The Place of Renaissance Humanism in the History of Philosophy location:Groningen date:13-15 June 2013
If Renaissance humanists were no real philosophers, then Francesco Filelfo is most probably a good champion of his class. Although apparently well read in both Plato and Aristotle, and at any rate prone to name-dropping when it came to more obscure antique philosophers, he stays almost mute about scholastic philosophy. In this paper I will examine to what extent Filelfo's vast and versatile corpus of writings, especially his massive letter collection, testifies to a diachronic perspective (if any) on the history of philosophy, on science and theology, and on their possibly problematic interrelationship. I will also dwell on the importance of Filelfo’s translations of long philosophical passages in his Commentationes Florentinae de Exilio and try to establish a comprehensive insight into Filelfo’s interests and intentions, in order to determine the way in which this humanist, who justifiably may be perceived more as a poet and a mainly philologically experienced “scholar” than as a philosopher, still fashioned himself as a scholar of (the history of) philosophy.