Marsilio Ficino: Humanist, Magus, or Philosopher?

When Cicero referred to the I studia humanitatis i , he meant the basis of the general education ( I paideia i ) of a cultivated man.[10] Incidentally, Kristeller's definition was also the cause of an unpleasant exchange that I, as a first-year graduate student studying Ficino, had with a senior student in a seminar on humanism, who assured me that Ficino was simply not a humanist. While their research focuses solely on Ficino's important contribution to Renaissance Platonism, Susan Byrne's I Ficino in Spain i charts the broad reception of Ficino's works in early modern Spanish literature: in her opening lines, she introduces a new characterization by calling Ficino a "Christian theologian and Neoplatonist philosopher" - some might argue that these two categories are mutually exclusive, but they are both applicable to Ficino. Robichaud relates not only how Ficino doodled a portrait of Plato in an initial capital I P i in Plato's name in a manuscript that he copied but also how Ficino is presented in illuminated manuscripts of his own works in relation to other groups or persons that can be identified as ancient Greeks or contemporary humanists. Modern humanism, as practiced as a life stance by several international organizations (such as Humanists International), seems to have found its inspiration in this vision of Renaissance humanism, when it stresses the worth, dignity, and autonomy of the individual, and its role in an evolution toward secularism and modernity.[5] Paul Oskar Kristeller, who studied under the philosopher Martin Heidegger from 1931 but fled from Germany in 1933, was welcomed in Italy by the above-mentioned Giovanni Gentile, who secured for him a position as lecturer in German at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. [Extracted from the article]