Giovanni Licata

"Dans ce travail de médiation et d’approfondissement, Filip Buyse s’est chargé de l’histoire des sciences, Russ Leo de la littérature néerlandaise, Giovanni Licata de la philosophie juive et arabe, Frank Mertens de l’histoire des Pays-Bas, Stephen Zylstra de la philosophie moderne, et Maxime Rovere du monde greco-romain et de l’entourage immédiat de Spinoza, chacun s’autorisant à commenter quelques aspects échappant à sa spécialité"

https://editions.flammarion.com/ethique/9782081513839?fbclid=IwAR2ZZKWbQJclNcAfrTMgo881MklBajDJgEAPmKuGORxKSvZWh5lwoOwcEF8

"I saggi raccolti in questo volume costituiscono un contributo originale e innovativo alla storia dell’averroismo. Di questa complessa tradizione filosofica, che trasmette e sviluppa l’opera di Averroè (1126-1198) all’interno del pensiero ebraico e latino, vengono qui esaminati alcuni momenti salienti, non più circoscritti al Medioevo, ma estesi a pensatori rinascimentali (Elia del Medigo, Agostino Nifo) e moderni (Uriel da Costa, Spinoza e Adriaan Koerbagh). Al tempo stesso, gli studi qui presentati aprono ulteriori orizzonti per indagare l’influenza dell’averroismo nella formazione del pensiero di Spinoza e del movimento libertino europeo".

Mauro Zonta - La tradizione testuale del Commento medio di Averroè alla Metafisica di Aristotele tra Quattrocento e Cinquecento
Silvia Di Donato - Traduttori di Averroè e traduzioni ebraico-latine nel dibattito filosofico del XV e XVI secolo
Giovanni Licata - Elia del Medigo sull’eternità del mondo
Omero Proietti - Creazione eterna, ordine della natura, miracolo in Uriel da Costa
Guido Giglioni - Haec igitur est nostra lex. Teologia e filosofia nel commento di Agostino Nifo alla Destructio destructionum di Averroè
Sara Barchiesi - Ibn Tufayl “maestro di Averroè”. Diffusione dell’Epistola di Hayy ibn Yaqzan in relazione alla tradizione averroistica
Filippo Mignini - Een ligt schijnende in duystere plaatsen: Adriaan Koerbagh tra averroismo e libertinismo

Le Lettere di Pieter van Gent a Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus, qui riedite e tradotte, costituiscono un documento prezioso per ricostruire l’ambiente culturale olandese degli anni 1675-1690. In questo libro divengono il punto di partenza per riesaminare la genesi dell’editio posthuma spinoziana e la sua complicata storia redazionale.
Di questa storia sono parte essenziale i profili intellettuali di Lodewijk Meijer, Jarig Jelles, Pieter van Gent, Georg Hermann Schuller, come anche l’attività editoriale di Jan Rieuwertsz e il complesso rapporto intellettuale di Tschirnhaus con Leibniz e Christiaan Huygens.

Concentrandosi su un'opera presente nella biblioteca di Spinoza, la Behinat ha-dat ("Esame della religione") dell'averroista cretese Elia del Medigo (c.1455-1492/3), questo volume ne indaga la tradizione testuale, il contenuto e la stretta dipendenza dal Trattato decisivo di Averroè. Ricostruisce dettagliatamente la biografia del filosofo cretese e mostra l'operare di alcune tesi averroistiche, mutuate dall'Esame della religione, nel Trattato teologico-politico. Contiene inoltre la traduzione, con testo ebraico a fronte, dell'editio princeps della Behinat ha-dat (1629), con il censimento delle varianti e dei passi censurati presenti nella recente edizione critica di J.J. Ross (1984). Si è potuto così portare all'attenzione degli studiosi un testo centrale per ogni futura discussione sull'averroismo di Spinoza.

The Sermo de substantia orbis, or Discourse on the Substance of the Celestial Sphere, is a collection of cosmological and metaphysical questions by the Islamic philosopher Averroes (1126-1198), no longer extant in Arabic, but preserved in Latin and Hebrew translations (the latter with the title Ma’amar be-‘Eṣem ha-Galgal). After dealing with the complex history of the text, I will point out that the Renaissance editions of the Latin translation are not reliable and in particular that the Giuntine edition, although considered authoritative, is in fact marred with errors and innovations, being the last chapter of a long history of transmission,
which needs to be thoroughly investigated.

Even a cursory reading of Cusanus’s Sermons shows that he often makes use of his principal philosophical ideas. Now that a complete edition of the Sermons is available, it may be worth comparing them with his philosophi-cal and theological works, in order to find out when his ideas first found their expression and how they evolved over time. As an example, in this paper I compare a number of themes contained in the Idiota dialogues, written in 1450, with the Sermons written in the years before that, specifically between 1443 and 1450.

More info here: https://www3.unifr.ch/fzphth/de/nummern/66-(2019)-2.html

The Hebrew word מתפלסף [mitpalsef], i.e., “philosophizer,” can be traced back to the medieval Tibbonide translations from Arabic into Hebrew. In this paper, I analyze the meanings that the term מתפלסף [mitpalsef] assumed in the medieval Jewish philosophical tradition, and especially its derogatory use by some rationalist authors. I will show that the term מתפלסף [mitpalsef], mainly in its plural form מתפלספים [mitpalsefim], became a polemical label employed by the Jewish Averroists chiefly because of the Hebrew translations of Averroes’ works. I will also investigate the meaning of this term in connection with related words (such as פילוסוף, התפלספות, התפלסף, נתפלסף), and I will briefly discuss the Arabic and Latin equivalents (متفلسفة and philosophantes).

