Icastes: Marsilio Ficino's Interpretation of Plato's Sophist, Five studies, with a critical edition and translation

by Michael J.B. Allen

Michael Allen's latest work on the profoundly influential Florentine thinker of the fifteenth century, Marsilio Ficino, will be welcomed by philosophers, literary scholars, and historians of the Renaissance, as well as by classicists. Ficino was responsible for inaugurating, shaping, and disseminating the wide-ranging philosophico-cultural movement known as Renaissance Platonism, and his views on the Sophist , which he saw as Plato's preeminent ontological dialogue, are of signal interest. This dialogue also served Ficino as a vehicle for exploring a number of other humanist, philosophical, and magical preoccupations, including the theme of man the artist and creator.

317 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Michael J.B. Allen is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Italian at UCLA.

His interests include Renaissance philosophy, drama, poetry, magic, mythology, iconography, hermeneutics, along with the Platonism of Marsilio Ficino & Pico della Mirandola.