Fortunio
Liceti
Hiro
HIRAI
Earth's
Soul and Spontaneous Generation:
Fortunio Liceti’s
Criticism against
Ficino's Ideas on the Origin of Life
in
Stephen Clucas et al. (eds),
Laus
Platonici Philosophi: Marsilio Ficino and his Influence,
Leiden, Brill, forthcoming.
In his Platonic Theology on the Immortality of
Souls (1482), Marsilio Ficino defended the idea
of the universal animation of the world. For this purpose, he namely developed
a ‘Platonic’ interpretation of spontaneous generation, basing
himself not only on such notions as Ideas and the World-Soul but also on his
own theory of the ‘earth’s soul,’ which influenced a number
of natural philosophers of the end of the Renaissance like Giordano Bruno and
Johannes Kepler. The present study analyses the true
nature of this Ficinian doctrine in the mirror of the criticism formulated by
Fortunio Liceti in his On the Spontaneous
Generation of Living Beings (1618).
1. Introduction
2. Liceti's De spontaneo viventium ortu (1618)
3. Junior Platonicists and the World-Soul
4. Major Platonists and the Ideas
5. Ficino and the Earth's Soul
6. Cicero's De natura deorum as the source of Ficino?
Also its longer French version
Âme de la terre,
génération spontanée et origine de la vie :
Fortunio
Liceti critique de Marsile Ficin
Bruniana & Campanelliana, 12 (2006), pp.
451-469.
