Music

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 LMU in Munich,

online at historyoflossv.net.

Today's episode will be an interview about magic in the Renaissance with Brian Copenhever,

who is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and History at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Hi, Brian.

Hi, Peter.

And let me thank you, first of all, for doing such really nice work on the Internet.

There's so much bad work on the Internet that seeing something is nice is what you've got is a real joy.

And also, thanks for taking the time to talk with me. I really appreciate it.

Oh, thank you. It's great to have such an eminent scholar of Renaissance philosophy on the series.

We are going to be talking about philosophy, but by talking about magic.

So we're going to get into the connections between magic and philosophy.

And to do that, I thought we could start by talking about the sources that influenced Renaissance discussions of magic.

So obviously, some of these sources would be Greek, but some of them would also be non-Greek.

Yes, going back to the ancients, but also going back to the not so ancients was quite important for people who made themselves experts on magic during the 15th century in a new way.

The way I look at it, before the Renaissance, during the Middle Ages, there really never was a time when educated, literate people were not discussing magic.

We can really only say that with certainty about that relatively small group of people in Europe, because, of course, otherwise, we just don't have good records, but we do have for that group of people.

So if you look at the 13th century, for example, you've not only philosophers, maybe sort of the second and third rank people like Roger Bacon and William of Paris were writing about magic, but also thinkers of the first rank, like Alberta's Magnus and Thomas Aquinas,

who's, I imagine, the best known medieval philosopher.

So lots of things were going on before the Renaissance that were well known to people like Marcelo Fichino and Piccolo Morandola during the Renaissance.

...