the sources of medical knowledge

in the Renaissance. The most important source of information

were of course books and texts. The difference with the Middle Ages is that

first of all Renaissance medical practitioners had access to many more books

many more sources. Of course the great majority of medieval texts, translations from antiquity were still read, but we need to consider a new wave of books that were translated.

For instance, directly from Greek sources.

Here is the important element created

by the humanists who were scholars interested in recovering

the knowledge of antiquity with the much more sophisticated philological approach to reading and editing and

translating texts. So whereas in the Middle Ages, the main activity of translation and reception of ancient medical

source happened through the mediation of the Arabic sources who already, especially in the ninth century,

...