The article provides a survey of recent literature on the relationship between Spinoza and Jewish Averroism. According to this new trend of scholarship, reading Spinoza in the light of some Averroistic doctrines helps to better understand the genesis and evolution of his thought.

The Sermo de substantia orbis (Discourse on the Substance of the
Celestial Sphere) is an original work by Averroes (1126-1198), no
longer extant in Arabic, that has been preserved in Latin and Hebrew
translations (the latter with the title Ma’amar be-‘Eṣem ha-Galgal).
This work is a collection of treatises dealing with the nature and the
properties of the heavens, according to the principles of Aristotelian
cosmology. In this paper, I firstly explain the complex history of the
text, the subject and the reception of the De substantia orbis in both
Latin and Jewish traditions. I then examine the interpretation of this
work offered by three renowned Jewish Averroists: Isaac Albalag,
Moshe Narboni and Elijah Del Medigo. Finally, I show that Uriel da
Costa shares with these thinkers a path of philosophical radicalism,
with particular reference to some themes that are crucial in his
Examination of Pharisaic Traditions, namely, the doctrine of eternal
creation, the necessary order of nature and the resulting negation of
miracles.

The aim of this paper is to focus the main features of Spinoza’s Compendium grammatices linguae hebraeae in order to point out the philosophical value of this work, closely connected with Spinoza’s thought. The purpose of Spinoza’s Hebrew Grammar is perfect and total knowledge of ancient Hebrew beyond the limited corpus of the Bible. This allows him to make a criticism of superstition in continuity with the Tractatus theologico-politicus and to undertake original research on the logical-grammatical structures of Hebrew. All the existing literature on the work has been critically taken into account.

Abraham de Balmes, ebreo pugliese vissuto tra il XV e il XVI sec., oltre ad esercitare la professione di medico, fu grammatico, filosofo e traduttore. Nella prima decade del XVI sec., De Balmes si trasferisce nel Veneto dove, per conto del cardinale Domenico Grimani, traduce dall'ebraico al latino diverse opere filosofiche arabe (Avempace, Ibn al-Hathan e, in particolare, Averroè). Scrive tre opere originali: la grammatica ebraica "Miqneh ’Avram/Peculium Abrae"; il "Liber de demonstratione", opera di logica che si rifà agli Analitici posteriori di Aristotele e al relativo Commento grande di Averroè, da lui stesso tradotto; e, infine, un’opera di qabbalah, "’Iggeret ha-‘asiriya". Lo scopo del presente contributo consiste in un affresco della vita e della produzione di questo autore, basato su una lettura critica delle fonti e della bibliografia più aggiornata.

In this paper, I show that the most important philosophical work of Elijah del Medigo (c. 1455-1492/3) was heavily influenced by Averroes’ philosophical-theological works. In particular, Del Medigo tried to reshape Averroes’ Decisive Treatise according to the Jewish context. By means of a careful comparison between the Examination of Religion and the medieval Jewish translation of the Decisive Treatise, I have expanded and improved the previous analyses of Adolph Huebsch and Julius Guttmann.

On 29th and 30th May 2023 there will be at the Department of Philosophy of Sapienza Università di Roma an International Conference on of a very little-known page of the Italian Renaissance, focusing on the biographical and intellectual activity of Jacob Mantino (Tortosa?, c.1490–Damascus, 1549). This topic is of particular interest for the history of Sapienza, because Mantino was the first Jewish scholar to teach at the Roman Studium in the year 1539, under the pontificate of Paul III. More importantly, he was the first Jewish scholar to teach in an official form in a European University – an extraordinary fact, made possible by the new climate of the Renaissance.
Shedding new light on the multifaceted life of Mantino, specialists in the field will also discuss about the importance of Mantino’s Hebrew-into-Latin translations of philosophical and scientific texts written by Muslim authors such as Averroes and Avicenna and their contribution to European intellectual history.
A section will be devoted to the complicated relationship between Jews and Universities extending the temporal scope to the nineteenth century.

Participants: Emma Abate, Chiara Adorisio, Guido Bartolucci, Dominique Bourel, Saverio Campanini, Candida Carella, Serena Di Nepi, Diana Di Segni, Michael Engel, Yehuda Halper, Dag N. Hasse, Giovanni Licata, Margherita Mantovani, Yoav Meyrav, Giuseppe Veltri

In this talk a forgotten aspect of Leo Strauss’s biography will be highlighted, namely his decisive impulse to the discovery and publication of some unknown Arabic works of al-Fārābī, thanks to the collaboration with his brother-in-law and Arabic philologist Paul Kraus. Some unpublished archival materials, demonstrating a fruitful collaboration hidden in the footnotes of Strauss’s works, will also be discussed. The collaboration and friendship between Strauss and Kraus tragically ended in 1944, when Kraus was found dead in Cairo, but the seeds matured thanks to Franz Rosenthal and Richard Walzer, and the Warburgian project of Plato arabus. The interpretation of al-Fārābī’s political philosophy and his legacy in the history of Arabic and Jewish philosophy (especially concerning Maimonides) became a battle of field in which a long chain of masters and pupils – most of them of Jewish background – still continues to argue.